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.'
  

 2022

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, 2021

December 2022

Dec. 31

 

New York Times, Barbara Walters, a First Among TV Newswomen, Is Dead at 93, Alessandra Stanley, Dec. 31, 2022 (print ed.). Barbara Walters (shown above and below right), who broke barriers for women as the first female co-host of the “Today” show and the first female anchor of a network evening news program, and who as an interviewer of celebrities became one herself, helping to blur the line between news and entertainment, died on Friday. She was 93.

Her death was reported by ABC News, where she was a longtime anchor and a creator of the talk show “The View.” It did not give a cause or say where she died.

Ms. Walters spent more than 50 years in front of the camera and, until she was 84, continued to appear on “The View.” In one-on-one interviews, she was best known for delving, with genteel insistence, into the private lives and emotional states of movie stars, heads of state and other high-profile subjects.

Ms. Walters first made her mark on the “Today” show on NBC, where she began appearing regularly on camera in 1964; she was officially named co-host a decade later. Her success kicked open the door for future network anchors like Jane Pauley, Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer.

She broke barriers as a co-host of the “Today” show, a network evening news anchor and a creator of “The View,” all while gaining her own kind of celebrity.

New York Times, Fellow journalists, celebrity interview subjects and others offered tributes to the renowned newswoman, McKenna Oxenden, Eduardo Medina and John Yoon, Dec. 31, 2022. Barbara Walters, who died Friday at 93, was remembered for her tenacious journalism that blazed a trail for women in the industry.

As word of her death spread, memories of, and tributes to, Ms. Walters flooded social media. Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News, said on Twitter that Ms. Walters “was a true legend, a pioneer not just for women in journalism but for journalism itself.”

Journalists across the country recalled on Friday night the effect that Ms. Walters had on their careers, directly and indirectly. Many said her interviews were models for good journalistic practices. Others marveled at the bravery she displayed when sitting across from some of the world’s most powerful people. And numerous others described Ms. Walters as a “trailblazer” who helped carve a path for women in the news industry.

Oprah Winfrey recalled how Ms. Walters had been an early inspiration.

In a local Miss Fire Prevention Contest that eventually helped Ms. Winfrey land her first broadcasting job at 17, a judge asked what she hoped to do with her life.

New York Times, Do You Know What’s in the Cloud? Kashmir Hill, Dec. 31, 2022. Google, Apple and Meta offer near-limitless storage for photos, videos and important documents, but you should keep a copy of what you hold most dear.

I have many fears as a mother. My kindergarten-age daughter recently learned a game on the school bus called “Truth or Force.” My youngest refuses to eat almost anything but Kraft Mac and Cheese. Added to the list this year, alongside outside influences and health concerns, is the possibility that my daughters could inadvertently lock me out of my digital life.

That’s what happened to a mother in Colorado whose 9-year-old son used her old smartphone to stream himself naked on YouTube, and a father in San Francisco whose Google account was disabled and deleted because he took naked photos of his toddler for the doctor.

I reported on their experiences for The New York Times, and as I talked to these parents, who were stunned and bereft at the loss of their emails, photos, videos, contacts and important documents spanning decades, I realized I was similarly at risk.

I am “cloud-complacent,” keeping my most important digital information not on a hard drive at home but in the huge digital basement provided via technology companies’ servers. Google gives all users 15 gigabytes free, a quarter of what comes standard on an Android phone, and I have not managed to max it out in 18 years of using the company’s many services.

I did fill up Apple’s free 5 GB, so I now pay $9.99 a month for additional iCloud storage space. Meta has no max; like scrolling on Instagram, the allowed space is infinite.

If I were suddenly cut off from any of these services, the data loss would be professionally and personally devastating.

As a child of the 1980s, I used to have physical constraints on how many photos, journals, VHS tapes and notes passed in seventh grade that I could reasonably keep. But the immense expanse and relatively cheap rent of the so-called cloud has made me a data hoarder. Heading into 2023, I set out to excavate everything I was storing on every service, and find somewhere to save it that I had control over. As I grappled with all the gigabytes, my concern morphed from losing it all to figuring out what was actually worth saving.

New York Times, Cristiano Ronaldo Signs With a Saudi Team, Victor Mather, Dec. 31, 2022 (print ed.). The soccer superstar will be paid handsomely to play in the Middle East in the twilight of his career.

New York Times, Woman Accuses Steven Tyler of Sexually Assaulting Her in the 1970s, Dan Bilefsky, Dec. 31, 2022 (print ed.). In a lawsuit filed under California’s Child Victims Act, the woman says she met the Aerosmith frontman when she was 16.

Steven Tyler, the frontman of the rock band Aerosmith, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing a woman in the 1970s when she was a teenager and he was in his mid-20s.

In the lawsuit, the woman, Julia Misley, accuses Mr. Tyler of using his status and power as a famous rock star to “groom, manipulate, exploit” and “sexually assault” her over the course of three years. She has previously discussed her relationship with Mr. Tyler, writing online that she met him at an Aerosmith concert in Portland, Ore., in 1973, shortly after her 16th birthday.

The lawsuit, earlier reported by Rolling Stone, was filed this week under the California Child Victims Act, which temporarily lifted the statute of limitations so people who said they were sexually abused as children could file civil cases. The three-year period to file a complaint ends on Saturday.

Washington Post, A routine operation left her son in a wheelchair. It changed Judy Woodruff’s journalism, Roxanne Roberts, Dec. 30, 2022 (print ed.). Judy Woodruff is stepping down as anchor of “PBS NewsHour” but still plans to report from around the country, with some stories about people with disabilities.

Last month, TV anchor Judy Woodruff had some news of her own: She is stepping down from “PBS NewsHour” on Friday, Dec. 30.

One of the most respected and honored journalists on television could have retired. Instead, she’s embarking on a new PBS project, “America at a Crossroads,” where she’ll spend the next two years traveling around the country trying to figure out what voters want, what they need and how to repair the deep divides.

One subject close to her heart that she wants to highlight? People with disabilities.

Her oldest son, Jeffrey Hunt, was born with what she calls a “very mild” case of spina bifida. When he was a teenager, what was a supposed to be a routine operation left him in a wheelchair and in need of full-time care. It was life-altering for Jeffrey and the entire family.

Woodruff during a taping of “Meet the Press” on NBC in 2007. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Jeffrey, now 41, lives in a group home in Maryland, and says the love and support of his family got him to this point. “After I was injured my parents were with me every day,” he writes in an email. “They told me despite disabilities, I can succeed. I have succeeded thus far.”

It’s one thing to report on the kitchen-table issues that affect people, another to live them. As a mother, Woodruff is keenly attuned to the needs of those with disabilities and their caregivers; as a Washington reporter, she has a deep understanding of what politicians and policymakers can do to help them.

“It made her dedicated to advancing the needs of people with these challenges in the medical system,” says longtime friend and colleague Andrea Mitchell, NBC News’s chief foreign affairs correspondent. “I think she’s more sensitive. She’s always been empathic, but this inevitably changed her.”

Dec. 30

New York Times, What’s Gone at Twitter? A Data Center, Janitors, Some Toilet Paper, Kate Conger, Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac, Dec. 30, 2022 (print ed.). Elon Musk has reduced the company to a bare-bones operation, and employees are under a “zero-based budgeting” mandate to justify any spending.

Elon Musk’s orders were clear: Close the data center.

Early on Christmas Eve, members of the billionaire’s staff flew to Sacramento — the site of one of Twitter’s three main computing storage facilities — to disconnect servers that had kept the social network running smoothly. Some employees were worried that losing those servers could cause problems, but saving money was the priority, according to two people who were familiar with the move but not authorized to talk about it.

The data center shutdown was one of many drastic steps Mr. Musk has undertaken to stabilize Twitter’s finances. Over the past few weeks, Twitter had stopped paying millions of dollars in rent and services, and Mr. Musk had told his subordinates to renegotiate those agreements or simply end them. The company has stopped paying rent at its Seattle office, leading it to face eviction, two people familiar with the matter said. Janitorial and security services have been cut, and in some cases employees have resorted to bringing their own toilet paper to the office.

Mr. Musk bought the social network for $44 billion in late October, saddling it with debt that will require him to pay about $1 billion in interest annually. Speaking on a live forum on Twitter last week, Mr. Musk compared the company to a “plane that is headed towards the ground at high speed with the engines on fire and the controls don’t work.” Twitter was on track to have a “negative cash flow situation” of about $3 billion in 2023, he said, citing a depressed advertising environment and increased costs, like the debt payments.

“That’s why I spent the last five weeks cutting costs like crazy,” he said.

Those cuts may be yielding consequences. On Wednesday, users around the world reported service interruptions with Twitter. Some were logged out, while others encountered error messages while visiting the website. Twitter has not explained what caused the temporary outage. Three people familiar with the company’s infrastructure said that if the Sacramento facility had still been operating, it could have helped alleviate the problem by providing backup computing capacity when other data centers failed.

Twitter, which has eliminated its communications department, and Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Although he has said he will appoint a new chief executive at Twitter, Mr. Musk remains closely involved at the social networking firm even as problems crop up at his electric vehicle company, Tesla. And his tight control of the daily management of Twitter calls into question just how much power he would cede to a new chief, who would inherit a bare-bones business that he still owns.

Since early November, Mr. Musk has sought to save about $500 million in nonlabor costs, according to an internal document seen by The New York Times. He has also laid off or fired nearly 75 percent of the company’s work force since completing the purchase.

New York Times, As Silicon Valley Retrenches, a Tech Talent Shift Accelerates, Steve Lohr and Tripp Mickle, Dec. 30, 2022 (print ed.). Most tech jobs are now in mainstream industries like health care, banking and retail.

Dec. 29

Washington Post, U.S. House blocks TikTok on official devices ahead of government ban, Meryl Kornfield and Camila DeChalus, Dec. 29, 2022 (print ed.). TikTok has been banned from all U.S. House of Representatives-managed devices, according to the House’s administrative arm, ahead of a new government-wide ban of the popular Chinese-owned video app that will soon take effect.

The House’s chief administrative officer cited “high risk” security concerns in a memo that ordered lawmakers and staffers on Tuesday to delete the app from government devices, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post.

Under the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill passed by the House on Friday, all employees of the federal government will be barred from installing or must delete TikTok, which is owned by the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, in the latest government measure to limit the app’s use in the public sector. Several Republican governors have banned the app on their governments’ electronic devices.

Washington Post, Analysis: Joining the billionaire fatigue, Hollywood is sticking it to the rich, Sonia Rao. Dec. 29, 2022. With “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” HBO’s “The White Lotus” and more, an aversion to the mega-rich seeped into all sorts of entertainment.

“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” on multiple occasions practically begs its audience to dissect the imagery in its title. Though “Glass Onion” refers literally to an enormous glass pavilion on fictional billionaire Miles Bron’s private island, it just as easily serves as a metaphor for the thin-skinned man himself, his carefully constructed persona so delicate it could shatter at any given moment.

Played by Edward Norton, Miles is perhaps the biggest target of “Glass Onion,” the second installment in a franchise launched by Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunit “Knives Out,” which follows suit with a timely critique of the upper echelon. Whereas the original film lampooned Trump-era politics, “Glass Onion,” now streaming on Netflix, arrives toward the end of a year plagued by billionaire fatigue. An aversion to the mega-rich seeped into all sorts of entertainment, even that produced by major studios.

Class satire is nothing new to Hollywood, but an urge to stick it to tech billionaires pairs nicely with the industry’s more recent storytelling obsession with scammers. Consider the specific resonance of a character such as Miles, whose famed flair for innovation is quickly revealed to be a bit of a fluke. The film draws clear lines from him to real-life figures such as Elon Musk, whose recently launched tenure as Twitter CEO has been chaotic, to say the least, or cryptocurrency guru Sam Bankman-Fried, who was charged with fraud after the quick demise of his company FTX.

Washington Post, Art at Capitol honors enslavers and Confederates. This is who they are, Gillian Brockell, Dec. 27, 2022. The Post examined more than 400 statues, paintings and other artworks in the U.S. Capitol. This is what we found.

When the 118th Congress is sworn in on Jan. 3, its members will walk the halls of a building whose paintings and statues pay homage to 141 enslavers.

As part of a year-long investigation into Congress’s relationship with slavery, The Washington Post analyzed more than 400 artworks in the U.S. Capitol building, from the Crypt to the ceiling of the Capitol Rotunda, and found that one-third honor enslavers or Confederates. Another six honor possible enslavers — people whose slaveholding status is in dispute.

Dec. 28

New York Times, Opinion, Did the Tesla Story Ever Make Sense? Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 28, 2022 (print ed.). If you’re one of those people who bought Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency near its peak last fall, you’ve lost a lot of money. Is it any consolation to know that you would have lost a similar amount if you had bought Tesla stock instead?

OK, probably not. Still, Tesla stock’s plunge is an opportunity to talk about what makes businesses successful in the information age. And in the end, Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think.

It’s natural to attribute Tesla’s recent decline — which is, to be sure, part of a general fall in tech stocks, but an exceptionally steep example — to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed. Indeed, given what we’ve seen of Musk’s behavior, I wouldn’t trust him to feed my cat, let alone run a major corporation. Furthermore, Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy. Who, aside from MAGA types who probably wouldn’t have bought Teslas anyway, sees him that way now?

On the other hand, as someone who has spent much of his professional life in academia, I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX.

Even if that’s the case, though, it’s hard to explain the huge valuation the market put on Tesla before the drop, or even its current value. After all, to be that valuable Tesla would have to generate huge profits, not just for a few years but in a way that could be expected to continue for many years to come.

Now, some technology companies have indeed been long-term moneymaking machines. Apple and Microsoft still top the list of the most profitable U.S. corporations some four decades after the rise of personal computers.

But we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. Both Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products.

Similar stories can be told about a few other companies, such as Amazon, with its distribution infrastructure.

The question is: Where are the powerful network externalities in the electric vehicle business?

Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business.

Which brings us back to the question of why Tesla was ever worth so much. The answer, as best as I can tell, is that investors fell in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine.

And as I said, there’s a parallel here with Bitcoin..

Dec. 27

 

 Former Donald Trump “body man” (personal assistant) Nicholas Luna, shown above

Proof, Source: Nick Luna Not Involved with Trump NFT Company CIC Digital or Trump NFT Scam, Seth Abramson, left, Dec. 27, 2022. Journalists at both the New York Times and Washington Post linked CIC Digital and a similarly named company, CIC Ventures—but that presumption appears to have been wrong, per a Proof source.

Proof readers will be well aware that Proof has reported both here and elsewhere—for instance, in the New York Times-bestselling Proof Trilogy—that former president Donald Trump has a history of directly or indirectly promising money, jobs, and/or favors to those federal witnesses who testify before Congress or speak to the DOJ or FBI in a fashion consistent with his own interests, leading to some understandable concern that if any such individual were to have been involved in Trump’s get-richer-quick NFT scam it could position that scam as part of a larger January 6 cover-up.

As the subhed of this new Proof report indicates, and as the last Proof report on Mr. Trump’s NFT venture disclosed, both the Washington Post and New York Times saw leading journalists on their payrolls draw conclusions about two Trump-launched companies—CIC Ventures and CIC Digital—that treated the two as one and the same, and therefore possibly at the head of a January 6 Witness Tampering scheme.

But Proof can now report, on the basis of contact with a person confirmed to have knowledge of the situation—and to whom Proof has granted anonymity to allow them to speak freely—that while former Trump “body man” Nicholas Luna was indeed involved with CIC Ventures for the purposes of signing contracts for Mr. Trump’s post-presidential speaking engagements, he had no involvement, formal or otherwise, with CIC Digital, a distinct venture that ultimately contracted with a dodgy entity named NFT INT LLC to mint Trump’s chintzy, much-mocked NFTs. Indeed, per this Proof source, CIC Digital was founded after Luna left Trump’s employ in October 2021.

This source believes CIC Digital to have been run, instead, by individuals associated with (or even formally part of) the Trump Organization. This source further states that there were no contacts between Luna and the listed co-director for CIC Ventures, Trump lawyer John Marion.

These revelations keep active the following key questions: (1) why a Trump lawyer (Marion) was made the co-director of an entity exclusively associated with Trump’s speaking engagements; (2) whether Marion was also involved with CIC Digital; and (3) whether Marion was given his business role(s) in the labyrinthine world of Trump single-purpose (sometimes shell) corporations as a means to avoid paying him for legal services rendered—whether through corporate perks or write-offs or by allowing Marion to do side business under Trump’s aegis and/or brand, as appears to have been the case in Ukraine with fellow Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani—or to generate a zone of attorney-client privilege in the context of a Witness Tampering (or other criminal) scheme.

Hopefully the Times and Post will update their coverage of Donald Trump’s NFT scam consistent with this new reporting by Proof.

Seth Abramson, shown above and at right, is founder of Proof and is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who later taught 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).

Legal Schnauzer, Matrix LLC paid ABC News "producer" to pepper pro-environment political candidates with deceptive questions in an effort to boost its clients who pollute (Part 1), Roger Shuler, right, Dec. 22, 2022. A journalist who identifies herself as working for ABC News has been paid by an Alabama-based political-consulting firm to sideswipe pro-environment politicians with deceptive questions, according to a report at NPR/Floodlight.

The journalist was Kristen Hentschel, the consulting firm was Montgomery-based Matrix LLC. The beneficiaries of the scheme were designed to be Matrix clients -- such as Alabama Power, Southern Company, and Florida Power & Light -- all with ties to projects known to produce pollution.

How did the "reporting" scheme with an ABC News journalist work? Exhibit A involves a Florida political candidate named Toby Overdorf, who had pledged to take a serious approach to environmental protection. That's where Hentschel, right, enters the picture.

Under the headline "She was an ABC News producer. She also was a corporate operative, NPR/Floodlight reporters Miranda Green, Mario Ariza, and David Folkenflik write:

Microphone and ABC News business card in hand, Hentschel rushed up to a candidate for the Florida House of Representatives before a debate, the candidate recalls, and asked him about 20 dead gopher tortoises that were reportedly found at a nearby construction site [in Stuart, FL]. Florida designates the species as threatened.

Overdorf, an environmental engineer, served as a consultant on the construction project -- and he knew of no such tortoises. A city investigation found there were no dead tortoises, and no evidence that any ever had been present during the construction project. The oddities about the story do not end there, as NPR/Floodlight report:

That wasn't the only surprise. Though Hentschel has done freelance work for ABC, she was not there for the network.

At the time, a political consulting firm called Matrix LLC had paid Hentschel at least $7,000, the firm's internal ledgers show. And Matrix billed two major companies for Hentschel's work, labeling the payments "for Florida Crystals, FPL." (Florida Crystals is a huge sugar conglomerate. FPL is shorthand for the giant utility Florida Power & Light.)

Both companies could have benefited from Hentschels efforts to undermine Overdorf and his promises to resolve environmental issues in the district he was vying to represent. Florida Power & Light has pushed back against efforts to bring solar panels to the Sunshine State, while runoff from the sugar industry is a major source of water pollution in Florida.

Overdorf won his election, but he remains distressed that he was subjected to such journalistic skulduggery:

"It was an attack ad against my livelihood, my family," Overdorf says. "And it was something that potentially could last far beyond my time running for office."

Overdorf was not the only victim of the Hentschel/Matrix operation. Once Hentschel's ties to Matrix became public, ABC cut ties with her earlier this week:

Interviews for this story and Matrix ledgers show Hentschel traded on her work for ABC News at least three times to trip up Florida politicians whose stances on environmental regulations cut against the interests of major Matrix clients. Internal Matrix financial records originally sent anonymously to the Orlando Sentinel and shared with Floodlight show that since 2016, the firm has paid Hentschel at least $14,350.

According to two people at ABC News with knowledge, Hentschel was not, in fact, reporting for ABC on any of those subjects. "If she was working on these stories, she was not authorized to cover them for ABC News," one of them said. They requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive network matters. . . . 

"Kristen Hentschel was a freelance daily hire who never worked for ABC News on the political stories referenced in the NPR article," the network said in a statement. "She does not currently work for ABC NEWS."

How unusual is the Hentschel story.? One news veteran cannot remember another one like it:

David Westin, president of ABC News from 1997 to 2010, says he never came across an instance in which a journalist for the network was simultaneously doing advocacy.

"It just goes to the very heart of why people no longer have the same confidence and trust in the news media as they once did," says Westin, now an anchor for Bloomberg TV. "They suspect this is going on anyway, and for it to actually go on confirms their worst suspicions."

Hentschel, it turns out, appeared in all kinds of places -- almost like a female Forrest Gump:

In another instance, the former girlfriend of Southern Company's CEO, Tom Fanning, says Hentschel cozied up to her over the past year. Southern Company is a rival to Florida Power & Light. This August, Alabama news site AL.com reported that Matrix had previously paid a private investigator to spy on Fanning in the summer of 2017.

Hentschel did not return multiple detailed requests for comment.

Matrix's former CEO, Jeff Pitts, left, who hired Hentschel for the firm, declined comment.

That leads us back -- as Matrix-related stories often do -- to the legal feud between Pitts and Joe Perkins:

Matrix's founder, Joe Perkins, disavows any knowledge of Hentschel's work for Matrix and says Pitts was acting as a "rogue"employee in Florida.

Pitts left Matrix to found a rival firm in late 2020, alleging in court papers that he quit Matrix over Perkins' "unethical business practices," including "ordering and directing the clandestine surveillance , including that of top executives of his largest client, the Southern Company." Perkins blames Pitts for the surveillance.

All of this leads to questions about the possible roles of Southern Company, Alabama Power, and Matrix in other unsavory Alabama events. These include the head-on vehicle crash that nearly killed Birmingham-area attorney Burt Newsome, someone shooting into the car of former Drummond Company executive David Roberson as he drove on U.S. 280 near Mountain Brook, and an apparent fake deposition of a Verizon Wireless records custodian in the Newsome Conspiracy Case. 

Documents -- and investigative reporting -- shine considerable light on Hentschel's ties to Matrix:

After Pitts left Matrix, reporters from Floodlight and NPR obtained company records documenting Hentschel's work. This story also draws on other materials, including court records, and 14 interviews with people with direct knowledge of her activities.

In recent months, Matrix has also been accused of interfering in the workings of democracy in Alabama and Florida by seeking to influence ballot initiatives, running ghost candidates and offering a lucrative job to a public official if he resigned. As Floodlight and NPR have revealed, Matrix secretly maintained financial ties to a half-dozen political news sites and tried to ensure favorable coverage for clients.

Legal Schnauzer, Journalistic chicanery, sexual entanglements, and curious cash flow form a strange brew for big-polluting clients represented by Alabama-based Matrix LLC (Part 2), Roger Shuler, right, Dec. 27, 2022. The story of former ABC News producer Kristen Hentschel and the Matrix LLC political-consulting firm seems, at first glance, to be a tale of what might be called "journalistic fraud."

After all, Hentschel would use her ABC News credentials to gain access to pro-environment political candidates, only to pepper them with bogus, accusatory questions designed to benefit Matrix's big-polluting clients -- Alabama Power, Southern Company, and Florida Power & Light. Alabama-based Matrix, it turns out, was paying Hentschel to pull off the deceptive scheme.

Upon further inspection, however, the story includes enough romantic entanglements to fill several scripts for an afternoon soap opera. Perhaps that is fitting because Hentschel, left, before she was outed and fired by ABC News last week, was best known for having an affair with ABC journalist Chris Hansen, of To Catch a Predator fame.  

A joint investigation by NPR and Florida-based Floodlight led to a story that broke the Hentschel-Matrix scam on a national stage. It was as if the Hentschel-Hansen affair served as an appetizer for the bigger scandal to come - - and, as it turned out, that story had plenty of sex angles, too.

Hentschel worked on the periphery of TV news, but struggled to gain a firm foothold on the big time. Write NPR/Floodlight reporters Miranda Green, Mario Ariza, and David Folkenflik:

Hentschel began her journalism career with short stints at local TV newsrooms in Chico, Calif., Waco, Texas, and Knoxville, Tennessee.

"A lot of people think that the television business ... looks Hollywood-esque," Hentschel once told Baldwin Park Living, a Florida lifestyle magazine. "I made $8 an hour [at] my first job, laid on couches and had to move around literally every one to two years."

At those jobs, she covered crime, storms, traffic — mainstays of local news.

Her career foundered in 2011 when the National Enquirer disclosed a romantic relationship between her and a married man: Chris Hansen, the former host of NBC's To Catch a Predator.

Hentschel learned that TV news presents a double standard for women in a highly competitive business:

Subsequent stints in Las Vegas, Seattle and Orlando, Fla., proved brief. "A double standard is an understatement as to what happens in this industry," Hentschel told RadarOnline.com in an interview about her relationship with Hansen. "The women get fired and the men keep going." Professionally, she had been using the name Kristyn Caddell, which endures on her Twitter account, but shifted to her family name, Kristen Hentschel, by late 2015.

Soon, Hentschel was out of work, and perhaps from desperation, turned to Matrix. Her resume found its way to the firm's CEO, Jeff Pitts -- and he hired her in early 2016. But that was not to be Hentschel's only job:

Hentschel soon secured a second gig. In February 2016, she started as a freelance news producer for ABC News.

Hentschel primarily did work for Good Morning America. Among her assignments: helping with segments on NFL star Tom Brady and the disappearance and death of Gabby Petito, the young Florida woman who documented her cross-country trip on social media.

"Our setup for today... #lighting is everything," Hentschel once tweeted with a photograph of a TV reporting shoot. "Who's in the hot seat?"

The answer often proved to be people Pitts wanted her to confront.

Perhaps the strangest episode came when Matrix decided to spy on Southern Company chief Tom Fanning:

In another instance, the former girlfriend of Southern Company's CEO, Tom Fanning, says Hentschel cozied up to her over the past year. Southern Company is a rival to Florida Power & Light. This August, Alabama news site AL.com reported that Matrix had previously paid a private investigator to spy on Fanning in the summer of 2017. . . . 

Matrix's founder, Joe Perkins, right, disavows any knowledge of Hentschel's work for Matrix and says Pitts was acting as a "rogue" employee in Florida.

Pitts left Matrix to found a rival firm in late 2020, alleging in court papers that he quit Matrix over Perkins' "unethical business practices," including "ordering and directing the clandestine surveillance including that of top executives of his largest client, the Southern Company." Perkins blames Pitts for the surveillance.

According to NPR/Floodlight, Pitts had a tendency to mix business with pleasure:

Pitts could be a charmer. He was known to cultivate a personal rapport with his corporate clients over sushi and steak dinners, favoring long meals with freely flowing red wine. In an email exchange with a vice president of the energy company NextEra, Pitts wrote, "Talk tomorrow but miss you." She wrote back that his note was a nice surprise. "You said [to] be more open," Pitts replied.

Pitts mixed business with romance, Matrix financial records show. Over the course of the last decade, Pitts paid his then-wife more than $10,000 for work for Matrix, according to copies of the firm's invoices reflecting payments to her personal company. She had previously been employed at Alabama Power, one of Matrix's oldest clients, according to press clippings and two associates.

Matrix also paid Pitts' ongoing romantic partner, Apryl Marie Fogel, a conservative radio-show host, nearly $150,000 over several years. Fogel runs the conservative news site Alabama Today, which published articles showcasing Matrix clients in a favorable light.

On a recent episode of her radio show, Fogel compared her relationship with Pitts to that of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, the pro-Trump activist Ginni Thomas.

"You check it at the door," Fogel says. "You may be somewhat, in a fuzzy way, aware of what the other person is doing. And you want them to be successful, but it doesn't mean that you two—that everything is running in lockstep."

It did not take long for Hentschel to become part of the romantic scene:

Shortly after Hentschel started working for Pitts at Matrix, the two began an affair, associates say, though it is not clear how long it lasted. Hentschel bought a home close to Pitts' apartment in West Palm Beach, Florida, public records show.

Meanwhile, Hentschel targeted political figures who could pose a problem for Matrix clients. One target proved to be the mayor of South Miami, who had promoted residential solar panels in the Sunshine State:

Hentschel called Phil Stoddard, then the mayor of South Miami, in August 2018. He says she identified herself as an ABC reporter and asked him about an upcoming press conference likely to bring unflattering publicity. A lawsuit had been filed by parents of a teenager who was hospitalized years earlier after attending a party thrown by Stoddard's teenage daughter. (The suit was ultimately settled.)

The press conference turned out to be a sham. It had been orchestrated by Joe Carrillo, a private detective, and Dan Newman, a political operative with financial links to Matrix, according to Matrix documents and a copy of the press release obtained by Floodlight and NPR.

Matrix paid Hentschel $2,000 a few weeks later for what was itemized as a "Miami shoot," a Matrix ledger shows.

The interest in Stoddard, a biologist, seems easy to discern. Stoddard had clashed with Florida Power & Light over transmission lines, a nuclear power plant, and policies on residential solar panels. . . . 

Internal Matrix emails between Newman, the political operative, and Pitts, the firm's then-CEO, show it hired a private detective to investigate Stoddard's personal life. The Orlando Sentinel reported that Matrix-linked nonprofits spent six figures trying to knock him out of office. . . . 

On Sept. 26, Hentschel showed up with a videographer to a city council meeting.

"I thought, 'No good's gonna come of this,'" Stoddard recalls. He shut down her requests for comment at the council meeting. He continued battling Florida Power & Light even after he left office in 2020.

NPR/Floodlight found that ABC News probably should not have been caught off guard by Hentschel's activities:

There is evidence that ABC News was first told two years ago that Hentschel inappropriately invoked her network ties in conducting work that had nothing to do with ABC News.

U.S. Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, a conservative Republican, has established a record as an advocate of strengthening water quality in Lake Okeechobee, the state's largest freshwater lake. He has introduced four pieces of legislation to address toxic algal blooms there.

His work puts him at odds with Florida's powerful sugar interest, Florida Crystals. Okeechobee is kept artificially full for that industry and other corporate use. Mast's bills could ultimately cut into their profits.

"They'll do anything that they can to hold onto that grip of controlling water in the state of Florida," Mast says. "And I'm probably the number one person that goes against them."

In the heat of the 2020 election season, Hentschel chased down Mast at a fundraiser featuring then-President Donald Trump. She told Mast's aides she wanted to ask him about messages he wrote nearly a decade earlier, before entering politics. He had joked about rape and sex with teenagers in Facebook posts to a friend. They had just surfaced publicly, and he had apologized. The aides didn't bite.

The conservative Florida news site The Capitolist called Mast's proposals extreme and urged readers to vote for his Democratic opponent. Matrix had previously funneled The Capitolist nearly $200,000 from Florida Power & Light, the firm's invoices show. Perkins denied Matrix paid The Capitolist and said the company "was unaware of any financial relationships between The Capitolist and any Matrix client."

That September, Hentschel rang the doorbell at Mast's home in a gated community and told Mast's wife she was reporting for ABC, even handing over a business card citing the network, according to Mast's accounts in an interview for this story and in a trespassing complaint he filed with police.

A senior aide to Mast shot off an email to ABC. Its political director, Rick Klein, replied that Hentschel was not there for the network.

Election Day was two months away. In a video he posted on Facebook, Mast denounced his Democratic opponent for sending Hentschel to his door. "I want to talk about something that frankly is just BS," Mast said.

Mast now says he believes Hentschel sought to intimidate him on behalf of the sugar company and Matrix client Florida Crystals — an allegation the company rejected.

Dec. 25

 

Frank Shakespeare in 1968. (CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images)

Washington Post, Frank Shakespeare, Nixon TV guru who redefined political ads, dies at 97, Brian Murphy, Dec. 25, 2022 (print ed.). Mr. Shakespeare's team oversaw ads and on-air events that reflected the rising power of television as a political tool.

Frank Shakespeare, a former CBS executive who deployed his television skills for Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign with a blitz of montage-style ads and on-air events that helped win the White House and underscored TV’s power as a political tool, died Dec. 14 at his home in Deerfield, Wis. He was 97.

The death was confirmed by Ed Feulner, founder of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, where Mr. Shakespeare served as board chairman from 1981 to 1985. No cause was given.

Mr. Shakespeare’s role as a Republican envoy covered decades, including heading the United States Information Agency, during which he sought a sharper pro-American edge to its broadcasts and other media. That included “The Silent majority,” a 1970 news-style propaganda film produced by Mr. Shakespeare’s agency that asserted widespread American support for the Vietnam War and Nixon’s policies.

Mr. Shakespeare later served as an ambassador to Portugal and the Vatican, acting as a liaison between President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II in discussions over shared opposition to communism.

But Mr. Shakespeare’s most direct stamp on U.S. political sensibilities came during the homestretch of the wrenching 1968 campaign, which played out amid the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Then came harsh crackdowns on antiwar demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August that further rocked the nation.

Mr. Shakespeare was part of a team of media advisers, including future Fox News president Roger Ailes, tasked with remolding Nixon’s image as someone who could rise to the challenges. The former vice president, however, was burdened by his own lack of public finesse and the lingering infamy of his clunky performance in a 1960 televised debate with John F. Kennedy.

Dec. 24

Boston Globe, Corporate owners have hollowed out the once-formidable Providence Journal, Mark Shanahan Globe Staff, Updated Dec. 24, 2022. The Providence Journal was an award-winning newspaper. But slowly, over the years, it has been hollowed out by corporate owners.

When The New York Times first called to recruit her, Cornelia Dean said no.

Why would she leave her job at The Providence Journal, covering a city so rife with crooked politicians and unscrupulous judges that it sometimes seemed like a theme park for reporters?

She considered it a privilege to work at a newspaper whose uncommon commitment to storytelling and deep-dive investigations would earn armloads of awards, including four Pulitzer Prizes.

“We sent reporters all over. I sent someone to Honduras when the civil war was raging there,” said Dean, who started in one of the Journal’s many local bureaus in the 1970s before becoming an editor. “The ProJo was just an excellent newspaper.”

But times have changed. Over the past two decades, the venerable broadsheet, first published in 1829, has been gutted. The reductions in staffing, gradual at first, have been dramatic since 2014, when the Journal was bought by GateHouse Media, which later merged with Gannett to become the country’s largest newspaper publisher, accounting for about a quarter of all daily print circulation in the United States. The Journal used to have a dozen reporters in its Warwick bureau alone; now it has barely a dozen reporters total, and its top editor, David Ng, was dismissed in the latest round of layoffs. Readers have taken notice: The newspaper’s circulation, which once eclipsed 220,000 on Sundays, has shrunk to just 33,000 on the weekend — print and digital combined — and even less on weekdays.

Gannett remains knives out. In the last year, it’s undertaken three rounds of company-wide layoffs, in addition to hiring freezes, suspension of company contributions to 401(k) accounts, and mandatory unpaid leaves. The voracious cost-cutting is a response to Gannett’s massive debt, estimated at more than $1 billion, and poor financial performance. (The publicly traded company reported $54 million in losses during the second and third quarters of 2022.)

“They’ve essentially said their No. 1 priority is paying off the debt,” said news industry analyst Ken Doctor. “So their products, like the ProJo, are losing circulation and advertisers more quickly and basically spiraling down.”

While the cuts affect all Gannett papers — in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it owns the Taunton Daily Gazette, the Cape Cod Times, The Patriot Ledger, The Herald News in Fall River, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, The Standard-Times in New Bedford, and The Newport Daily News, among others — the tradition of excellence at The Providence Journal makes its dismantling especially alarming. Former staffers and longtime subscribers who remember when the paper, colloquially known as the ProJo, was thick with local news, long-form narratives, and prize-winning investigative projects are heartbroken.

“I don’t know whether to cry or tear my hair out,” said M. Charles Bakst, a veteran political reporter and columnist at the Journal who took a buyout in 2008. “It’s just been a decades-long slide.”

The oldest continuously published daily newspaper in the United States, the Journal has a proud history. In its heyday, from the 1970s through the mid-1990s, the paper maintained a dozen bureaus across Rhode Island, each with a team of reporters who scrutinized city and school budgets, hung around courthouses, and generally made a nuisance of themselves to movers and shakers — politicians, businesspeople, and influence peddlers — who preferred to conduct business behind closed doors.

“We used to say, ‘If it hasn’t been in the Journal, it hasn’t happened,’” said Bakst.

The list of Journal alums is illustrious: Legendary critic A.J. Liebling worked there in the 1930s; Ben Bagdikian, a Washington Post editor famous for his role in publishing the Pentagon Papers, won a Pulitzer in Providence in 1953; Dean Starkman, later an award-winning investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and Dan Barry, the celebrated scribe at The New York Times, were part of a team that won a Pulitzer at the Journal in 1994; current Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger interned at the Journal for two years in the 2000s; and before taking their talents to The New York Times, Helene Cooper, Sheryl Stolberg, and C.J. Chivers all had A1 bylines at the Journal.

Dean, who at first rejected the Times’ entreaties, accepted a job there in 1984, eventually becoming science editor.

“In the Times newsroom, when something would happen, I’d say, ‘Well, what we’d do at The Providence Journal...,’” Dean recalled. “People at the Times weren’t used to hearing someone hold up another newspaper as an example of how to do things.”

In the pre-Internet era, the Journal, like most US newspapers, made a mountain of money from advertising — grossing as much as $1 million a day, according to some old-timers. (That figure includes revenue generated by the TV stations and cable systems the paper’s former owner, The Providence Journal Co., also operated.) But unlike some newspapers, the Journal spent lavishly, too. It had a bureau in Washington and routinely sent reporters far beyond its circulation area to cover the news. For example, during the America’s Cup in 1987, the paper dispatched reporters to Australia for a month.

“Seemed like a good thing to do because Newport’s a sailing capital,” said Gerry Goldstein, who worked in the paper’s South County bureau for 25 years before taking a buyout in 2001. “If it was a journalistically sound idea, you could be damn sure they were going to give it serious consideration.”

That was still true in the early 1990s, when an influx of refugees from Cambodia arrived in Rhode Island. Curious about the newcomers and the conditions in their home country, the paper’s immigration reporter Karen Ziner proposed going to Cambodia. Her editor said yes.

“It was meaningful to the Cambodians living here, and also to the greater population of Rhode Island who had all these refugees in their midst but no cultural connection,” said Ziner, a reporter at the paper for 38 years before taking a buyout in 2017.

Coverage of this sort is unimaginable today, said Tracy Breton, who worked at the Journal for four decades, much of it as an investigative reporter. With Starkman, Barry, and others, she shared the 1994 Pulitzer for a series that revealed pervasive corruption in the Rhode Island court system and led to the disbarment and conviction of the chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

Twitter owner Elon Musk, standing in the back row at center, is shown with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner in Qatar at the World Cup championship game in a VIP box on Dec. 18, 2022.

Washington Post, Investigation: Here’s who helped Elon Musk buy Twitter, Hamza Shaban and Faiz Siddiqui, Dec. 24, 2022. Who pulls the financial strings at Twitter? These are Musk’s backers:

• Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud
• The Qatar Investment Authority
• Binance
• Andreessen Horowitz
• Sequoia Capital
• Larry Ellison
• Jack Dorsey
• Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays

After slashing half the company’s 7,500 member staff, he’s driven away advertisers and created a bigger financial hole for the company. So far, his ideas for bringing in additional money — paying for verification and additional features — have failed to make much of a dent. An unscientific poll he launched recently told him to step down as CEO.

On a Twitter audio chat recently, Musk cited the company’s precarious financial position as a driver of his aggressive job cuts and drastic actions, adding “we have an emergency fire drill on our hands.”

That’s making at least some of his investors in the deal antsy, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Last week, at least a couple of the original investors received letters from a Musk associate soliciting additional investments, according to two people familiar with the matter, although it was unclear if that would proceed.

Here’s who initially invested in the deal, and what we know about why:

Foreign Investors

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud. Estimated Contribution: $2 Billion

The Saudi prince agreed in May to convert his shares of Twitter, worth nearly $2 billion, into a stake in the company when Musk took it private. A month earlier, he had publicly sparred with Musk about the company’s worth, but later tweeted that Musk would be an “excellent leader for Twitter.”

The prince has previously placed winning bets on Apple, Amazon and eBay. But his latest Silicon Valley investment has drawn skepticism in Washington. President Biden and some members of Congress have called on officials to examine the role of Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Twitter deal.

The Qatar Investment Authority. Estimated Contribution: $375 Million

Dec. 23

 

New York Times, Musk Lifted Bans for Thousands on Twitter. Here’s What They’re Tweeting, Stuart A. Thompson, Dec. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Many reinstated users are tweeting about topics that got them barred in the first place: Covid-19 skepticism, election denialism and QAnon.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in October, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” has ad-libbed his way through the company’s moderation policies.

He initially argued that bans should be reserved for spam accounts, offering “amnesty” to thousands of suspended users and reinstating former president Donald J. Trump. Last week, he suspended several journalists, claiming they had shared public flight data revealing his private location. (Many of the bans were later reversed.)

To gauge how Mr. Musk’s content decisions influenced Twitter’s content, The New York Times analyzed tweets from more than 1,000 users whose accounts were recently reinstated. The posts were collected for The Times by Bright Data, a social media tracking company, using a list of reinstated users identified by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who has tracked extremism on Twitter.

Most of the reinstated accounts were deeply partisan — often vocal supporters of Mr. Trump — and they appeared eager to bring their fiery takes back to the social network. It was not clear from the data why the users were originally suspended or why they were reinstated, though their post histories suggest many were banned as Twitter cracked down on Covid-19 and election-related misinformation.

Imran Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said the message Mr. Musk sent to the formerly suspended users was clear: “‘Welcome back, welcome home.”

“I finally got this account back after being banned for being a #Republican thanks @elonmusk,” one user tweeted. Just 10 minutes later, the same person wrote: “Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and the 2020 election was stolen.”

New York Times, Twitter Is Said to Have Struggled Over Revealing U.S. Influence Campaign, Kate Conger and Sheera Frenkel, Dec. 23, 2022 (print ed.). Internal emails showed the company’s communications with the Pentagon over a network of military-run accounts.

In response to a 2017 request from the Pentagon, Twitter kept online a network of accounts that the U.S. military used to advance its interests in the Middle East, according to internal company emails that were made public on Tuesday by The Intercept, a nonprofit publication.

A counterterrorism division at Twitter knew about the arrangement, but others did not, five people with knowledge of the matter said. When it became more widely known within the company, executives rushed to undo it. But they struggled with whether to publicly disclose the military-run Twitter accounts, the people said.

Some of the accounts were removed, but others remained online for years. Twitter eventually disclosed the U.S. influence campaign this year.

The situation was unusual because Twitter normally removes and publicly discloses influence campaigns conducted by governments. Social media companies have taken a strong line against state-backed influence campaigns since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when Russia misused Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to influence American voters. But in this case, Twitter’s transparency efforts moved slowly and the company showed deference to the U.S. government.

Dec. 21

 

Elon Musk released what he called the “Twitter Files” in December, delving into the company's decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story and limit other controversial messaging that Musk wants distributed. In this 2019 photo, Musk speaks during a gaming convention (Photo by Mike Blake for Reuters).

The Guardian, Opinion: Elon Musk was never a liberal, and his plans for Twitter were never benevolent, Thomas Zimmer, Dec. 21, 2022. Tech barons’ lip-service to democracy and pluralism was always conditional on preserving their own positions at the top.

On Monday, Elon Musk polled Twitter users on whether he should step down as CEO. The answer was a resounding yes. On Tuesday, Musk announced that he will step down once he finds a replacement. Still, the damage has been done: Musk’s tenure has been a disaster for democracy.
Elon Musk is a Jekyll and Hyde character. And as head of Twitter, Hyde is winning

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, he has encouraged far-right conspiracy theories, consistently articulated rightwing extremist ideas and coddled extremists who propagated them, changed or undermined content moderation in a way that allowed hate speech and far-right abuse to flourish, and constantly derided Democrats, liberals and anyone he perceives as part of “the Left” in an escalating crusade against “wokeism”. He is now banning critical voices, including those of mainstream journalists, under obviously disingenuous pretenses.

Musk’s actions are fully consistent with the worldview that dominates among far-right reactionary extremists. Yet, many observers seem reluctant to acknowledge that what is happening is exactly what it looks like. People who cover the tech world are still searching for a grand business strategy that would explain all this behavior. And some people whose main occupation is to cover politics are also struggling. The New York Times recently declared Musk’s politics “tricky to pin down”, and said that “what he stands for remains largely unclear.”

The source of confusion seems to be that Musk’s actions collide with certain assumptions about the supposedly liberal tech world and with Musk’s own previous claims about his political leanings. But the male-dominated tech world seemed “liberal” only because it was associated with technical progress, while most of the (predominantly male) tech oligarchs were happy to present a culturally permissive image. And people say all sorts of things about their political leanings and may even believe them – that doesn’t mean we should take their proclamations at face value. What people actually do, the political projects they support, is far more relevant.

So, what’s up with Musk’s politics?

From a democratic perspective, it’s highly problematic that tech oligarchs like Musk are amassing so much power and influence. They are not democratically controlled in any way or guided by any concern for the public good. Musk is yet another example of how short the path from a certain kind of libertarianism to the far right is, a reminder that this type of libertarianism is driven by a desire for freedom from regulation and criticism of any kind.

Musk believes that the world works best if people like him are in charge and get to do as they please, unhampered by regulations or demands for equality – because their interests ought to be the same as humanity’s. It’s an inherently anti-democratic worldview that tracks very well with the reactionary idea that the world should be run by wealthy white men. This is what is pulling these people to the right, and why they eventually gravitate toward autocratic regimes at home and abroad.

Much of the moral panic over “cancel culture” – which animated Musk to buy Twitter in the first place – is a reaction to the fact that traditionally marginalized groups gained technological means to affect the political debate.

Twitter has been crucial in this uphill struggle: a tool for organizing, a platform, a global amplifier that enabled people with no traditional access to power to speak to powerful elites directly and criticize them in the public square. How valuable this has been is evidenced by the fact that many of those elites are so consistently bemoaning “persecution” – and, like Musk, wish to sabotage and destroy this instrument for public criticism. To the extent that traditional societal elites – and elite white men in particular – face a little more scrutiny today than in the past, Twitter has helped to democratize public life.

Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer

Dec. 19

JFK Facts, Analysis: Tucker Carlson, the Liberal Media, and JFK, Jefferson Morley, right, Dec. 19, 2022. A sea change in how the media talks about Kennedy's assassination. The coverage of the U.S. government’s latest JFK document dump on December 15 marked a sea change in how American mass media talks about Kennedy's assassination.

“I turned on “Morning Joe” and I thought I was at a conference in Dallas,” one researcher told me. Jim DiEugenio, producer of Oliver Stone’s JFK documentary, laughed out loud when I asked him about Tucker Carlson’s scorching JFK segment on Fox, which JFK’s nephew, Robert Kennedy Jr., called, in a now-deleted tweet, “the most courageous broadcast in 60 years.”

Katy Tur at MSNBC expressed hope for full JFK disclosure soon. So did Jim Acosta at CNN. NBC’s Chuck Todd was even tougher, reporting “The law demands full JFK record release, but ‘clearly the CIA doesn’t care about those consequences.”’

Dec. 18 

New York Times, In the U.S., His Site Has Been Linked to Massacres, In Japan, He’s a Star, Ben Dooley, Dec. 18, 2022.  Hiroyuki Nishimura has become a famous voice for disenchanted young Japanese. What he talks much less about is his ownership of the notorious website 4chan.

He has amassed millions of followers on social media, where he opines on the failures of Japanese society. He has appeared both on the catwalk at one of Japan’s biggest fashion shows and in a government video urging people to watch their finances. In a national poll, high school students said he was their top pick for prime minister.

By endearing himself to young Japanese who feel oppressed by their country’s rigid rules, Hiroyuki Nishimura has become wildly famous in Japan, a celebrity entrepreneur, author and commentator so ubiquitous that people simply call him Hiroyuki, a name roughly as common as Adam in the United States.

In some two dozen books and hundreds of magazine columns, he has encouraged his fans to be more selfish, to stop caring about what others think, to work less and to game the system by obeying the law’s letter while flouting its spirit. Initially famous for his role in building two of Japan’s most popular websites, he has since become a national antihero by raising a giant middle finger to mainstream society, expressing his many contrarian views as unapologetically and publicly as possible.

But there is one thing Mr. Nishimura is much less eager to talk about: his ownership of 4chan, the anonymous online message board.

New York Times, Twitter to Ban Accounts That Promote Rival Social Media, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Dec. 18, 2022. The move may affect giant social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram, as well as smaller ones like Mastodon and Truth Social.

Twitter said on Sunday that it would ban accounts that promote rival social media platforms, the most recent shift by the company since Elon Musk took over.

In a post, Twitter said it would remove accounts “created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms.” The company went on to say it would take action against users that flout the policy “at both the Tweet level and the account level.”

The decision also means that users may no longer be able to link to their own accounts on other social media platforms. (Mr. Musk tweeted later on Sunday, “Casually sharing occasional links is fine.”)

The move, the latest change in an already chaotic month at the company, could affect giant social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram; start-ups like Mastodon and Post; and the right-wing site that former President Donald J. Trump helped found, Truth Social. Twitter said the new policy would also affect two other alternative social networks, Tribel and Nostr.

Twitter last week suspended the account of Mastodon, after the site had promoted the work of a journalist who had been barred from Twitter.

Social networks traditionally have permitted links to other social platforms, with the idea that sharing content can bring wider distribution to posts and a more open internet.

Twitter’s policy change on Sunday reflects a broader pattern in which Mr. Musk has purged the platform of dissenting voices. Last week, he suspended the accounts of half a dozen well-known journalists, including Ryan Mac of The New York Times and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post. Most of those accounts have since been reinstated.

New York Times, The Education of CNN’s Chris Licht, James B. Stewart, Dec. 18, 2022. The network’s chief executive knew the job would not be easy. But this hard?

When Chris Licht told his boss, Stephen Colbert, the host of the CBS program “Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” in February that he had been offered the chief executive job at CNN, Mr. Colbert was blunt: “Definitely don’t go do that.”

But for Mr. Licht, right, nothing less than democracy itself was at stake. He argued he could make CNN a news channel that people trusted, as opposed to one that monetized partisan combat.

“Oh, man, you used to be in news, remember?” Mr. Colbert recalled telling him. “You said this was so much nicer — 12 weeks off, good pay, laugh for an hour every night. Everyone is really nice; you can say anything you want, and nobody leaks it. It’s great.”

“CNN would be lucky to get you,” Mr. Colbert continued. “But you’re my friend, and I’m telling you not to go.”

On Feb. 28, Mr. Licht was named CNN’s new chief executive. Since then, he and Mr. Colbert have spoken nearly every Friday. Each time, Mr. Colbert begins with the same four words:

“I told you so.”

By almost any measure, Mr. Licht, 51, has had a rough start. His first major act was to kill the network’s fledgling streaming service, CNN+, and fire 400 or so people working on it. CNN’s revenue and profits have plunged to a projected $750 million this year, down from $1.25 billion last year, partly from the costs associated with CNN+, the network acknowledged. CNN’s ratings declined, on average, this year compared with 2021, according to Nielsen, with CNN falling behind MSNBC for the first time in prime time on election night among total viewers. (CNN prevailed in the coveted 25-to-54 age group.)

At the end of November, Mr. Licht levied another round of job cuts — this time just under 10 percent of CNN’s work force of about 4,000, which plunged morale further. Among the casualties were familiar commentators like Chris Cillizza, key behind-the-scenes producers with decades of experience, and the entirety of HLN, CNN’s sister network, and its popular morning host, Robin Meade.

New York Times, Vatican Removes Anti-Abortion Activist From the Priesthood, Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, Dec. 18, 2022. Frank Pavone’s work has led to clashes over the years with some Catholic leaders. His removal comes at a precarious moment for the anti-abortion movement.

A well-known Catholic priest and incendiary leader of the anti-abortion movement was removed from the priesthood by the Vatican, according to a letter from Pope Francis’ representative to the United States that was obtained by The New York Times.

Frank Pavone, who leads the advocacy organization Priests for Life, and was once a religious adviser to former President Donald J. Trump, was dismissed from the clergy on Nov. 9 with no possibility of appeal, the letter states. The letter included a statement about the removal, called laicization, that it said was approved by the Dicastery for the Clergy, a Vatican office.

“This action was taken after Father Pavone was found guilty in canonical proceedings of blasphemous communications on social media, and of persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop,” it states.

The letter did not specify those communications or disobedience, or name the diocesan bishop. Reached by phone on Sunday morning, Mr. Pavone said that he had not been properly notified of the decision.

“I’m waiting for them to point out to me what I did wrong that merits something like this,” he said. And though the Vatican has said there was no possibility of appeal, Mr. Pavone said that ultimately he and his allies “would have to appeal to the next pope” and “to the people of God.”

The punishment of a high-profile Catholic anti-abortion activist comes at a precarious moment for the movement as it plans its future after losses in the midterm election and struggles to unify Republicans around the issue. Mr. Pavone’s anti-abortion activism was not cited in the letter as the reason for his dismissal.

The move also comes a month after the Catholic bishops of the United States said they would redouble their efforts to end abortion and elected new leaders who are expected to continue the conservative leanings of the hierarchy.

Washington Post, We’re drowning in old books. But getting rid of them is heartbreaking, Karen Heller, Dec. 19, 2022. .‘They’re more like friends than objects,’ one passionate bookseller says. What are we to do with our flooded shelves?

Dec. 17

Catholic News Agency, Vatican dismisses Father Frank Pavone from priesthood, Shannon Mullen and Joe Bukuras, Dec 17, 2022. Father Frank Pavone, shown above, a well-known pro-life activist and national director of the organization Priests for Life, has been dismissed from the clerical state for “blasphemous communications on social media” and “persistent disobedience of the lawful instructions of his diocesan bishop,” CNA has learned.

In a Dec. 13 letter to U.S. bishops obtained by CNA and confirmed by multiple sources as authentic, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, the apostolic nuncio to the United States, wrote that the prefect of the Dicastery for the Clergy issued the decision on Nov. 9, adding that there was “no possibility of appeal.”

“Father Pavone was given ample opportunity to defend himself in the canonical proceedings, and he was also given multiple opportunities to submit himself to the authority of his diocesan bishop,” explains a separate statement attached to Pierre’s letter. “It was determined that Father Pavone had no reasonable justification for his actions.”

Pavone, however, told CNA Saturday that he had not been notified about the Vatican’s judgment.

The communication from Pierre does not specify the actions that led to Pavone’s dismissal or name the bishop he disobeyed.

The statement refers to Pavone as “Mr. Pavone” and calls him “a lay person,” underscoring the dramatic and immediate nature of the Vatican’s action. 

“Since Priests for Life, Inc. is not a Catholic organization, Mr. Pavone’s continuing role in it as a lay person would be entirely up to the leadership of that organization,” the statement says.

Pavone is still saying Masses, including one streamed online Saturday. The Priests for Life website states that Pavone “is a Catholic priest in good standing, and exercises his ministry in full communion with the Catholic Church.”

In an email to CNA on Saturday, Pavone said that he was not aware of the Vatican’s action.

“How did CNA learn about this before I did?” he asked. In a subsequent email he added that CNA’s inquiry was “the very first communication that came to me about this.”

It is not clear in what diocese Pavone, 63, is incardinated as a priest. On the Priests for Life website, it says he received permission from the Vatican in 2019 to transfer from the Diocese of Amarillo, Texas, where he was incardinated in 2005, to another, unnamed diocese.

Pavone hosted the show “Defending Life” on EWTN for many years until the bishop of Amarillo, Texas, revoked Pavone’s permission to appear on the Network. EWTN is the parent organization of CNA.

Originally based in Staten Island, New York, Priests for Life is now headquartered in Titusville, Florida, within the Diocese of Orlando. That diocese, also, did not respond to CNA’s request for comment Saturday.

Pavone has served as the pro-life organization’s national director since 1993.

In that role he has a long history of conflicts with bishops, beginning more than 20 years ago with the late Cardinal Edward Egan of the Archdiocese of New York. Egan succeeded the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor, who ordained Pavone in 1988 and encouraged his pro-life work.

In his email, Pavone directed CNA to a document posted on his personal website titled “Summary of How Fr. Frank and Priests for Life Have Been Treated by Some in the Hierarchy.”

Hollywood Reporter, Hollywood’s Messy Tradition of Newspaper Yarns, Thomas Doherty, Dec. 17, 2022. Studio executives' interest in journalism movies was born in the early sound era, then the genre thrived in the pre-Code era and learned better manners after the Production Code Administration unsheathed its scissors in 1934.

Based on New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor’s account of their harpooning of the powerhouse producer and loathsome sexual predator Harvey Weinstein, Maria Schrader’s She Said had a lot going for it: two congenial performers (Carey Mulligan as Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Kantor); a narrative fixation on the target of opportunity; and the cathartic satisfactions of justice served, eventually.

Yet She Said was also — not to bury the lede — a bit pedantic and procedural. Journalism here is serious business — akin to a sacred vocation, actually — and its practitioners are straitlaced and earnest.

This is not the way Hollywood traditionally portrayed members of the Fourth Estate. The ink-stained progenitors of today’s digital crusaders were crude, irreverent, and often inebriated. They didn’t want to change the world or give voice to the voiceless; they wanted to crush the competition by any sneaky, underhanded, and conniving means necessary. Also, they were fun to watch.

1931’s ‘Front Page’

Unlike westerns or musicals, there seems to be no good name for the genre (if that’s what it is) of motion pictures set in newsrooms and built around news gathering. The mundane signifier “journalism film” may have to make do for the full range of newsworthy films (for example, the magazine-centric Shattered Glass [2003] and the TV news-centric The China Syndrome [1979]), but the term coined by the trade papers when the first editions hit the streets better captures the speed, style, and pizzazz of the original iterations: “newspaper yarns.”

The newspaper yarns were born in the early sound era, thrived in the pre-Code era, and learned better manners after the Production Code Administration unsheathed its scissors in 1934. They presumed a media world in which newsprint was the dominant transmission belt for information and cold hard type carried cultural authority. In the 1930s, nine dailies were published in New York City; the New York Daily News alone boasted a circulation of one million. With the exception of the snooty New York Times, all were ruthlessly competitive, all published multiple editions each day, and, when a hot story broke, an extra edition rolled off the presses for newsboys to hawk on street corners: “Extra! G-Men Kill Dillinger in Chicago! Extra!”

What sparked Hollywood’s interest in the newspaper game was the introduction of talk to the cinema in 1927. Logically enough, the studios figured newspapermen, already trained in churning out snappy prose and hitting deadlines, could put words into the mouths on screen. Underpaid bylines like Herman Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Gene Fowler, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Jo Swerling, and scores more needed little nudging to go Hollywood. By 1930, the entire writing staff at Columbia Pictures was comprised of nothing but former newsmen. A statistically significant percentage of the raw recruits was second-generation Jews and Irishman, fast-talking wiseguys-and-gals bred on the city streets, prone to wit, wordplay, irony, and malice.

A well-timed stage play inspired Hollywood to feature the writers on the other side of the screen: The Front Page, written by Ben Hecht, a seasoned beat reporter and columnist for the Chicago Daily News, and the slightly more urbane playwright Charles MacArthur. (Hecht’s endlessly entertaining and occasionally reliable memoir A Child of the Century, published in 1954, recounts the true-life backstory for the play.) 

Premiering on Broadway on August 14, 1928, The Front Page was an instant smash. Howard Hughes scooped up the film rights for $125,000, at which point almost every studio in Hollywood rushed a newspaper yarn into production to beat him out of the gate. In 1929, Variety was already detecting an “epidemic of film newspaper yarns” (also known as “city desk stuff”) and numbering among them Paramount’s Gentlemen of the Press, Warner Bros.’s In the Headlines, and Pathe’s Big News.

Washington Post, Opinion: Journalism and government are struggling. Here’s why I’m optimistic, Colbert I. King, right, Dec. 17, 2022. On the “Larry King Live” CNN program, the talk show host often asked guests the question: “Are you optimistic or pessimistic?”

It was King’s way of getting people to open up about how they felt about the future.

If asked the King question, most of us, I suspect, would apply the old Miles’s Law aphorism: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”

At year end and seated at my computer, I asked the King question about three aspects of my time and attention: D.C. government, national leadership and this thing called journalism.

For openers, I’m hopelessly devoted to this town.

I was born, raised and educated here, and I’ve been married 61 years to Gwen, who gave birth here in this city to two of our three children. (The last was born overseas.) I bleed Dunbar High School and Howard University.

I have worked in Washington from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other: as a Senate staffer to positions in the city’s West End at the State and Treasury departments. Job assignments have led me numerous times into the White House, city government agencies, and inside just about every federal department lining Constitution and Independence avenues. This is home turf.

My Post association also began decades ago, probably predating most people on today’s payroll.

I was there on March 18, 1954, when the first issue of The Washington Post and Times-Herald was published — The Post having just purchased its morning rival, the Times-Herald. Admittedly, I was in the sub-sub-basement of the newspaper’s food chain. But I was on hand for the launching.

The first issue combined most of the two papers. As a Times-Herald carrier suddenly folded into the ranks of The Post, I had the privilege — and burden — of delivering dozens of those multi-pound monstrosities to subscribers residing in blocks neighboring the west side of the White House. Yes, I really was present at the beginning.

But to King’s “optimistic or pessimistic” query:

From where I sit, and drawing upon Miles’s Law, I see government — the District, the White House and Congress — and the world of journalism all going through a rough patch.

But that is no cause for pessimism.

Our saving grace is that we have, amid legislative unruliness, a core of elected officials with the capacity to legislate pragmatically and reconcile — people not inclined to let the perfect be enemy of the good.

To survive, we must get back to basics, return to being conveyors of news and carefully drawn opinions, not entertainers bearing carefully tailored tales. That readjustment might cause heartaches within the ranks of latter-day journalists. But if done right, journalism will survive to talk about it. That, too, spells optimism for the future.

Dec. 16

 

Elon Musk released what he called the “Twitter Files” this month, delving into the company's decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story and limit other controversial messaging that Musk wants distributed. In this 2019 photo, Musk speaks during a gaming convention (Photo by Mike Blake for Reuters).

Politico, Opinion: Why the ‘Twitter Files’ Are Falling Flat, Joan Donovan, Dec. 16, 2022 (print ed.). The public has recently gotten an inside peek at the workings of Twitter and Facebook, thanks to a pair of extraordinary document drops.

The first release — the “Facebook Files” — came in late 2021 from Frances Haugen, a former Facebook employee. The second — the “Twitter Files” — came this month from Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner. Unfortunately for Musk, the “Twitter Files” are not having nearly the same impact as the “Facebook Files” did. And for good reason.

The two document drops are set apart by the methods of the media rollouts and the goals of the informants. The “Facebook Files” were the product of an intensive Wall Street Journal investigation, with Haugen later releasing the data to over a dozen major media outlets, who confirmed and amplified the original claims. Over at Twitter, Musk has given privileged access to some ideologically friendly journalists who must publish their findings on his platform.

Haugen’s ultimate goal was to blow the whistle on Facebook’s inability to reckon with the damage caused by its own product, and she largely succeeded. The “Facebook Files” helped drive a new narrative about how the social media company handled (or failed to handle) content moderation issues and fueled incitement across the globe.

On the other hand, the “Twitter Files” are a desperate attempt to legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies. Tweets laced with allegations that former Twitter executives purposefully stopped aggressive moderation of child exploitation often subsume the Twitter replies, but the details of the “Twitter Files” do not seem to hold new revelations.

Instead, they serve the purpose of demonizing Twitter’s former content moderation executives to make it seem like they were prioritizing the moderation of political disinformation above child exploitation. In the crosshairs, quite literally, are a handful of former employees tasked with “Trust and Safety,” tech speak for brand management. One of them, Yoel Roth, has fled his home amid death threats.

In fact, what the “Twitter Files” reveal is what we already knew about social media governance from the “Facebook Files”: Social media corporations spend a large amount of time and resources discussing how to bend the rules so that politicians and celebrity influencers don’t get suspended. To pretend that the “Twitter Files” illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk’s new regime is much more politically motivated.

Ultimately, both social media releases are attempts at shaping the mainstream media narratives about the purpose and practice of content moderation on massively large open platforms. But while the “Facebook Files” took months to contextualize and fact-check, Musk is baiting mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about something that happened years ago and it is still not yielding returns. So far, the media largely isn’t taking the bait, showing that news coverage doesn’t just happen simply because a billionaire tries to engineer it. Silence is still the editor’s best kept weapon in the content wars.

While the “Twitter Files” are numbered to imply some continuity, the content is mostly searches of particular former executives’ emails and chats, focusing on very inside baseball discussions about meeting with the government regarding threats to the platform. Intent on drumming up suspicion and intrigue, the tweet-thread shenanigans of the media gatekeepers, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, have made it increasingly more difficult for mainstream outlets to cover this “nothingburger,” as Musk might say.

Love it or hate it, coverage by legitimate newsrooms still matters because of the high burden of editorial and legal review that hold up major investigations until all is fact-checked. There is no such apparatus functioning to substantiate the claims made in “Twitter Files” threads. The cherry-picked so-called evidence consists of screenshots from former Twitter executives, but if you bother to read such tiny print, the evidence implies the executives were desperately attempting to rationalize how to apply their own terms of service against an increasingly hostile President Donald Trump who was using social media to claim he won an election he lost.

Perhaps Musk can take heart in the fact that Haugen also struggled to control the news: At one point, the Facebook document release suffered from a botched embargo that perhaps lessened the overall impact on public opinion. After the Wall Street Journal published its multi-part series called the “Facebook Files,” there was a secondary rollout known as the “Facebook Papers” produced by major media outlets as diverse as CNN, Le Monde, NBC News, Fox Business and POLITICO who were served drips of data daily. This frustrated reporters who had a difficult time piecing together stories because they did not know what else might be coming. T

hese selected news organizations were supposed to cooperate on the enormous trove, but after the New York Times fired off a big story featuring the leaks from Facebook on a Friday evening, the other outlets that had been waiting for the Monday morning embargo published in quick succession. This created a feverish cascade of stories about Facebook’s negligence but may have confused the public, who was largely over it by the next week. To this end, I have been working alongside Latanya Sweeney at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on FBArchive, a project to catalog these materials and publish them in the public interest.

As an internet researcher, it is my job to monitor, measure and analyze trends in technology. I listened to several Twitter Spaces involving Musk and he is reveling in the attention from conservative media, even as he is chagrined at the lack of mainstream media uptake.

If the “Facebook Files” were about the public interest, the “Twitter Files” are all about public relations. Like the brand management of Tesla, Musk is building a sycophantic legion of true believers bent on believing the platform can influence elections and change the culture (which all could very well be true in a limited way).

As we watch leading journalists and researchers, like Jelani Cobb of the New Yorker and Kate Starbird of the University of Washington, leave the platform, I can’t help but think that everyday Musk is in charge, Twitter is being drained of the very thing that made it influential and informative in the first place. That exodus may be the one thing the “Twitter Files” are accomplishing.

Joan Donovan is the Research Director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center and Co-author of Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.

New York Times, Musk Faces Growing Anger Over Twitter Ban of Journalists, Bernhard Warner, Dec. 16, 2022. The suspensions, which were criticized by U.S. and European lawmakers, could raise the regulatory heat on the platform — and Elon Musk’s other companies.

Elon Musk faced a growing backlash on Friday from lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, with threats of fines and sanctions, after Twitter suspended the accounts of at least eight journalists on Thursday without warning.

The suspended accounts included those belonging to Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post. It was unclear what the suspensions had in common.

The silencing of prominent voices could raise the regulatory heat on Twitter, and possibly Mr. Musk’s other companies, including Tesla and SpaceX, which is a big recipient of government funding and projects. It could also hurt his push to get reluctant advertisers back onto the platform.

The action set off a wave of protests. News organizations, including The Times and CNN, have demanded that Mr. Musk explain his rationale. Supporters of the journalists argued on Twitter that the move was overly punitive.

Lawmakers in the European Union may go on the offensive. Vera Jourova, a vice president of the European Commission, said the move violated the E.U.’s Digital Services Act and its Media Freedom Act.

“There are red lines. And sanctions, soon,” she tweeted Friday morning.

The recently ratified Digital Services Act serves as a kind of rule book on moderating content for firms operating in the bloc. It goes into effect next year, and carries a fine of 6 percent of global revenue for companies that run afoul of the rules.

Representative Lori Trahan, Democrat of Massachusetts and a member of the House committee on electronic communications and the internet, also expressed dismay over Twitter’s move. She tweeted on Thursday that she had received assurances this week from the company that it had no intention of retaliating against journalists or independent researchers who cover Mr. Musk and Twitter critically.

“Less than 12 hours later, multiple technology reporters have been suspended. What’s the deal, @elonmusk?” she wrote.

The moves came a day after Twitter suspended more than two dozen other accounts, including an account belonging to Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college student behind @elonjet, which tracked the movements of Mr. Musk’s private plane. Each of the suspended journalists had written about the plane-tracking account or tweeted about it.

New York Times, How Silicon Valley Bosses See Elon Musk, Kevin Roose, Dec. 16, 2022. The Twitter owner’s ruthless, unsparing style has made him a hero to many tech executives, Kevin Roose writes.

It may seem obvious, to most people outside Silicon Valley, that Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter has been an unmitigated disaster.

In less than two months since taking over, Mr. Musk has fired more than half of Twitter’s staff, scared away many of its major advertisers, made (and unmade) a series of ill-advised changes to its verification program, angered regulators and politicians with erratic and offensive tweets, declared a short-lived war on Apple, greenlit a bizarre “Twitter Files” exposé, stopped paying rent on Twitter’s offices, and falsely accused the company’s former head of trust and safety of supporting pedophilia. His personal fortune has shrunk by billions of dollars, and he was booed at a Dave Chappelle show.

It’s not, by almost any measure, going well for him. And yet, one group is still firmly in Mr. Musk’s corner: Bosses.

In recent weeks, many tech executives, founders and investors have expressed their admiration for Mr. Musk, even as the billionaire has flailed at Twitter. Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, praised Mr. Musk at a New York Times DealBook conference late last month, calling him “the bravest, most creative person on the planet.”

Gavin Baker, a private equity investor, recently claimed that a lot of venture-funded chief executives were “inspired by Elon.”

And several partners at Andreessen Horowitz, the influential venture capital firm, have tweeted similar encomia to Mr. Musk’s management style.

New York Times, Elon Musk Sells Another $3.6 Billion Worth of Tesla Stock, Michael J. de la Merced and Peter Eavis, Dec. 16, 2022 (print ed.). Twitter’s owner has now sold $23 billion worth of Tesla stock this year, much of it after he pledged in April to stop selling shares to finance his deal to acquire the social media company.

If Tesla shareholders were already worried that Elon Musk was too distracted by his new chief executive position at Twitter, they now have more reason to be upset: Mr. Musk disclosed on Wednesday that he had sold another $3.6 billion worth of Tesla stock, possibly to prop up his embattled social network.

Mr. Musk has now sold $23 billion worth of Tesla stock this year, much of it after he pledged in April to stop selling shares to finance his Twitter deal.

He hinted at what he was up to on Tuesday, saying on Twitter, “Beware of debt in turbulent macroeconomic conditions, especially when Fed keeps raising rates.” That suggests he either plans to buy back some of Twitter’s billions in debt — including the $13 billion it took on as part of his takeover — or, perhaps less likely, buy back some of the company’s shares.

None of this will reassure Tesla shareholders, who are fretting over the roughly 61 percent drop in the carmaker’s stock price from its peak in late 2021 — and a chief executive who has admitted to spending nearly all of his time at Twitter nowadays. On Wednesday, Leo KoGuan, one of Tesla’s biggest individual investors, said on Twitter, “Tesla needs and deserves to have working full-time C.E.O.”

The slump in Tesla’s stock is a sharp break from the days when its ascent lit up the stock market and gave the company a market value of well over $1 trillion. This year, the stock has not only lagged the wider market but also more established automakers that are competing more aggressively with Tesla in the fast-growing electric vehicle business. Some investors and analysts are concerned that the competitive challenges Tesla faces are coming at a time when Mr. Musk appears to not only be distracted but also possibly selling Tesla shares to shore up his purchase of Twitter.

Tesla stock closed up 0.6 percent, to $157.67, on Thursday after falling for three straight days. Adjusting for a stock split, the shares briefly traded at more than $400 in late 2021.

“The Twitter nightmare continues as Musk uses Tesla as his own A.T.M. machine to keep funding the red ink at Twitter,” Dan Ives, a stock analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a note to clients on Thursday. Some investors are also worried that Mr. Musk’s divisive and incendiary statements on Twitter could be damaging Tesla’s brand and putting off customers, especially people who are buying electric cars to reduce the emissions responsible for climate change.

Dec. 15

The Free Press, Commentary: Our Reporting at Twitter, Bari Weiss, right, Dec. 15, 2022. If the story of Twitter's former overlords is about their prejudices and power trips, the question now is what Elon Musk will do with the powerful tools they created.

At dinner time on December 2 , I received a text from Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, founder of SpaceX, founder of the Boring Company, founder of Neuralink, on most days the richest man in the world (possibly history), and, as of October, the owner of Twitter. 

Was I interested in looking at Twitter’s archives, he asked. And how soon could I get to Twitter HQ?

Two hours later, I was on a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco with my wife, Free Press writer Nellie Bowles, and our three-month-old baby.

In the days that followed, we—the journalist Matt Taibbi; investigative reporters connected to The Free Press, including Abigail Shrier, Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse; plus Free Press reporters Suzy Weiss, Peter Savodnik, Olivia Reingold, and Isaac Grafstein—camped out in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room at Twitter headquarters and began looking through the company’s vast archive of internal communications. 

The only condition Musk imposed was that we first publish our findings on Twitter itself. (We did. Today, on The Free Press, we are publishing versions of those stories that aren’t limited to 280-character chunks.)

Twitter was founded in 2006. It is impossible to calculate how many emails and internal Slack messages and reports it has generated over the years. Looking for information about big subjects relevant to the public—the question of whether Covid-19 started with a leak from a laboratory in Wuhan, say, and how the platform suppressed or shaped the conversation around it—is like trying to put together a 100,000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

We also had to work through lawyers using e-discovery tools—software designed for lawyers to help them search huge amounts of information. So we entered search terms—mostly dates and names of former Twitter executives—and, over many hours, files would pop up. We then stitched together a chronology of events and communications. 

We did not selectively retrieve, or cherry-pick, files with an eye toward servicing a particular agenda. Our goal was simply to figure out what had happened at crucial moments in the history of the country and the company.

As for Musk’s aim? 

What was his goal in asking us to exhume the so-called Twitter Files? And why did the man obsessed with outer space decide to spend $44 billion on a social media platform that has made most of us feel more claustrophobic? 

Those are much harder questions.

To hear Musk tell it, his motivation is obvious: It’s about saving the world.

“I’m not going to spend $44 billion to reinstate a satire blog,” Musk said about the Babylon Bee, which had been banned from Twitter in March 2022. “I did it because I was worried about the future of civilization,” he told us late one night. 

As far as Musk sees things, “birth rates are plummeting, the thought police are gaining power, and even having an opinion is enough to be shunned. We are trending in a bad direction.”

He says he wants to transform Twitter from a social media platform distrusted and despised by at least half the country into one widely trusted by most Americans. To have it fulfill its highest mission: that of a digital town square where all ideas can be heard, and the best will win out. 

“If there is one information source that breaks ranks, then I think it ultimately forces others not to have the same narrative,” he said. “If even one organization competes hard for the truth, others will have to follow.” 

To win back that trust, Musk figured it would require being honest about what had, until very recently, been going on at the company he had just bought: the suppression of disfavored users; the curtailing of certain political views; the censorship of stories like the Hunter Biden laptop; and the extent to which the government had tried to influence such decisions.

The Independent, Twitter suspends liberal journalist Aaron Rupar and CNN, NYT and Washington Post reporters, Graeme Massie, Dec. 15, 2022. Billionaire’s social media platform also suspended Donie O’Sullivan, Drew Harwell, Keith Olberman and Ryan Mac.

Twitter has suspended the account of prominent liberal journalist Aaron Rupar as well as reporters from CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Rupar, who has more than 788,000 followers, had his account suspended the day after Twitter suspended then restored an account that followed the movements of the billionaire’s private jet.

“I never posted anything Elon Jet related or that could violate the policy about disclosing locations. Unless the policy is that you criticize Elon and you get banned,” Rupar told CNN’s Oliver Darcy.

And it came on the same day that Twitter suspended the account of social media rival platform Mastodon.

Also suspended are Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post and Ryan Mac of The New York Times, all of whom have covered Mr Musk in recent months. Veteran journalist Keith Olberman was also suspended.

“Elon says he is a free speech champion and he is banning journalists for exercising free speech,” Harwell told Darcy. “I think that calls into question his commitment.”

Rupar’s suspension came a day after he published a Substack article written by Noah Berlatsky criticising Mr Musk, with the headline ‘Elon Musk’s Reactionary Populism.’

“It’s all about punching down at the already marginalized,” the article stated.

Rupar was an Associate Editor at Vox Media until 2021, and has been covering national politics as an independent journalist ever since. He regularly covers right-wing politicians such as Donald Trump, as well as Fox News and hosts such as Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.

On Twitter critics of the suspensions questioned Mr Musk’s repeated assertion that he believed in free speech.

Journalist Judd Legum wrote: “I volunteer to write the next chapter of THE TWITTER FILES on how the decision was made to deactivate the accounts of a bunch of journalists that reported on Musk Just send me all the internal communications. My email is in my bio.”

 

Washington Post, Musk bans Twitter account tracking his jet, threatens to sue creator, Drew Harwell and Faiz Siddiqui, Dec. 15, 2022 (print ed.). Twitter suspended, restored and then suspended again the 20-year-old college student’s account that for years had shared publicly available data on Musk’s private flights.

Jack Sweeney, a sophomore at the University of Central Florida, was a big fan of the billionaire industrialist Elon Musk, shown aboved in a file photo. In 2020, Sweeney launched a Twitter account, @ElonJet, that used public air-travel data to map the flights of Musk’s private jet, thinking it’d be cool to track how Musk managed his business empire.

But when Sweeney woke up Wednesday morning, he was stunned to see that the 530,000-follower account on Twitter, the social media platform Musk bought in October, had been “permanently suspended” without explanation. A notice on Sweeney’s Twitter account said only that the company had, “after careful review … determined your account broke the Twitter rules,” without saying which rules it broke.

On Wednesday evening, the account was briefly restored, with Twitter outlining new rules seemingly designed to prevent Sweeney from posting the real-time locations of planes used by Musk and other public figures as long as he included a slight delay. Sweeney, over Twitter, asked Musk how long he’d have to delay the data to comply.

Washington Post, QAnon, adrift after Trump’s defeat, finds new life in Elon Musk’s Twitter, Drew Harwell, Dec. 15, 2022 (print ed.). Among some QAnon devotees, Musk has become a figure of prophecy on par with Donald Trump.

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.

The billionaire has spread bogus theories about the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to his 120 million followers, and he called for the criminal prosecution of infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci. He has thrown around baseless accusations about adults sexualizing children, helping stir up an angry online mob against Yoel Roth, a former Twitter safety executive Musk praised in October for his “high integrity.”

And on Tuesday, he tweeted a message with an emoji that many people interpreted as saying “follow the white rabbit,” possibly harking back to “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Matrix.” But many QAnon believers saw the rabbit as a wink to one of their foundational icons, a secret indicator shared in one of QAnon’s earliest online prophesies, known as “drops.”

Musk mocked the suggestion that the tweet could be interpreted negatively but offered no clarification. Among QAnon promoters, though, the message was clear: Musk was speaking to them.

One QAnon-amplifying account on Telegram with 118,000 followers, known for spreading a bogus claim that Russian fighters were targeting “U.S. biolabs” in Ukraine, said the tweet was only his latest flirtation with QAnon ideology.

“Elon called out Fauci for creating [covid-19], [is] calling out the woke hive mind, is paving the path for 2020 to be nullified and Trump reinstated … and now he’s directly quoting Q,” the account said. “Elon is an Anon,” the account added, using the term QAnon disciples call themselves.

Twitter owner Elon Musk’s boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.

The billionaire has spread bogus theories about the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband to his 120 million followers, and he called for the criminal prosecution of infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci. He has thrown around baseless accusations about adults sexualizing children, helping stir up an angry online mob against Yoel Roth, a former Twitter safety executive Musk praised in October for his “high integrity.”

And on Tuesday, he tweeted a message with an emoji that many people interpreted as saying “follow the white rabbit,” possibly harking back to “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Matrix.” But many QAnon believers saw the rabbit as a wink to one of their foundational icons, a secret indicator shared in one of QAnon’s earliest online prophesies, known as “drops.”

Musk mocked the suggestion that the tweet could be interpreted negatively but offered no clarification. Among QAnon promoters, though, the message was clear: Musk was speaking to them.

One QAnon-amplifying account on Telegram with 118,000 followers, known for spreading a bogus claim that Russian fighters were targeting “U.S. biolabs” in Ukraine, said the tweet was only his latest flirtation with QAnon ideology.

“Elon called out Fauci for creating [covid-19], [is] calling out the woke hive mind, is paving the path for 2020 to be nullified and Trump reinstated … and now he’s directly quoting Q,” the account said. “Elon is an Anon,” the account added, using the term QAnon disciples call themselves.

Logan Strain, a conspiracy theory researcher who uses the name Travis View on the podcast “QAnon Anonymous,” said Musk’s “conspiracist dog whistles” have galvanized a group that was fractured after 2020, when major social networks including Twitter started banning QAnon accounts and Trump lost the White House.

Dec. 14

New York Times, A Growing Network of Conservative Groups Is Fueling a Surge in Book Bans, Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, Dec. 13, 2022 (print ed.). Some groups are new, some are longstanding. Some are local, others national. Over the past two years, they have become vastly more organized, well funded, effective — and criticized.

The Keller Independent School District, just outside of Dallas, passed a new rule in November: It banned books from its libraries that include the concept of gender fluidity.

The change was pushed by three new school board members, elected in May with support from Patriot Mobile, a self-described Christian cellphone carrier. Through its political action committee, Patriot Mobile poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Texas school board races to promote candidates with conservative views on race, gender and sexuality — including on which books children can access at school.

Traditionally, debates over what books are appropriate for school libraries have taken place between a concerned parent and a librarian or administrator, and resulted in a single title or a few books being re-evaluated, and either removed or returned to shelves.

But recently, the issue has been supercharged by a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups. The organizations frequently describe themselves as defending parental rights. Some are new and others are longstanding, but with a recent focus on books. Some work at the district and state level, others have national reach. And over the past two years or so, they have grown vastly more organized, interconnected, well funded — and effective.

Washington Post, Twitter abruptly dissolves its Trust and Safety Council, Cat Zakrzewski, Joseph Menn and Naomi Nix, Dec. 14, 2022 (print ed.). Meanwhile, a former top Twitter official fled his home amid attacks following Musk tweets.

Twitter on Monday night abruptly dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, the latest sign that Elon Musk is unraveling years of work and institutions created to make the social network safer and more civil.
Tech is not your friend. We are. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter.

Members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council received an email with the subject line, “Thank You,” that informed them the council was no longer “the best structure” to bring “external insights into our product and policy development work.”

The email dissolution arrived less than an hour before members of the council were expecting to meet with Twitter executives via Zoom to discuss recent developments, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans.

Dozens of civil rights leaders, academics and advocates from around the world had volunteered their time for years to help improve safety on the platform.

“We are grateful for your engagement, advice and collaboration in recent years and wish you every success in the future,” said the email, which was simply signed “Twitter.”

In less than two months, Musk has undone years of investments in trust and safety at Twitter — dismissing key parts of the workforce and bringing back accounts that previously had been suspended. As the body unravels, Musk is tightening his grip on decisions about the future of content moderation at Twitter, with less input from outside experts.

The move is just throwing away “years of institutional memory that we on the council have brought” to the company, said one council member who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to concerns about harassment on the platform. “Getting external experts and advocates looking at your services makes you smarter.”

The Trust and Safety Council unraveled after Musk himself had pitched the creation of a content moderation council that would have weighed in on key content moderation decisions, but later appeared to change his mind about introducing such a body.

Many members were already on the verge of resigning, said Larry Magid, chief executive of ConnectSafely, a Silicon Valley nonprofit that advises consumers about children’s internet use.

“By disbanding it, we got fired instead of quit,” he said. “Elon doesn’t want criticism, and he really doesn’t want the kind of advice he would very likely get from a safety advisory council, which would likely tell him to rehire some of the staff he got rid of, and reinstate some of the rules he got rid of, and turn the company in another direction from where he is turning it.”

Washington Post, Analysis: How Biden’s FCC nominee became a major campaign target, Cristiano Lima and Aaron Schaffer, Dec. 14, 2022 (print ed.). Nearly two years into President Biden’s term, he and Senate Democrats have yet to lock down a majority at the Federal Communications Commission amid a protracted fight over his pick for the agency, Gigi Sohn. Progressive groups and consumer advocates have lamented the delay as hamstringing efforts to restore open internet protections and expand broadband access.

Sohn’s nomination has faced steadfast opposition from Senate Republicans, who have pointed to her past advocacy work and public remarks on topics including Fox News in casting the former Democratic FCC staffer as a “partisan” and “radical” activist. 

That push to tank Sohn’s nomination has been bolstered by conservative groups taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in attack ads, according to a review by The Technology 202.

The moves highlight how the battle over the FCC nomination, which typically draws limited fanfare, grew into a significant campaign flash point.

In the past year, two conservative nonprofits — the American Accountability Foundation (AAF) and the Center for a Free Economy (CFE) — have placed at least $246,000 in Facebook ads opposing Sohn, according to a review of digital ads archives. Facebook does not disclose the exact amount paid or reach garnered for ads on the site, but its database shows that the two groups’ paid messages have been shown to users at least 14.8 million times.

The bulk of the spending has come from AAF, an opposition research group that has targeted dozens of Biden’s nominees. The ads, some of which were still running as of last week, hammer Sohn over what they call her “extremist defund the police politics” and cite opposition to her nomination from the Fraternal Order of Police, a group made up of law enforcement officials.

The ads appear to reference a memo released by the law enforcement group surfacing tweets that Sohn “liked” pushing back on “‘Defund’ … attacks” and calling on lawmakers to pass progressive agenda items including to “Defund police surveillance.” 

AAF and CFE did not return requests for comment. Sohn declined to comment. 

Jeff Hauser, founder of the progressive watchdog group Revolving Door Project, said the spending makes the campaign among the most sprawling of any targeting a Biden pick.

“It’s relatively rare that you see this kind of effort,” said Hauser, whose group tracks federal appointments and the battles over their confirmations. 

Hauser said it’s rare for a single commissioner or regulator to face this level of opposition, and he said the Facebook campaigns are likely just a fraction of the total money spent given that there are “many forms of spending which do not create a financial trail.”

Hauser pushed back on the criticisms leveled against Sohn in the ads, particularly those based off her past liked tweets related to policing. “No one can meaningfully determine what her views are on policing from a liked tweet,” he said.

 One AAF ad running through last Friday warned that “some senators may sneak her into office in the lame-duck session before the end of the year” and urged Biden to pick “a new nominee.” 

The message arrives during a key stretch: Senate Democrats face a dwindling window to confirm Sohn before their session expires after the end of the year, and will need to overcome additional procedural hurdles next year if they do not. 

A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who controls floor votes, did not return requests for comment on whether he intends to take up Sohn’s nomination before the end of the year. The White House did not return a request for comment.

Sohn’s nomination also has been opposed by the One Country Project, a group founded by former Democratic senators Heidi Heitkamp and Joe Donnelly, which in April announced “a six-figure ad campaign” arguing that Sohn “is the wrong choice for the FCC and rural America.” 

The group, which did not return a request for comment, said the ads would run in key states whose senators could be crucial to Sohn’s still-pending nomination, including West Virginia, Nevada and Arizona.

 

 

Goyim Defense League leader Jon Minadeo, Jr. announced Goyim TV's move to Florida in a livestream on Dec. 12, 2022.

J Weekly (Jewish News from Northern California), Goyim TV, America’s most prolific antisemitic propaganda group, has left the Bay Area for Florida, Gabe Stutman, Dec. 14, 2022. The functional headquarters and nerve center of the nation’s most prolific antisemitic propaganda group have moved from the Bay Area to Florida.

Jon Minadeo Jr., the leader of Goyim TV, announced the move in videos and social media posts this week, explaining that he had grown increasingly isolated in his hometown of Petaluma, and saw Florida as fertile ground for the hate group’s activities. The announcement came in a highly dramatic, Hollywood-style movie trailer replete with drone shots of the Florida coast, alligators and flamingoes. “My time in this state is over,” Minadeo says in voiceover.

A loose network of antisemites, white supremacists and virulently anti-gay activists, Goyim TV — which is both a website and the name of Minadeo’s business registered in California — focuses its efforts on spreading anti-Jewish propaganda. Its followers have claimed responsibility for hundreds of antisemitic flyer drops in more than 40 states over the past two years.

In the Bay Area, flyer drops blaming Jews for the Covid pandemic, for the war in Ukraine and for “gun control” have hit San Francisco, Danville, Berkeley, Marin City, Tiburon, and Novato, among other cities.

The most widely viewed videos on Goyim TV are hosted by Minadeo, who works alongside a cadre of die-hard supporters known as the Goyim Defense League to help keep the website running, evade takedowns and orchestrate propaganda events “IRL,” or “in real life.” The terms “Goyim TV” and the “Goyim Defense League” are often used interchangeably by watchers of the hate group’s activities.

In 2022, the group “more than tripled” the number of propaganda acts targeting Jews, according to ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, “making them feel vulnerable all over the United States.”

“GDL’s overarching goal is to cast aspersions on Jews and spread antisemitic myths and conspiracy theories,” an Anti-Defamation League report says.

The group has gained widespread publicity in part because of several banner drops; one such stunt troubled many in Los Angeles in October. Seeking to capitalize on the mainstreaming of antisemitism from celebrities such as the rapper Ye, Goyim TV hung a banner over the 405 freeway claiming “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

Minadeo, who grew up in Northern California and attended Novato High School, had for years recorded near-daily livestreams in a makeshift studio at his home in Petaluma. In the livestreams, which have continued from Florida and are viewed in real time by hundreds of people who simultaneously donate money, Minadeo rails against Jews, Black people, Latinos and LGBTQ people, spouting a litany of slurs, Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories.

He sells and ships packets of 500 flyers, encouraging his viewers to pass out as many as possible, usually in the middle of the night. Minadeo praises those who drop the flyers, calling them “paper goys,” and rewards anyone who earns coverage on TV news broadcasts with free merchandise, including antisemitic T-shirts and bars of soap that say “wash the Jew away.”

Despite his close family ties and following in Northern California, Minadeo had increasingly felt besieged by negative press and by criticism of his behavior by authorities. Minadeo’s family owns the historic Valley Ford restaurant Dinucci’s Italian Dinners, a popular road stop en route to the Sonoma Coast, and a source close to Minadeo said the 39-year-old once worked as a waiter at the restaurant, one of his last real jobs.

Yet he had developed a dismal reputation in the North Bay after a flood of media attention on his provocative antisemitic propaganda operation in J., the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and other outlets.

And he had made enemies. Over a year ago his house was vandalized, he said, and later someone “threatened to burn down my house.” Minadeo said he never felt the authorities took his complaints seriously.

“Jews are getting to intimidate me, vandalize my house, slander me, assault me, and the police do absolutely nothing,” he said.

North Bay police have called out the flyer campaigns as “hate incidents,” which Minadeo said has damaged his reputation.

“You’re essentially putting a green light on my head with the community, to say that I’m some bad person because I’m talking truth about Jews,” he said.

Though Minadeo says he does not support violence, his content is rife with violent imagery and messages. One digital background that appears frequently on his livestream is a photo of the train tracks leading to Auschwitz. Much of the casual language used in the Goyim TV online universe is extremely violent; when Minadeo wants to point out something he doesn’t like, for example, he instructs his followers to “gas” it, or kill it, using a reference to the Holocaust.

He also encourages his followers to harass journalists and activists who cover or speak out against his activities.

Minadeo hopes Florida will be more hospitable to him and his worldview, and he may have reason to believe that to be true. A recent report from the ADL described an upward trend of extremist and antisemitic activity in the Sunshine State, driven in part by new white supremacist groups including White Lives Matter, Sunshine State Nationalists, NatSoc Florida and Florida Nationalists.

Minadeo and Goyim TV have partnered with neo-Nazi elements in Florida on antisemitic stunts in the past, and the Goyim Defense League has been extremely active in the state. Last May, Minadeo and his followers held a “protest” outside a Holocaust memorial center in Maitland, an Orlando suburb, carrying bullhorns and holding up signs denying the Holocaust and saying “Jews promote homosexuality.” In October, he and others describing themselves as “laser Nazis” used a light projection to superimpose the message “Kanye is right about the Jews” on a football stadium in Jacksonville, as fans streamed out of a college rivalry game attended by 75,000 people.

Sam Bankman-Fried at the DealBook Summit in New York in November (New York Times photo by Hiroko Masuike).

New York Times, Critic’s Notebook: Hey Silicon Valley, It’s Time to Wear a Suit, Vanessa Friedman, Dec. 14, 2022 (print ed.). Sam Bankman-Fried’s choices may signal an end to the schlubby mystique.

The mythic figure that is the billionaire tech genius in the nowhere man tee may finally be about to meet its long overdue end. The arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency trading platform, on Monday in the Bahamas on charges of fraud, may signal not just the next stage in his downfall, but also a change in the global image-making of Silicon Valley.

After all, no one took the idea that a life of the boundless mind was reflected in a life freed from petty concerns like clothing further than Mr. Bankman-Fried (or SBF, as he is often called). Not for him the physical cage of a suit and tie. Instead, the T-shirt, cargo shorts and sneakers, often worn with white running socks scrunched down at the ankle.

And not just any T-shirt and cargo shorts, but what could seem like the baggiest, most stretched out, most slept in, most consciously unflattering T-shirts and shorts; the most unkempt bed-head. While the look may have evolved naturally, it became a signature as he rose to prominence, a look he realized was as effective at pushing the Pavlovian buttons of the watching public (and the investing community) as the Savile Row suits and Charvet ties of Wall Street.

“It’s as conscious as incorporating in the Bahamas where there is no to little regulatory oversight,” said Scott Galloway, an investor, podcasting host and professor of marketing, referring to the fact that FTX’s headquarters were in the Caribbean rather than California. “It’s the ultimate billionaire white boy tech flex: I’m so above convention. I’m so special I am not subject to the same rules and propriety as everyone else.”

• New York Times, How Sam Bankman-Fried Put Effective Altruism on the Defensive, Dec. 13, 2022.

 

Nancy Pelosi and Alexandra Pelosi are seen in “Pelosi In The House,” Alexandra's latest documentary film for HBO. (HBO)

Washington Post, Nancy Pelosi is notoriously private, but her daughter filmed her for years, Ellen McCarthy, Dec. 14, 2022 (print ed.). Alexandra Pelosi’s HBO documentary ‘Pelosi in the House’ captures rare behind-the-scenes footage of her mom.

Alexandra Pelosi gets a call from her mother every day.

By 11 a.m. one day the week before she was set to release a documentary about her mother, Nancy Pelosi, she’d already spoken to the first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives twice. Nancy Pelosi had called “at the break of dawn” to wish Alexandra’s teenage son a happy birthday. And when Alexandra’s Christmas tree toppled over a couple hours later, as she was preparing her New York City apartment for a celebration, she phoned her mom to vent.

But for all their closeness, despite what Alexandra describes as their “glorious, beautiful relationship as mother and daughter,” the filmmaker failed to brief her mom on one little detail: that she was, uh, making this movie about her. “Pelosi in the House” premieres Tuesday on HBO.

The House speaker wasn’t the only one who didn’t get a heads-up about the film. Pelosi accompanied her mother to the state dinner at the White House two weeks ago and ran into Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.). In footage of Alexandra’s that was shown publicly earlier this fall by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Schumer is seen working the phones (in Schumer’s case, an old-school flip phone) alongside Nancy Pelosi as they tried to get a handle on the chaos from a secure location. “I was like, ‘Oh, sorry about the whole January 6th thing.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I didn’t know you were filming,’” Alexandra told The Washington Post in an interview.

Dec. 13

Rolling Stone, Russian Trolls Made Fake Kid Rock Fan Accounts — and Fooled Donald Trump Jr., Dec. 13, 2022. The former president’s son reposted a conspiracy theory on Ivermectin and oil supplies from “KidRockOfficial.” The account was a Russian troll trying to meddle in the U.S. election.

Russian trolls are taking advantage of the free-for-all on far-right social media apps to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda — and they were particularly successful when impersonating fans of MAGA musician Kid Rock.

Those conclusions are from a new report by the social media tracking firm Graphika and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. The researchers traced at least 35 accounts on the right-wing social apps to the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC), a phony news organization linked to Russia’s troll factory. The fake accounts focused on ginning up support for failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, attacking Democratic Senate candidates, and pushing bizarre conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, among other topics.

Researchers found Russian-linked fake accounts posing as authentic American conservatives cross-posting content to personas on Truth Social, Gab, and Gettr. While right-wing social platforms like Gab and Parler have previously played host to Russian influence operations, the report marks the first documented case of Russian meddling on Truth Social, the social media app founded by Trump.

The former president’s son reposted a conspiracy theory on Ivermectin and oil supplies from “KidRockOfficial.” The account was a Russian troll trying to meddle in the U.S. election

Russian trolls are taking advantage of the free-for-all on far-right social media apps to spread pro-Kremlin propaganda — and they were particularly successful when impersonating fans of MAGA musician Kid Rock.

Those conclusions are from a new report by the social media tracking firm Graphika and Stanford University’s Internet Observatory. The researchers traced at least 35 accounts on the right-wing social apps to the Newsroom for American and European Based Citizens (NAEBC), a phony news organization linked to Russia’s troll factory. The fake accounts focused on ginning up support for failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, attacking Democratic Senate candidates, and pushing bizarre conspiracy theories about Ukraine and the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, among other topics.

Researchers found Russian-linked fake accounts posing as authentic American conservatives cross-posting content to personas on Truth Social, Gab, and Gettr. While right-wing social platforms like Gab and Parler have previously played host to Russian influence operations, the report marks the first documented case of Russian meddling on Truth Social, the social media app founded by Trump.

The 35 trolls amassed an audience of approximately 33,000 unique followers spread across Gab, Gettr, and Truth Social. The network’s memes and talking points mostly failed to recapture the large audiences they enjoyed during the 2016 presidential election, but a few — particularly those impersonating Kid Rock, a favorite target of Russian trolls — outperformed their troll persona colleagues. 

One of the trolls, KidRockOfficial, created a fake Kid Rock fan account that even scored a repost from Donald Trump Jr., when the former president’s son (a friend of the real Kid Rock) shared it with his more than 6 million Instagram followers. After screenshotting the troll’s post — a memed conspiracy theory about gas prices and the bogus Covid cure Ivermectin originally posted to Gettr — and putting it on Instagram, Trump Jr. commented simply “Yup.”

Researchers linked the bogus “official” fan account on Gettr to Russia’s troll factory when they discovered an identical account on Gab — first identified by the FBI as run by Russia’s Internet Research Agency in 2020 — had resurfaced under the same handle to post the same content as its Gettr twin. 

Washington Post, Opinion: Musk’s ugly attack on Fauci shows how right-wing info warfare works, Greg Sargent, right, Dec. 13, 2022. By now it should be obvious that for large swaths of the right-wing media ecosystem, the Triggering of the Libs has become an end in itself. In the brutal competition of the so-called attention economy, provoking large-scale outrage and loathing is not an incidental feature of making controversial arguments. It has become a key marker of success.

Over the weekend, Elon Musk called for the prosecution of Anthony S. Fauci, the leading infectious-disease expert in the Biden administration. “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” Musk tweeted, mocking transgender people for good measure. Musk then endorsed a complicated right-wing conspiracy theory about Fauci’s role in the covid-19 pandemic.

Democrats and other Musk critics reacted with an explosion of outrage. One Democratic senator pleaded with Musk to “leave a good man alone.” Another member of Congress seethed: “Shame on you.” Former CIA director John Brennan scolded Musk: “You have no class.”

All these responses — which also noted that Fauci admirably tried to serve the country during a major crisis and under great pressure — are reasonable. But outrage and shaming also seem fundamentally out of touch with basic realities of how right-wing information warfare really works.

This sort of info-warring, at bottom, is what characterizes Musk’s transformation into the world’s richest right-wing troll. Tons of pixels have been wasted on efforts to pin down Musk’s true beliefs, but whatever they are, we can say right now that he’s consciously exploiting fundamental features of the right-wing information ecosystem. His critics should adapt accordingly.

In his attack, Musk flatly validated a big right-wing obsession: The idea that Fauci was involved in U.S. government funding of controversial early research into covid, and lied to Congress about it. As The Post’s Glenn Kessler demonstrated, this is a highly complex dispute, but there are zero grounds for concluding anything remotely like that happened. Musk’s claim is at best profoundly irresponsible and at worst straight-up disinformation.

It’s understandable that Musk’s critics are trying shaming and outrage, in that this could further drive advertisers away from Twitter. But, paradoxically, it might also help Musk. The DealBook newsletter suggests that he’s trying to boost “conservative engagement” and “help Twitter’s business” by “winning over right-leaning users and conservative politicians.”

If so, the coin of the realm is the Triggering. A massive backlash from liberals and Democrats creates the impression of controversy, which draws news media attention. It also persuades the right-leaning constituencies Musk hopes to engage that he is “drawing blood.”

In much of the right-wing info-ecosystem, liberal outrage is a sign of an attack’s effectiveness. It can be only confirmation that the Libs Were Owned. Shaming is useless in such an environment, and in some ways can backfire.

New York Times, Bookforum Is Closing, Leaving Ever Fewer Publications Devoted to Books, Kate Dwyer and Elizabeth A. Harris, Dec. 13, 2022 (print ed.). Launched in 1994, the magazine published reviews, essays and interviews, and was an important outlet for book reviewers and for authors.

The literary magazine Bookforum announced on Monday that its current issue would be its last, dealing a significant blow to literary journalism, which has been vastly diminished in recent years.

“We are so proud of the contribution Bookforum has made to the literary community,” the magazine said on Twitter after announcing its closure, “and are immensely grateful to the advertisers, subscribers and booksellers who made our mission possible over the years.”

Bookforum was one of the few remaining publications devoted to books, running a mix of reviews, essays and interviews. Among the articles it published over the years were interviews with writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Marlon James, and essays on Philip Roth and George Saunders.

So called “little” magazines — independent and noncommercial journals, often with readership in the low four figures — are experiencing a renaissance, with the recent launching of many new publications such as The Drift and Forever Magazine. At the same time, national legacy journals funded by corporations are struggling to stay afloat in an era of consolidation.

Astra Magazine, an international magazine of literature published by Astra Publishing House, ceased publication earlier this year after two issues, while The Washington Post Magazine announced that its final issue will run at the end of December. (The Post’s books section, Book World, has recently made a comeback, however.)

Bookforum and its sister publication, Artforum, were acquired by Penske Media Corporation last week. Penske did not respond to questions about the decision to shutter Bookforum. David Velasco, the editor of Artforum, said that magazine would continue operations.

Bookforum’s website will continue to offer access to the archives for the near future, according to Kate Koza, who is the associate publisher at Artforum and Bookforum, and will stay on at Artforum.

Bookforum was an important outlet for freelance book reviewers, who could gain exposure there, and for authors as well, as one of the few remaining places they could hope to receive a thoughtful and lengthy review.

New York Times, Wall Street Journal Names Emma Tucker as New Editor, Katie Robertson, Edmund Lee and Benjamin Mullin, Dec. 13, 2022 (print ed.). News Corp said that Ms. Tucker, a longtime editor in London, would replace Matt Murray, who has led the news organization for four years.

The Wall Street Journal named a new top editor on Monday, saying it would hand control of the newsroom to Emma Tucker, a longtime editor for Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers in Britain. She replaces Matt Murray, who has led the paper for the past four years, occasionally clashing with the paper’s publisher.

The Journal said Mr. Murray would take on a new role, reporting to Robert Thomson, the chief executive of Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, The Journal’s parent company. Ms. Tucker starts on Feb. 1, with Mr. Murray assisting with the transition through the beginning of March.

“Matt is a superb journalist and leader who has overseen a peerless editorial team that fashioned success for The Journal during an era of extreme vulnerability for media companies and journalism,” Mr. Thomson said in a statement.

By selecting Ms. Tucker, Mr. Murdoch put in the top job an editor from outside the paper with close ties to his wider media empire. He has made a similar move multiple times since buying the paper more than a decade ago, the exception being Mr. Murray, who had spent decades at The Journal.

New York Times, Opinion: ‘White Lotus’ Didn’t Care About Toxic Masculinity After All, Michelle Goldberg, right, Dec. 13, 2022 (print ed.). Lurid tales of class war in paradise were a major cinematic trend in 2022.

In “Triangle of Sadness,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, the social hierarchy on a luxury cruise turns upside down after a shipwreck leaves plutocrats and model-influencers dependent on the survival skills of a Filipina toilet attendant. “The Menu” is a satirical horror movie about high-end foodie culture in which the celebrated chef of an exclusive restaurant on a private island takes his revenge on his clientele. “Glass Onion,” the sequel to the 2019 murder mystery “Knives Out,” also takes place on an island, this one in Greece, where a tech billionaire named Miles Bron, clearly based on Elon Musk, has gathered his motley group of amoral friends during the acute phase of the pandemic.

These movies, critical darlings all, whack you over the head with their politics. There’s an element of wish fulfillment in each of them; they seem intended for upper-middle-class people who both envy and resent the rich. The jokes are pitched toward a very online audience that is willing to laugh at its own privilege but that also probably wishes it had more of it.

It’s not surprising that professional influencers feature in two of these movies, and — here is the place to stop reading if you want to avoid spoilers — a guy who can’t stop photographing his food meets a terrible end in the third. The films give shape to the homicidal feelings social media elicits by bombarding us with images of the world’s luckiest people indulging themselves in stunning locales.

In some ways, the first season of the HBO series “The White Lotus,” the caustic, multi-award-winning comedy-drama set in a luxury resort on the coast of Maui, was a prototype for these movies. It skewered the monstrous entitlement of the self-regarding wealthy, like Shane, the old-money real-estate agent who melted down because he was given only the second-best suite. But, unlike recent eat-the-rich cinema, “The White Lotus” denied its audience the satisfaction of any sort of karmic payback. In the end of the first season, the staff suffered the most, while the careless guests walked away largely unscathed. The queasy political punch came from the reminder of power dynamics that should have been obvious all along.

• New York Times, Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences
• New York Times, Bookforum Is Closing, Leaving Ever Fewer Publications Devoted to Books

Dec. 12

Billionaires Behaving Badly?

• Politico, FTX founder Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas
• Washington Post, Elon Musk uses QAnon tactic in criticizing former Twitter safety chief
• Washington Post, Former Twitter official leaves home after threats spurred by Musk attacks
• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Musk and Thiel are highly deportable, Wayne Madsen
• Associated Press, Elon Musk takes the stage, amid boos, at Chappelle’s show
• Palmer Report: Analysis: Another Trump hotel falls under a cloud of controversy

Politico, FTX founder Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas, Sam Sutton, Dec. 12, 2022. FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested by authorities in the Bahamas, according to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams confirmed the arrest in a tweet from the Southern District’s official account.

“Earlier this evening, Bahamian authorities arrested Samuel Bankman-Fried at the request of the U.S. Government, based on a sealed indictment filed by the SDNY. We expect to move to unseal the indictment in the morning and will have more to say at that time,” Williams said.

A government spokesman in the Bahamas said in a statement that Bankman-Fried’s arrest “followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition.”

The spokesman added, “It was deemed appropriate for the Attorney General to seek SBF’s arrest and hold him in custody pursuant to our nation’s Extradition Act.”

 

Elon Musk released what he called the “Twitter Files” this month, delving into the company's decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story and limit other controversial messaging that Musk wants distributed. In this 2019 photo, Musk speaks during a gaming convention (Photo by Mike Blake for Reuters).

Washington Post, Elon Musk uses QAnon tactic in criticizing former Twitter safety chief, Joseph Menn, Dec. 12, 2022. Elon Musk escalated his battle of words with previous managers of Twitter into risky new territory over the weekend, allying himself with far-right crusaders against a purported epidemic of child sex abuse and implying that the company’s former head of trust and safety had a permissive view of sexual activity by minors.

Musk told more than 30,000 listeners in a live Twitter Spaces audio session Friday night that he recently discovered that child sex abuse material was a severe problem on Twitter and that fighting it would be his top priority.

In follow-up tweets Saturday, he misrepresented a section of a graduate dissertation from recently departed safety chief Yoel Roth. “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” he wrote.

The attached snippet instead showed Roth suggesting that since teenagers were accessing apps and websites that they were not supposed to use, as they always have, those services should consider offering toned-down content alongside adult fare.

Musk also commented on an old tweet in which Roth wrote, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?” Roth did not answer his own question, merely linking to an article about a Washington Supreme Court ruling that found a teacher in the state could be convicted of a crime for having sex with a student who was over the age of 18. The age of consent in Washington is 16, but a majority of the court ruled that Washington state lawmakers intended to criminalize teacher-student sexual contact for all students, even those over 18. Twenty-one is the age limit for high school in the state.

“This explains a lot,” Musk wrote to his more than 100 million followers. Roth’s two-year-old tweet about students then drew new replies calling for him to be jailed.

Several internet safety experts said that Musk’s comments put Roth at grave risk. Roth, who is openly gay, worked past Musk’s October takeover. He then resigned and said Musk’s hands-off approach to moderation was increasing danger to users.

“He’s putting Yoel’s life in danger and he knows it,” tweeted Alejandra Caraballo, an instructor at Harvard Law School. Roth did not respond to a request for comment.

In imputing nefarious motives to Twitter’s former managers and saying a crime had been committed, Musk adopted techniques used by the QAnon conspiracy movement, which falsely claims that Democrats and elites are running child sex abuse networks. Promoted by Alex Jones and other far-right operatives, claims of Democratic involvement in child abuse, QAnon’s precursor, inspired a shooting at Comet Pizza in Northwest Washington when a follower of the theory searched the restaurant intending to rescue any children trapped in a basement that did not exist. The incident became known as “Pizzagate.”

In the past year, right-wing activists have harnessed some of the fervor of that theory to tar drag queens, transgender people, gay teachers, and others as “groomers,” or adults bent on seducing children. This has fed into threats and real-world violence: A recent five-fatality shooting at a gay bar in Colorado with transgender victims is being charged as a hate crime.

Musk has accused critics of pedophilia in the past, most notably Vernon Unsworth, who helped rescue children from a Thailand cave and faulted Musk’s much-hyped contribution to the effort. Unsworth sued Musk for tweeting that he was a “pedo guy,” but lost the case after Musk testified that he only meant to insult Unsworth and did not mean to accuse him literally of pedophilia.

Musk’s weekend statements appeared intended to counter criticism of his early stewardship of Twitter. The number of moderators who are on the lookout for inappropriate content on the social media site has been slashed, and just a few experts on child exploitation remain, according to media reports.

Three members of Twitter’s long-standing Trust and Safety Council advisory board resigned last week, citing a rise in tweets with hate speech against Black Americans, gay men and Jews. Over the weekend, Musk fans accused the three of responsibility for child exploitation.

Twitter has invited the more than 50 remaining members of the council to a meeting with executives this week.

“I’m looking forward to hearing what they have to say, because like a lot of people I have concerns about the direction of the company,” said council member Larry Magid, who runs ConnectSafely.org, a nonprofit that offers advice to teens on using the internet safely.

Allegations that child porn could be found easily on Twitter arose even before Musk assumed control of the company, unnerving advertisers and hurting pre-Musk plans for the site to develop an adult feature to challenge the adult-themed OnlyFans website. Two former employees told The Washington Post they agreed that previous chief executives had not devoted enough resources to that issue. Twitter, unlike its social media rivals Facebook and Instagram, permits adult sexual content.

But experts more frequently cite other platforms as hunting grounds for child sex abuse victims. A report last year by Thorn, a nonprofit founded by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to combat child sexual abuse, said minors it surveyed reported more “potentially harmful online experiences” of all kinds on Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Messenger than on Twitter.

Musk and his allies have said that since Musk’s takeover, the company has suspended many more accounts for abusive material than it had before, but the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a congressionally chartered nonprofit, told The Post that it “has seen no noticeable changes on the reporting front compared to previous months.”

Musk’s criticism of Twitter’s allegedly inadequate child protection actions came as Twitter continued to release internal emails and chats that Musk and others claim show the company intentionally censored conservative voices and stories.

Washington Post, Former Twitter official leaves home after threats spurred by Musk attacks, Cat Zakrzewski, Dec. 12, 2022. Yoel Roth’s family and friends have had to delete their Twitter accounts after Musk adopted QAnon-style tactics Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, and his family have been forced from their home by a tide of harassment unleashed by Elon Musk’s tweets that misrepresented Roth’s academic writing about sexual activity and children.

The online mob also sent threats to people Roth had replied to on Twitter, forcing some of Roth’s family and friends to delete their Twitter accounts, according to a person familiar with Roth’s situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to concerns about Roth’s safety.

Musk’s followers also directed harassment at professors who reviewed the dissertation that Roth wrote in 2016, as well as at his graduate school, the University of Pennsylvania, the person said. The university did not respond to a request for comment.

As head of trust and safety at Twitter, Roth was involved in many of the platform’s decisions about what posts to remove and what accounts to suspend. His communications with other Twitter officials have been posted in recent days as part of what Musk calls the Twitter Files, a series of tweets by conservative journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Palmer Report: Analysis: Another Trump hotel falls under a cloud of controversy, Ron Leshnower, Dec. 11, 2022. In an opinion piece published in the Chicago Tribune on June 19, 2014, Donald Trump vehemently defended the use of a huge sign bearing his name on the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago. He argued against critics who believed such a sign was architecturally and aesthetically offensive, claiming “my name is known and respected worldwide” and “brings a prominence to Chicago by mere fact of recognition.”

There is no question that Trump’s name is known worldwide, but Trump excels in offering new reasons for his name to become even less respected with each passing day. It has reached a point where now, eight years later, the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board is demanding that it’s time “to take a jackhammer” to the vain eyesore that persists as a monument to hate, fascism, and corruption.

The Tribune’s new editorial on Thursday offers a quick history lesson of how Trump’s sign came to be, which is a tale replete with strategic political contributions and shady dealings. The Tribune then acknowledges its own recent support for Trump’s sign. Just last year, the newspaper came out against a proposed ordinance that would ban anyone “convicted of treason, sedition or subversive actions from doing business with the city, including having a sign permit.”

In doing so, the Tribune declared in 2021: “It’s Trump’s building, and he should have the prerogative of stamping his name on it.” Concerned about “anti-Trump fever” that could lead the city to attract a lawsuit alleging violations of private property rights, the Tribune insisted at the time that city officials “would be wise to swallow their distaste and leave the sign alone.”

However, two very recent developments have changed the equation, prompting the Tribune to pen a new editorial proposing that the toxic sign be demolished. The first is Trump calling for the “termination” of the Constitution on account of a “massive fraud” that stole the 2020 election from him, as the man-child claimed. The second is a jury finding that the Trump Organization “was corrupt at the core” and an obvious “criminal enterprise.”

The Tribune now calls for Chicago to figure out a way to jackhammer that sign to the ground–whether it’s new negotiations, another ordinance, or a public relations campaign. Not only does the Tribune support such an effort this time, but it suspects “most everyone who lives there” would as well. Indeed, it’s high time for this oversized sign promoting an equally overinflated ego to go.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Musk and Thiel are highly deportable, Wayne Madsen, left, Dec. 12, 2022. Two of the world's wealthiest men -- Peter Thiel and his friend and business colleague Elon Musk -- became U.S. citizens through the naturalization process.

Both are aiding and abetting neo-Nazi and other far-right causes in the United States and fit the bill of "undesirable aliens." Thiel, through bankrolling the political campaigns of dangerous Nazi sympathizers like Blake Masters in Arizona, and Musk, in re-platforming hundreds of neo-Nazis on Twitter, pose a threat to the constitutional governance of the United States. Thiel and Musk are as deportable from the United States as were dozens of Nazis who were discovered to have carried out war crimes during World War II. In any event, Thiel does not seem to care very much about his acquired U.S. citizenship since he also carries a New Zealand passport and is attempting to obtain one from Malta.

Although it is rare for naturalized U.S. citizens to be stripped of their citizenship and deported, U.S. immigration law permits it under certain circumstances. These include committing fraud during the naturalization process, refusing to testify before the Congress, and the one criteria that could be used against Thiel and Musk: membership in or support for subversive groups that advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government.

Thiel, left, who was born in Germany and spent part of his youth in South Africa and South West Africa, has bankrolled Republican politicians, including Donald Trump, who are on the record supporting the January 6, 2021 insurrection against the U.S. government. Musk, born in South Africa to a South African father and Canadian mother, has advocated for a wide range of subversive causes, including his quite recent embrace of QAnon conspiracies.

As naturalized citizens, Thiel and Musk seem to believe they have the right to threaten the very country that granted them the safe harbor of American citizenship. Their free ride must come to an end through denaturalization and deportation from the United States.

The support of Thiel and Musk for far-right seditious causes is certainly more reprehensible than the activities of the British right-wing former publishing tycoon Conrad Black. After his 2007 conviction by the United States for felony fraud as the head of Hollinger International, which owned the Daily Telegraph, Chicago Sun-Times, and Jerusalem Post, Black was deported to Canada from the United States after being released in 2012 from a U.S. prison.

As far as denaturalization and deportation are concerned, let Thiel and Musk join other Americans, citizens and residents, who were either stripped of their acquired U.S. citizenship or Green Cards and sent packing. They include Hermine Braunsteiner, Nazi prison guard at the Ravensbrück and Majdanek concentration camps, the latter where she had been nicknamed the "Stomping Mare" for beating prisoners to death; Karl Linnas, commandant of the Nazi concentration camp at Tartu in Estonia; Charles Ponzi, convicted for numerous cases of fraud and deported to Italy in 1934 -- his name lives on in the term "Ponzi scheme;" Andrija Artuković, founder of the Croatian fascist Ustasha movement; and Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel, author of "The Hitler We Loved and Why," deported from Tennessee to Canada in 2003.

Associated Press, Elon Musk takes the stage, amid boos, at Chappelle’s show, Haven Daley, Dec. 12, 2022. Dave Chappelle asked the crowd at his comedy show to “make some noise for the world’s richest man.”

They did. Lots of booing.

It was a rather uncomfortable appearance for Elon Musk, right, Twitter’s new owner, at Chappelle’s show with Chris Rock on Sunday night at the Chase Center in San Francisco. At the end of the show, Chappelle was talking about the need to get along and communicate with people with different viewpoints and perspectives.

He invited Musk onstage. The billionaire obliged, wearing an “I Love Twitter” T-shirt. Loud boos filled the arena – along with some cheers, too.

Chappelle joked to Musk: “Sounds like some of those people you fired.” As the boos continued to ring out, the comic pointed out that “All you people booing, and I’m just pointing out the obvious — are in terrible seats.”

Twitter is going through massive changes since Musk took over the social media platform, with the first few weeks of tenure seeing widespread layoffs and the restoration of several blocked accounts, including those of former president Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

The other performers from the night, including Rock, Donnell Rawlings from “Chappelle’s Show” and the hip hop group Black Star, came up on stage to say goodnight, while Musk also remained on stage. Chappelle asked Musk to repeat Rawlings’ catch phrase from their classic show – “I’m rich b—-” Rawlings went first, and then Musk complied.

That’s when Chappelle asked the crowd not to boo Musk as he needs him to open up the first comedy club on Mars. He also asked Musk if he could help Black Star’s Talib Kweli, who Chappelle said had been banned from Twitter.

Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion in October, responded by saying: “Twitter customer service here.”

He stayed onstage and shook hands with many of the performers. Attendees had been required to lock up their phones during the show, but a few videos of the encounter made their way online.

• Politico, Inside the secret $32M effort to stop ‘Stop the Steal’, Zach Montellaro, Dec. 12, 2022. Operating with absolutely no public notice, two groups plowed millions across a host of battleground states to support voting access and election infrastructure.

“I think it’s unfortunate for young writers especially,” said Kaitlin Phillips, a writer and publicist whose first print byline was in Bookforum. She described the magazine as “the first stop on a train that ends” at publications like Harper’s, The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books. “I also feel for the small presses who rely on the consistent attention Bookforum paid to their novels.”

Politico, Top progressive firm drops Sinema as a client, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 12, 2022. Authentic has dropped the Arizona senator after she announced she was leaving the Democratic Party.

The leading progressive digital firm Authentic has dropped Kyrsten Sinema as a client, after the Arizona senator announced she was leaving the Democratic Party, according to a person close to the firm.

Sinema announced Friday that she would become an independent, putting a wrinkle in Democrats’ plans for their small Senate majority.

Authentic has represented Sinema for years. But the firm saw an internal revolt over its work for the senator earlier this year as she voted against several of the Biden administration’s initiatives and refused to support revamping filibuster rules to move legislation on voting rights.

One employee wrote in a union message that the person felt that they were “doing the devil’s work.” Employees were told they could be removed from the account if they did not feel comfortable.

Authentic declined to comment. Sinema’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Sinema campaign has paid more than $700,000 to Authentic since the start of 2020, according to Federal Election Commission records. According to the filings, expenses included digital consulting and list acquisition.
White House calls Sinema ‘a key partner’ after her switch to independent

Authentic was founded in 2018 by veteran political consultant Mike Nellis, who worked on Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. The firm’s work has included campaigns for President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). Its clients also include Patients for Affordable Drugs and other organizations. Authentic’s website still lists Sinema on its roster as of mid-Friday.

The Arizona senator will be up for reelection in 2024. Should she make a reelection bid, the loss of Authentic could hinder her fundraising efforts. In January, POLITICO reported that Sinema’s grassroots fundraising had largely dried up and that her campaign was increasingly relying on corporate PACs or large donations.

Dec. 11

Washington Post, 67 journalists and media staff killed on duty in 2022, report says, Andrew Jeong, Dec. 11, 2022 (print ed.). Sixty-seven journalists and media staff have been killed so far this year while performing their duties, the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists said Friday in its annual report documenting reporters’ deaths.

The grim toll is an increase from last year, when 47 were killed, and is the highest since 2018, when 95 journalists and media staff died due to “targeted killings, bomb attacks or crossfire incidents.” Ukraine was the most dangerous place for journalists this year, with 12 media fatalities there due to the ongoing war.

“The surge in the killings of journalists and other media workers is a grave cause of concern and yet another wake up call for governments,” IFJ general secretary Anthony Bellanger said in a statement, calling journalism a critical pillar of democracy.

The fallen include Brent Renaud, an award-winning American journalist who was shot while reporting near Kyiv in March. Oleksandra “Sasha” Kuvshynova, a 24-year-old who was working in Ukraine as a fixer, one of journalism’s most dangerous and thankless jobs, died with Pierre Zakrzewski, a Fox News cameraman, when their vehicle was hit by incoming fire the same month.

In the United States, Jeff German, an investigative journalist at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was found dead at his home, apparently stabbed to death, in September. His colleagues did reporting and on-the-ground detective work to help authorities find the suspected killer.

In the West Bank, Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran correspondent wearing a helmet and protective vest labeled “PRESS” in large white letters, was shot and killed in May.

Mexico, historically one of the most dangerous places for the media, was where at least 11 journalists were killed this year. Among them were Sheila Johana García Olivera and Yesenia Mollinedo Falconi, who were shot in a car outside a convenience store. Mollinedo Falconi’s brother said she had received threats for her work, The Washington Post reported.

Dom Phillips, journalist who chronicled Amazon deforestation, is dead at 57

At least 375 journalists and media workers are behind bars around the world, the group said. That figure is a new high since the IFJ started publishing lists of jailed journalists two years ago, it added. There were at least 84 media workers imprisoned in mainland China and Hong Kong, topping the list, while Myanmar came second with 64 and Turkey third with 51.

Washington Post, As bitcoin plummets, Miami vows to hold onto its crypto dreams, Tim Craig, Dec. 11, 2022 (print ed.). When Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez, below right, unveiled an 11-foot, 300-pound black fiberglass reproduction of the Wall Street bull last spring, he hailed it as a symbol of the city’s arrival as the “capital of crypto.”

“Welcome to the future,” he said, calling for digital currencies like bitcoin to be “integrated into every aspect of society” before the end of the year.

But eight months later, Republican mayor’s dream of turning Miami into a hub for the digital currency industry has hit a speed bump.

The value of bitcoin has plummeted, a blow to Miami residents who bought into Suarez’s call to invest in digital currencies. MiamiCoin — the city’s own cryptocurrency — is now essentially worthless. And crypto exchange FTX’s meltdown has had ripple effects here.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Bahamas-based exchange was expected to open its U.S. headquarters in Miami. One of the city’s signature stadiums is FTX Arena, where the NBA’s Miami Heat plays home games. Now Miami-Dade County officials are asking a judge to end the $135 million, 19-year naming rights deal.

The collapse of crypto has emboldened Suarez’s critics, who say the industry’s nosedive reinforces their view that Miami has, once again, recklessly bet parts of its future on untested technology and wobbly economics. There is also concern over whether Miami will remain a top destination for young tech workers now that pandemic-related restrictions in San Francisco and New York have eased.

“A bunch of con men, selling imaginary coins and magic beans is not that interesting of a story,” said Billy Corben, a documentary filmmaker and longtime skeptic of Suarez’s embrace of bitcoin. “But the fact is the government, and its elected officials were complicit in it, and dragged the city in it.”

But throughout Miami, a city that was built around risky financial deals and boom-bust economic cycles, there is little sign that government officials and local crypto investors are rethinking their embrace of digital currencies and blockchain technologies.

Instead they are hedging on the city getting through what is becoming known as a “crypto winter” in belief that bitcoin will bounce back and help redefine the city as a hub for creativity, finance and tech.

Thomas Kennedy, a Miami resident and Democratic National Committeeman, accused Suarez of being aligned with “grifters” who are chasing “fever dreams” instead of dealing with issues such as a severe lack of affordable housing and chronic flooding due to sea level rise and over development.

“I think he is reckless, dangerous, irresponsible and neglectful,” Kennedy said of Suarez’s gamble on MiamiCoin. “If you live here, you see that Miami has a lot of problems, so it is just stupid and disappointing to see our mayor palling around with grifters at these tech conferences.”

Corben, who directed the hit documentary film “Cocaine Cowboys,” compares Miami’s dream of striking rich on crypto to the city’s long history of embracing risky business enterprises.

“Miami has no indigenous industry, and we persist from hustle to hustle,” he said. “As long as the booze is flowing, and the checks are clearing, no one says, ‘Hey where is this money coming from’?”

Politico via Yahoo News, Shadowboxing and geopolitics on the dark web, Mohar Chatterjee, Dec. 11, 2022. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, a notorious cyber-criminal group called Conti declared its “full support” for President Vladimir Putin. Three days later, a pro-Ukraine member of Conti leaked logs detailing the group’s plans to follow that up with action, saying Conti’s leaders had “lost all their shit.”

The logs revealed a startling new dimension to the evolution of one of the world’s biggest cyber-criminal collectives: These groups were splintering along geopolitical lines — nationalist agendas were infiltrating a cybercrime operation that had, until now, been ruthlessly profit-driven.

And that’s making the shadowy world of the so-called darknet marketplaces — where criminals trade in computer hacking tools, stolen data, narcotics and money-laundering services — even more dangerous and difficult to rein in. Cyber-criminal groups are abandoning rules that governed these marketplaces and using the malware they trade on these platforms to go after more sensitive computing systems connected to critical infrastructure and government services of the countries they deem enemies.

“You've got kind of an ideological cyber operation occurring between what I would call willing participants,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president for intelligence at cybersecurity technology company CrowdStrike. “We're seeing the proliferation of offensive cyber operations to more and more nation-states.”

In September, researchers from Google and IBM noted the same dynamic. Conti’s hacking tools were being used in cyberattacks against Ukraine in what the researchers called an “unprecedented blurring of lines.”

On the dark web, this new environment arose, in part, due to a law enforcement success: In April, German authorities shut down Hydra — at the time, the world’s oldest and largest darknet marketplace, and one of the places where Conti bought and sold data and hacking tools, according to the logs.

Groups like Conti had always been relatively platform agnostic, willing to make the jump to the next big platform and go on with their business.

 

New York Times, Investigation: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C., Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Ilana Marcus, Dec. 11, 2022. In high schools across the country, students are being placed in military classes without electing them on their own. “The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination,’” one parent said.

On her first day of high school, Andreya Thomas looked over her schedule and found that she was enrolled in a class with an unfamiliar name: J.R.O.T.C.

She and other freshmen at Pershing High School in Detroit soon learned that they had been placed into the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, a program funded by the U.S. military designed to teach leadership skills, discipline and civic values — and open students’ eyes to the idea of a military career. In the class, students had to wear military uniforms and obey orders from an instructor who was often yelling, Ms. Thomas said, but when several of them pleaded to be allowed to drop the class, school administrators refused.

“They told us it was mandatory,” Ms. Thomas said.

J.R.O.T.C. programs, taught by military veterans at some 3,500 high schools across the country, are supposed to be elective, and the Pentagon has said that requiring students to take them goes against its guidelines. But The New York Times found that thousands of public school students were being funneled into the classes without ever having chosen them, either as an explicit requirement or by being automatically enrolled.

A review of J.R.O.T.C. enrollment data collected from more than 200 public records requests showed that dozens of schools have made the program mandatory or steered more than 75 percent of students in a single grade into the classes, including schools in Detroit, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Oklahoma City and Mobile, Ala. A vast majority of the schools with those high enrollment numbers were attended by a large proportion of nonwhite students and those from low-income households, The Times found.

The role of J.R.O.T.C. in U.S. high schools has been a point of debate since the program was founded more than a century ago. During the antiwar battles of the 1970s, protests over what was seen as an attempt to recruit high schoolers to serve in Vietnam prompted some school districts to restrict the program. Most schools gradually phased out any enrollment requirements.

But 50 years later, new conflicts are emerging as parents in some cities say their children are being forced to put on military uniforms, obey a chain of command and recite patriotic declarations in classes they never wanted to take.

In Chicago, concerns raised by activists, news coverage and an inspector general’s report led the school district to backtrack this year on automatic J.R.O.T.C. enrollments at several high schools that serve primarily lower-income neighborhoods on the city’s South and West sides. In other places, The Times found, the practice continues, with students and parents sometimes rebuffed when they fight compulsory enrollment.

“If she wanted to do it, I would have no problem with it,” said Julio Mejia, a parent in Fort Myers, Fla., who said his daughter had tried to get out of a required J.R.O.T.C. class in 2019, when she was a freshman, and was initially refused. “She has no interest in a military career. She has no interest in doing any of that stuff. The only word I can think of is ‘indoctrination.’”

J.R.O.T.C. classes, which offer instruction in a wide range of topics, including leadership, civic values, weapons handling and financial literacy, have provided the military with a valuable way to interact with teenagers at a time when it is facing its most serious recruiting challenge since the end of the Vietnam War.

While Pentagon officials have long insisted that J.R.O.T.C. is not a recruiting tool, they have openly discussed expanding the $400 million-a-year program, whose size has already tripled since the 1970s, as a way of drawing more young people into military service. The Army says 44 percent of all soldiers who entered its ranks in recent years came from a school that offered J.R.O.T.C.

High school principals who have embraced the program say it motivates students who are struggling, teaches self-discipline to disruptive students and provides those who may feel isolated with a sense of camaraderie. It has found a welcome home in rural areas where the military has deep roots but also in urban centers where educators want to divert students away from drugs or violence and toward what for many can be a promising career or a college scholarship.

And military officials point to research indicating that J.R.O.T.C. students have better attendance and graduation rates, and fewer discipline problems at school.

New York Times, Investigation: J.R.O.T.C. Textbooks Offer an Alternative View of the World, Mike Baker and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Dec. 11, 2022. Descriptions of civic life and some key historical events differ from the way they are taught in typical public school textbooks.

One textbook for high school military cadets says girls should wear lipstick when in uniform. Another offers what a history professor described as a “frightening” interpretation of how the Vietnam War was lost. Another blames the death of Kurt Cobain, the Nirvana frontman who fatally shot himself in 1994, on heroin addiction.

A majority of public school textbooks receive extensive professional and government vetting, undergoing revision, rejection and public debate. But the Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, in courses taught at thousands of high schools around the country, uses textbooks that have bypassed those standard public reviews.

The J.R.O.T.C. curriculum materials cover a wide range of subjects, with lessons on financial literacy and public speaking, on healthy eating and first aid, on preparing for college and life in the military. Most of them offer a presentation similar to what might be found in any public high school study materials.

But a New York Times review of thousands of pages of the program’s textbooks found that some of the books also included outdated gender messages, a conservative shading of political issues and accounts of historical events that falsify or downplay the failings of the U.S. government.

Dec. 10

 

The chair of the five-member Federal Trade Commission is Lisa Khan, shown above, confirmed by the Senate in a 69-28 vote in June 2021 and considered a critic of the Big Tech sector.

 New York Times, Lina Khan, Aiming to Block Microsoft’s Activision Deal, Faces a Challenge, David McCabe, Cecilia Kang and Karen Weise, Dec. 10, 2022 (print ed.). Ms. Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has staked an ambitious trustbusting agenda on a case that may be difficult to win.

Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, has pledged to usher in a new era of trustbusting of America’s corporate giants, recently saying the agency plans to “enforce the antitrust laws to ensure maximal efficacy.”

Now Ms. Khan has staked that ambitious agenda on a case that may be highly challenging for the agency to win.

The F.T.C. on Thursday sued to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game publisher Activision, the biggest consumer tech deal in two decades. The action punctuated Ms. Khan’s statements about reining in corporate power and was the boldest of a recent string of lawsuits from the agency to prevent other, smaller deals in the name of competition.

But Ms. Khan and the F.T.C. face hurdles in trying to stop the Microsoft-Activision deal, experts said. That’s because courts have been skeptical of challenges to so-called vertical mergers, where the two businesses don’t compete directly. In this case, Microsoft is best known in gaming as the maker of the Xbox console, while Activision is a major publisher of blockbuster titles such as Call of Duty.

Bloomberg, Elon Musk Steps Up Attacks on Twitter’s Former Safety Head, Dana Hull and Kurt Wagner, Dec. 10, 2022. Elon Musk posted tweets including an excerpt of Yoel Roth’s doctoral dissertation Saturday that suggested the former Twitter executive is an advocate for child sexualization — a baseless trope that leaves Roth susceptible to online abuse.

 

Washington Post, Some Hunter Biden allies making plans to go after his accusers, Matt Viser and Michael Scherer, Dec. 10, 2022. Facing GOP investigations, some Hunter Biden allies want to aggressively target his accusers and tell his story, while others want a lower-profile defense.

Hunter Biden’s friend and lawyer Kevin Morris was blunt in laying out his thoughts at a strategy session last September on an expected onslaught of investigations by House Republicans: It was crucial, he suggested, for Hunter Biden’s camp to be more aggressive.

Morris, at the meeting in his California home, described defamation lawsuits the team could pursue against the presidential son’s critics, including Fox News, Eric Trump and Rudy Giuliani. He outlined extensive research on two potential witnesses against Hunter Biden — a spurned business partner named Tony Bobulinski and a computer repairman named John Paul Mac Isaac.

At one point, Hunter Biden, shown above, himself happened to call into the meeting, connecting briefly by video to add his own thoughts.

“They feel that there is a whole counternarrative missing because of the whole Hunter-hater narrative out there,” said liberal activist David Brock, left, who attended the meeting. “What we really got into was more the meat of it, the meat of what a response would look like.” Brock was planning for a new group, Facts First USA, focused on fighting the looming House GOP investigations.

The meeting was a glimpse into a sprawling infrastructure that is rapidly, almost frantically, assembling to combat Republicans’ plans to turn Hunter Biden into a major news story when the GOP takes over the House next year. The risk for Hunter Biden, and possibly for President Biden as well, is that this hodgepodge of efforts is not fully coordinating and does not share a unified approach, according to people involved in the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal dynamics.

Hunter Biden has been working with Morris, his friend and sometime financial benefactor, and a team of researchers. The younger Biden has also hired several other lawyers — Chris Clark, who is handling a federal criminal investigation into his business dealings and other matters, along with a separate attorney, Joshua A. Levy, to deal directly with the House investigators.

Meanwhile, the White House and the Democratic National Committee have developed their own strategies for dealing with what could be a political firestorm around the president’s son. Bob Bauer, a former White House counsel under President Barack Obama, is set to represent President Biden in a personal capacity should the need arise. And a trio of Democratic-aligned outside groups has stepped up to provide rapid response and other communications.

Washington Post, Analysis: The rise and fall of right-wing influencers — as tracked by Turning Point USA, Philip Bump, Dec. 10, 2022. If you are familiar with the group Turning Point USA, it may be because of an incident that occurred back in 2019. President Donald Trump was appearing at an event hosted by TPUSA, offering one of his standard multidirectional riffs on politics and culture. Behind him, a screen showed the presidential seal — except not really. The eagle at the center of the logo had been replaced with a double-headed bird plucked from Russia’s coat of arms.

Not the headlines either TPUSA or Trump were hoping to generate.

Despite that setback, TPUSA has grown in influence in the years since. Aimed at engaging young people in right-wing politics, it holds regular conferences with celebrities from the Republican Party and conservative media world. And, as the group’s clout and self-confidence have grown, its events have gotten flashier.

On Thursday, the group published one of its now familiar slate-card promotions for its upcoming conference. It’s a who’s-who of a particular cultural universe, from Charlie Kirk himself at top left down to former Trump administration staffer Kash Patel at lower right.

By collecting and analyzing these promotional slates, we can get a sense for the ebb and flow of power and appeal in the right-wing world over time.

So I did. I pulled about 20 social media posts delineating speaker lineups at upcoming events from 2018 to this year. I indexed where individual politicians, conservative media personalities and other figures appeared on the slate, generally taking my cues on importance from where Kirk himself was positioned.

Now let’s discuss what this tells us.

Dec. 9

New York Times, How the Global Spyware Industry Spiraled Out of Control, Mark Mazzetti, Ronen Bergman and Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Dec. 9, 2022 (print ed.). The market for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — is booming. Even the U.S. government is using it.

The Biden administration took a public stand last year against the abuse of spyware to target human rights activists, dissidents and journalists: It blacklisted the most notorious maker of the hacking tools, the Israeli firm NSO Group.

But the global industry for commercial spyware — which allows governments to invade mobile phones and vacuum up data — continues to boom. Even the U.S. government is using it.

Dec. 8

New York Times, F.T.C. Sues to Block Microsoft’s $69 Billion Acquisition of Activision, Karen Weise and David McCabe, Dec. 8, 2022. The move by the commission signals an aggressive stance by federal regulators to thwart the expansion of the tech industry’s biggest companies. The Federal Trade Commission, in one of the most aggressive actions taken by federal regulators in decades to check the power of the tech industry’s giants, on Thursday sued to block Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of the video game maker Activision Blizzard.

The F.T.C. said that the deal would harm consumers because Microsoft could use Activision’s blockbuster games like Call of Duty to lure gamers from rivals. The agency’s commissioners voted 3to 1 to approve filing the suit.

The decision is a blow to the expansion of Microsoft’s video game business, which has become its most important consumer unit and topped $16 billion in annual sales during the most recent fiscal year. For the F.T.C. chair, Lina Khan, a legal scholar who rocketed to fame after she wrote an article criticizing Amazon, the lawsuit will test whether her aggressive plan to rein in the power of Big Tech can survive in the courts.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision would be the largest consumer technology deal since AOL bought Time Warner two decades ago. It would marry Microsoft’s Xbox console and game streaming service, which many consider gaming’s future, with Activision titles like Call of Duty and Candy Crush. The scale of those games is enormous: Activision says it has almost 370 million active users each month.

Microsoft indicated it would not abandon the deal and would fight in court to keep the acquisition alive.

 

Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes arrive at the Disney Upfront 2022 event in New York City on May 17 (Reuters photo by David Dee Delgado via Associated Press).

Washington Post, Opinion: ABC offers a masterclass in how not to handle workplace romance, Helaine Olen, Dec. 8, 2022 (print ed.). All rom-com protagonists need an obstacle to overcome. This week, newly revealed lovebirds T.J. Holmes and Amy Robach, co-anchors of ABC’s “Good Morning America” spinoff show “GMA3,” got a doozy of one, when the corporate suite announced they were taking the couple off the air.

But while network suits might have upped the dramatic tension, they also inadvertently offered up a master class in the wrong way to go about managing a workplace romance. No one needs the c-suite to weigh in on consensual behavior between equals that takes place outside the workplace — no matter how attention-getting it is.

The “GMA3” contretemps began last week, when the Daily Mail got a hold of the exclusive — make that “EXCLUSIVE” — news that the two anchors were an item, despite being married to other people, in a piece studded with private-investigator-style tabloid photos.

The New York Post jumped in to confirm they were spotted “canoodling” in a local bar. (Word subsequently went out the couple both separated from their spouses this summer.) TikTok and Twitter went wild. After a few days, ABC decided this midlife romance was an “internal and external distraction,” as the ABC president, Kim Godwin, apparently said during an editorial call, and pulled the twosome from air.

Given the natural human inclination to gossip about celebrities and co-workers, that distraction may be real — and yet it’s unclear precisely how the romantic upgrade in Holmes and Robach’s relationship is otherwise a problem. The couple is not triggering any of the traditional red flags when it comes to workplace romances. They are co-anchors, so there is no issue of hierarchy, unlike when CNN’s head Jeff Zucker lost his position following an investigation into an ongoing relationship with network chief marketing executive Allison Gollust. No one has alleged favoritism or harassment as a result of the affair. In fact, it’s been reported that Godwin told staffers that the relationship is “not a violation of company policy.”

The fact is, workplace romances are incredibly common.

So why not tell co-workers to MYOB and let everyone get back to work? It’s not like there aren’t examples of a functional workplace romance between co-anchors. When Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski began co-hosting Morning Joe, they were married to other people. After they survived tabloid scandal about their affair and four years after they got married, the show goes on.

Washington Post, New York Times employees stage 24-hour walkout in labor dispute, Elahe Izadi, Dec. 8, 2022. The most dramatic move by union workers at the company in decades follows months of negotiations over pay and other issues.

Reporters won’t write stories or interview sources. Photojournalists will stay home. And if a spate of unsavory language breaks out in the online comments thread posted below a New York Times story, there might not be anyone on hand to delete it.

That’s the expected scenario at the Times on Thursday, after more than 1,100 employees began a day-long work stoppage at midnight in one of the most dramatic labor disputes at the company in decades.

Members of the New York Times Guild — the union that covers about 1,400 Times workers, including non-newsroom departments such as advertising and security — have said the walkout is the culmination of months of frustration over contract negotiations on a range of issues, particularly compensation. The previous employee contract expired in March 2021. In a letter to members this week, union organizers wrote that “we cannot get to a deal until the company makes wage and benefit proposals that truly share the company’s gains with its employees.” They accused the company Wednesday evening of failing to “bargain in good faith.”

Dec. 7

New York Times, Twitter’s Rivals Try to Capitalize on Musk-Induced Chaos, Kalley Huang, Dec. 7, 2022. New start-ups and other social platforms are racing to dethrone Twitter as questions swirl about how viable it might be since Elon Musk took over. Last month, employees at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, joined a virtual brainstorming session to discuss how to build the next Twitter.

Among the ideas Meta’s workers talked over was a more extensive rollout of a feature called Instagram Notes, where people can share short messages on the photo-sharing site with their followers and friends, according to posts of the conversation that were viewed by The New York Times. Others said Meta should build a text-focused app using Instagram’s technology or add another feed to Instagram. They floated names for the features such as Realtime, Real Reels and Instant.

“Twitter is in crisis and Meta needs its mojo back,” one Meta employee wrote in a post. “LET’S GO FOR THEIR BREAD AND BUTTER.”

A race is on to dethrone Twitter and capitalize on the chaos of its new ownership under Elon Musk, the tech mogul who bought the social media company for $44 billion in late October. Since then, questions have swirled about how viable Twitter might be as Mr. Musk has laid off thousands of employees, started changing the platform’s content rules and proclaimed that the company is in such dire financial shape that bankruptcy is possible.

Dec. 6

 

Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch to be deposed in $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox, Jeremy Barr and Rachel Weiner, Dec. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The Fox Corp chairman, shown above at the 2009 World Economic Forum, is the highest-profile individual to be questioned in the case, which hinges on Fox’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

Rupert Murdoch, the 91-year-old chairman of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, will be forced to answer questions under oath next week about his network’s coverage of the 2020 presidential election.

Murdoch will be deposed on the mornings of Dec. 13 and Dec. 14 as part of election technology company Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, according to a filing in Delaware’s Superior Court. The lawsuit alleges that the network purposely aired false claims about Dominion’s role in the 2020 presidential election to boost ratings and fight off competition from more-conservative-leaning television networks.

According to the filing, Murdoch’s deposition will be conducted remotely, via videoconference.

New York Times, Oversight Board Criticizes Meta for Preferential Treatment, Adam Satariano and Sheera Frenkel, Dec. 6, 2022. Influential users on Facebook and Instagram have been able to share posts that would otherwise be removed for violating company policies, the board said.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, was harshly criticized on Tuesday by a company-appointed oversight board for policies that give celebrities, politicians and business partners special treatment compared with the vast majority of its users.

Under a program called cross-check, people with a high number of followers were able to say and share things on Facebook and Instagram that would otherwise have been quickly removed for violating company policies, according to the Oversight Board, which Meta had created to adjudicate thorny policy questions related to free speech, human rights and content moderation.

“The board is concerned about how Meta has prioritized business interests in content moderation,” the board said in a report. The cross-check program, it said, “provided extra protection for the expression of certain users.”

The oversight board recommended that Meta overhaul its cross-check system by “radically” increasing transparency over who is on the program’s list of VIPs and hiding their posts while they are reviewed. Meta should prioritize speech, which is “of special public importance,” it added. Recommendations made by the board, which includes about 20 academics, human rights experts and lawyers, are nonbinding.

New York Times, Computer Science Students Face a Shrinking Big Tech Job Market, Natasha Singer and Kalley Huang, Dec. 6, 2022. A new reality is setting in for students and recent graduates who spent years honing themselves for careers at the largest tech companies.

Ever since she was a 10th grader in Seattle, Annalice Ni wanted to develop software for a prominent tech company like Google. So she went to great lengths to meet the internship and other résumé criteria that make students attractive hires to the biggest tech firms.

In high school, Ms. Ni took computer science courses, interned at Microsoft and volunteered as a coding teacher for younger students. She majored in computer science at the University of Washington, earning coveted software engineering internships at Facebook. After graduating from college this year, she moved to Silicon Valley to start her dream job as a software engineer at Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

Then last month, Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees — including Ms. Ni.

“I did feel very frustrated and disappointed and maybe a bit scared because all of a sudden, I didn’t know what to do,” Ms. Ni, 22, said of her unexpected career setback. “There’s not much I could have done, especially in college, more than I already did, better than I already did.”

Dec. 5

 

CNN, Opinion: Elon Musk’s Twitter is helping to normalize a neo-Nazi, Dean Obeidallah, Dec. 5, 2022. Elon Musk (shown above) apparently is trying his hand at creating a major media story by the release of what he called the “Twitter Files,” which included internal Twitter documents from October 2020 showing the social media company’s executives debating whether to allow postings on the platform of a New York Post article about a laptop Hunter Biden reportedly owned.

As CNN reported, Musk’s release on Friday pointed to tweets by journalist Matt Taibbi, who was provided “with emails that largely corroborated what was already known about the incident.”

But the Twitter story that demands coverage is not about something that happened more than two years ago but what we are seeing now on Twitter since Musk took control in October. There has been an “unprecedented” spike in hate speech as well as a resurgence of ISIS-linked accounts, The New York Times detailed in an article published Friday, citing findings from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups studying online platforms.

In addition, Twitter just reinstated the account of self-professed White supremacist Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. Anglin, who was banned from Twitter in 2013, has called for tearing down Berlin’s memorial to the Holocaust (which he despicably calls a “hoax”) and replacing “it with a statue of Hitler 1,000 feet tall.”

I have firsthand experience with the neo-Nazi just reinstated on Twitter. Anglin targeted me in 2017 in response to an article I wrote at that time slamming then-President Donald Trump for refusing to denounce White supremacist violence. (This was months before the August 2017 White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.)

Anglin first posted fabricated tweets on his White supremacist website that appeared to have been written by me claiming responsibility for an ISIS terrorist attack. (I’m Muslim.) He then instructed his followers to “confront me.” Given that readers of The Daily Stormer had in the past committed acts of violence — including apparently Dylann Roof, left, who murdered nine Black people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 — they did what Anglin asked.

I was soon inundated with death threats. However, if Anglin thought I was going to cower in fear, he was wrong. I sued him in federal court for defamation and emotional distress, where I won a default judgment of $4.1 million. While I still have not recovered a penny, I have long pledged to donate all the proceeds to organizations that fight the type of hate Anglin spews.

I’m not alone. Anglin has orchestrated targeted harassment of other minorities, including African American student Taylor Dumpson who successfully sued Anglin, and Tanya Gersh, a Jewish real estate agent who also sued Anglin, resulting in a $14 million judgment.

In fact, the person who was reinstated on Twitter had an arrest warrant issued against him by a federal judge just last month over refusing to comply with court orders in the collection of those damages in Gersh’s lawsuit.

Alarmingly, Anglin’s dangerous influence continues. The White gunman who killed Black people in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store in a racist attack in May, reportedly cited Anglin’s Daily Stormer by name in a manifesto, crediting it as shaping his view that White people were being “replaced” by people of color.

Reinstating Anglin on Twitter not only helps normalize a neo-Nazi, but it also helps him recruit followers. One of Anglin’s first tweets on Friday said: “Trying to find my friends. I lost them in 2013.”

But Anglin is not the only problem. As laid out in the bone-chilling New York Times article, recent data from groups that study online platforms has documented that hate speech has exploded on Twitter in the first two weeks since Musk took over. Overall, the Times reported that researchers noted “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”

Some of the most jarring statistics include that slurs against Black Americans have tripled to 3,876 times per day, antisemitic posts are up more than 60% and slurs against gay men jumped from 2,506 a day to now nearly 4,000 comments per day, according to the article.

Forbes, Ex-Twitter Employees Begin Lawyering Up To Face Elon Musk, Cyrus Farivar, Dec 5, 2022. Judge Considers Whether To Hold Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk In Contempt Over Tweet

Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrives at federal court, April 4, 2019 in New York City. Getty Images

After a few tumultuous weeks since Elon Musk took over Twitter, fired former employees in ever-greater numbers are now taking the company to task over what they say are broken promises surrounding their severance from the company.

On Monday, Lisa Bloom, left, a well-known Los Angeles-based attorney, announced in a press conference that she is now representing three ex-Twitter employees in arbitration claims — even going so far as to holding up a ceramic sink, nodding to the strange joke that Musk made when he took over the company in late October.

“Elon, you broke your promises and you violated the law, we are coming after you,” she said in a press conference held in her law offices and streamed online. “Let that sink in.”

Additionally, a New York-based lawyer is now threatening to bring new arbitration claims on behalf of 22 ex-employees, while a Boston-based lawyer has brought three lawsuits and claims before the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of three additional former Twitter workers.

Taken together, these represent a collective new legal front that the company must now face, given that Musk has fired more than half of the company’s workforce since he took over in late October.

At its core, the primary issue is that some employees say they are not receiving the level of severance and compensation, which includes bonuses and stock vesting, prior to the takeover. Additionally, others were given what Bloom called an “illegal ultimatum” — asking workers to take a three months severance deal if they weren’t willing to stay on as part of Musk’s “hardcore” workforce. Bloom said Twitter is in alleged violation of a federal labor law, known as the WARN Act, which requires advance notice of termination before separation from the company actually takes place. If found in violation of this law, Twitter could owe penalties of $500 per employee per day.

By seemingly evading the WARN Act and other alleged misdeeds, these lawyers say, the company seems to be trying to save tens or even hundreds of millions dollars in cash payments, bonuses, equity, vested stock and other payouts.

Dec. 4

 

Lachlan Murdoch with his wife, Sarah, at the White House in 2019 (Pool photo by Ron Sachs).

New York Times, Defamation Suit Against Fox Grows More Contentious, Jeremy W. Peters, Dec. 4, 2022. Lachlan Murdoch is set to be deposed on Monday, part of a flurry of activity in the high-stakes case.

Lachlan Murdoch, the chief executive of the Fox Corporation, is expected to be deposed on Monday as part of a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News for amplifying bogus claims that rigged machines from Dominion Voting Systems were responsible for Donald J. Trump’s defeat in 2020.

Mr. Murdoch will be the most senior corporate figure within the Fox media empire to face questions under oath in the case so far. And his appearance before Dominion’s lawyers is a sign of how unexpectedly far and fast the lawsuit has progressed in recent weeks — and how contentious it has become.

Fox and Dominion have gone back and forth in Delaware state court since the summer in an escalating dispute over witnesses, evidence and testimony. The arguments point to the high stakes of the case, which will render a judgment on whether the most powerful conservative media outlet in the country intentionally misled its audience and helped seed one of the most pervasive lies in American politics.

Although the law leans in the media’s favor in defamation cases, Dominion has what independent observers have said is an unusually strong case. Day after day, Fox hosts and guests repeated untrue stories about Dominion’s ties to communist regimes and far-fetched theories about how its software enabled enemies of the former president to steal his votes.

“This is a very different kind of case,” said David A. Logan, dean of the Roger Williams School of Law, who has argued in favor of loosening some libel laws. “Rarely do cases turn on a weekslong pattern of inflammatory, provably false, but also oddly inconsistent statements.”

Dominion, in its quest to obtain the private communications of as many low-, mid- and high-level Fox personnel as possible, hopes to prove that people inside the network knew they were disseminating lies. Fox hopes to be able sow doubt about that by showing how its hosts pressed Trump allies for evidence they never produced and that Dominion machines were vulnerable to hacking, even if no hacking took place.

The judge, Eric M. Davis, has ruled in most instances in Dominion’s favor, allowing the voting company to expand the pool of potential evidence it can present to a jury to include text messages from the personal phones of Fox employees and the employment contracts of star hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, along with those of Suzanne Scott, the chief executive of Fox News Media, and her top corporate managers.

Washington Post, Surging Twitter antisemitism unites fringe and encourages violence, officials say, Julian Mark, Dec. 4, 2022 (print ed.). Online comments often lead to real-world actions, social media experts warn.

Federal officials are predicting that Twitter will contribute to more violence, citing the proliferation of extreme content, including support for Nazis by certain celebrities and the reemergence of QAnon proselytizers and white nationalists.

Current and former federal officials are warning that a surge in hate speech and disinformation about Jews on Twitter is uniting and popularizing some of the same extremists who have helped push people to engage in violent protests including the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

The officials are predicting that Twitter will contribute to more violence in the months ahead, citing the proliferation of extreme content, including support for genocidal Nazis by celebrities with wide followings and the reemergence of QAnon proselytizers and white nationalists.

Since billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk bought Twitter just over a month ago, he has slashed more than half the staff, including most of the people who made judgment calls about what counts as impermissible slurs against religious or ethnic groups.

Musk announced a broad amnesty for most previously banned accounts and has personally interacted with fringe activists and white nationalists on the site in the weeks since he assumed ownership. Other actors have experimented with racist and antisemitic posts to test Musk’s limits as a self-declared “free speech absolutist.”

Even before Musk’s takeover, some Twitter users were encouraging confrontations with transgender people and others who were falsely depicted as “groomers,” or predators who sexually target underage victims. But the new wave of antisemitism has reached millions of people in just days, brought new followers, and helped galvanize a broader coalition of fringe figures.

 Dec. 3

 

Elon Musk released what he called the “Twitter Files” on Friday, delving into the company's decision to block the Hunter Biden laptop story. In this 2019 photo, Musk speaks during a gaming convention (Photo by Mike Blake for Reuters).

Washington Post, Elon Musk’s ‘Twitter Files’ ignite divisions, but haven’t changed minds, Cat Zakrzewski and Faiz Siddiqui, Dec. 4, 2022 (print ed.). It was billed as a bombshell: Elon Musk, after rifling through his new company’s internal files, would finally expose how Twitter engaged in “free speech suppression” in the critical run up to the 2020 election.

“This will be awesome,” Musk tweeted, teasing the announcement with a popcorn emoji.

But by the time the dust settled Saturday, even some conservatives were grumbling that it was a dud. Musk’s Twitter Files produced no smoking gun showing that the tech giant had bent to the will of Democrats.

A handful of screenshots from 2020, posted over the course of two hours Friday evening in a disjointed, roughly 40-tweet thread, show the San Francisco company debating a decision to restrict sharing of a controversial New York Post story about the son of then Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

The Twitter thread, based on internal communications posted by Substack writer Matt Taibbi, showed the company independently decided to limit the spread of the article, without Democratic politicians, the Biden campaign or FBI exerting control over the social media network. In fact, the only input from a sitting politician that Taibbi noted was from Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna (D), who told Twitter executives they should distribute the story, regardless of the potential consequences for his party.

“I’m not persuaded these are anything close to a bombshell,” said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, in an interview.

In the process, Musk took the extraordinary step of promoting the leak of internal company communications to Taibbi, exposing the names of several rank-and-file workers and Khanna’s personal email address.

The online mob descended on the Twitter workers on the chain, threatening them and circulating their photos online.

“Publicly posting the names and identities of front-line employees involved in content moderation puts them in harm’s way and is a fundamentally unacceptable thing to do,” former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth, who was among the employees named in the tweets, said in a social media post.

Musk acknowledged on a Twitter Spaces audio chat Saturday afternoon some missteps, including “a few cases where I think we should have excluded some email addresses.”

“The idea here is to come clean on everything that has happened in the past in order to build public trust for the future,” Musk said during the Twitter Spaces which was plagued with technical difficulties. Musk said he joined via a Starlink satellite connection from his private jet.

Musk also criticized the media’s coverage of the files.

“Rather than admit they lied to the public they’re trying to pretend this is a nothingburger,” he said. “Shame on them.”

Musk and Taibbi both tweeted that they would reveal more information in a second chapter Saturday. Musk also said on the Spaces that he shared the documents with another Substack writer, Bari Weiss, and suggested he may share them with the public in the future.

The spectacle capped off another week of chaos at Musk’s Twitter, after the “chief Twit” spent Friday afternoon meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron and batting back reports about the rise of hate speech on the Twitter platform.

 

 

Blogger Matt Taibbi and the increasingly erratic ultra-right corporate titan Elon Musk

Emptywheel, Analysis: Matty Taibbi’s Dick Pics, Emptywheel, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 3, 2022. Apparently, Elon Musk decided that the best person to disclose what he promised would show, “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter” was Matt Taibbi, someone who — by his own admission (an admission on which he has apparently flip-flopped) — apologized for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine because he was, “so fixated on Western misbehavior that I didn’t bother to take [the] possibility [of Russian invasion] seriously enough.”

Reverse chauvinism, Taibbi called it.

Taibbi’s own apologies for Russia didn’t just start with the Russian imperialism and war crimes, however.

He was long a critic of what he called “RussiaGate” based on the tried and true tactic of treating the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank allegations — and not the legal verdicts that confirmed Trump’s National Security Advisor, campaign manager, Coffee Boy, personal lawyer, and rat-fucker all lied to hide the true nature of their Russian ties — as the primary substance of the case.

Taibbi scolded others about shoddy reporting even while he adhered to the Single Server fallacy that not only assumed all the hacked material came from just one server, but ignored the hack of Amazon Web Services content and abundant other evidence attributing the hacks to Russia from other cloud companies. Then there was the time Taibbi tried to smack down on claims that Maria Butina used sex to entice targets, in which he made error after error, all without allowing his false claims to be disrupted by consulting the actual primary sources.

That’s the guy Elmo decided would be a credible voice to tell us what happened with the “Hunter Biden” “laptop” story.

That matters because, as Andy Stepanian explained last night, Twitter had advance warning of a Russian information operation targeting Hunter Biden during the summer of 2020, months before the release of the “Hunter Biden” “laptop.”

Matt Taibbi is either woefully misinformed about this or cynically lying. How do I know? Because I attended two meetings with Twitter representatives in July and August 2020 wherein the Hunter Biden story was discussed within the larger framework of election integrity.

Matt Taibbi’s analysis has myriad problems but the biggest problem is his failure to underscore what initially prompted Twitter staff to designate the content in the Post story as “stolen” or “hacked” material. This came from conversations with law enforcement in summer of 2020.

Taibbi claims that he’s concerned about First Amendment implications of the government pressuring Twitter about content. And then … he ignores the evidence he presents about (what is probably shorthand for) the Trump White House pressuring Twitter about content. Let’s see those specifics, Matty!
Or rather he excuses it, using the old charade of campaign donations which show what a small portion of Twitter employees spend.

As numerous people have laid out — most notably Free Beacon reporter Andrew Kerr — a number of these takedown requests were of dick pics and other personal porn, a celebrity kind of revenge porn. Others were of Hunter Biden smoking crack — at least a violation of law. But none so far identified pertain to allegations of influence peddling.

Tabbi’s smoking gun amounts to takedown requests of stolen dick pics, precisely the kind of thing that content moderation should be responsive to.
“Handled,” Elmo responded with glee about proof that his predecessors had seen fit to remove leaked porn and dick pics.

Hunter Biden (file photo).

The Bulwark, Commentary: No, You Do Not Have a Constitutional Right to Post Hunter Biden’s Dick Pic on Twitter, Tim Miller, right, Dec. 3, 2022. Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi’s First Amendment follies.

While normal humans who denied Republicans their red wave were enjoying an epic sports weekend, an insular community of MAGA activists and online contrarians led by the world’s richest man (for now) were getting riled up about a cache of leaked emails revealing that the former actor James Woods and Chinese troll accounts were not allowed to post ill-gotten photos of Hunter Biden’s hog on a private company’s microblogging platform 25 months ago.

Now if you are one of the normals—someone who would never think about posting another person’s penis on your social media account; has no desire to see politicians’ kids’ penises when scrolling social media; doesn’t understand why there are other people out there who care one way or another about the moderation policies surrounding stolen penis photos; or can’t even figure out what it is that I’m talking about—then this might seem like a gratuitous matter for an article. Sadly, it is not.

Because among Republican members of Congress, leading conservative media commentators, contrarian substackers, conservative tech bros, and friends of Donald Trump, the ability to post Hunter Biden’s cock shots on Twitter is the number-one issue in America this weekend. They believe that if they are not allowed to post porno, our constitutional republic may be in jeopardy.

I truly, truly wish I were joking.

Here’s a synopsis for the blessedly uninitiated:

The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden, right, in the buff.

There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background. Taibbi’s next list of material was removed by Twitter after being flagged by the Democratic National Committee. They include a picture of Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting his feet rubbed and a link to a Hunter Biden sex tape.

And that’s the big hubbub. Social media company removes unwanted dick pics: News at 11.

On Friday, Elon Musk promised to reveal “what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression by Twitter.” It turns out that he had provided a trove of internal corporate documents to the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack, Matt Taibbi, who said they amounted to a “unique and explosive story”—revealing the juicy details inside Twitter’s decision to suppress the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, which had previously been rejected by such liberal outlets as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal due to its suspicious provenance. Taibbi agreed to divulge these private emails on Twitter itself rather than via his Substack as part of a “few conditions,” which he does not detail, that were imposed on him, presumably by Musk or a Musk factotum.

The documents Taibbi tweeted on Friday were titillating in the way that reading private correspondence revealing what people were really saying around a controversial subject always is, but nothing new was learned about the contours of the story. The leak mostly relitigates two facts that have already received much ink across the media: 1) How Twitter throttled the New York Post’s initial story about Hunter’s laptop based on what we now know was an incorrect assessment of its source; and 2) How political campaigns and government agencies have worked with social media companies—in this case Twitter—to flag troubling content.

On the first point, the emails confirm the essential consensus that has come into focus in reporting on the matter: Twitter got out over its skis on the ban and a typical corporate bureaucratic goat rope ensued as the company tried to “unfuck” the situation, as one employee put it. To say that this is not a new revelation would be an understatement given that Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey admitted that this was a mistake over a year ago.

As such it was the latter point that drove the most hysterical discussion online on Friday.

The most retweeted installment in Taibbi’s thread (so far) was this, which purported to show the Biden campaign directing Twitter to delete specific tweets:

This supposed smoking gun resulted in Musk responding to his own journalistic stenographer on Twitter with a fire emoji and the comment “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment, what is.” Musk was so impressed with this digital citizen’s arrest, that he made it his pinned tweet, after which the MAGA attaboys for Musky came hot and heavy.

Right-wing commentator Buck Sexton (real name), said this was a “bright red line violation” and that Biden, should be IMPEACHED for it. Rep. James Comer (R-TN) was on Fox promising that everyone at Twitter involved with this would be brought before the House Oversight committee. Rep. Billy Long retweeted several MAGA influencers praising Elon for, among other things, “exposing corruption at the highest levels of society” (Projection Alert). Meanwhile Kari Lake hype man Pizzagate Jack Posobiec declared this the “biggest story in modern presidential election history,” claimed that “we can never go back to the country we were before this moment,” and donned this “a digital insurrection.”

In reality, all they really had was a digital erection.

As someone who once consulted for social media companies on content moderation issues, let me tell you, the amount of eggplant-related terms of service violations that these platforms review in a given year is so voluminous that we have not yet invented an artificial intelligence machine capable of counting them.

Yet Taibbi and Musk are trying to turn this mundane moderation matter into the story of the century by emphasizing a few misconceptions about how platforms work with political campaigns and what First Amendment obligations they do or do not have. To debunk a few of them:

1. Campaigns of all ideological stripes have direct lines into social media companies and make requests about offending content. There is nothing at all strange about what is shown in these emails. If Jeb’s kid’s grundle was posted by a Chinese troll, we surely would’ve flagged that for the company in the hopes they deleted it, and I suspect their internal correspondence on the matter would’ve been identical. This would not have been a “demand” or a “dictate” from our campaign, mind you. Companies can do what they want.

2. In this specific instance, the requests came from a campaign that has absolutely no government authority at all. At the time of the correspondence in question, Joe Biden was a private citizen running for office, while Donald Trump was the president. Taibbi acknowledges that Trump’s White House made requests that “were received and honored” and that “there’s no evidence—that I’ve seen—of any government involvement in the laptop story.” So if there are any First Amendment issues at play here—and I don’t believe there are since neither Musk nor Taibbi have demonstrated that the government made any mandates on Twitter—they would, in this case, only relate to the material that Trump wanted removed.

3. Why MAGA Republicans and Elon Musk are so adamant that people be able to post photos of Hunter’s johnson is something that should probably be explored with their respective preachers or psychiatrists, but it is certainly not a matter for constitutional scholars or litigators.

To sum up what we learned: Big penis, little news, First Amendment not under threat.

Musk and Taibbi have promised more editions of the “Twitter Files” in the coming days, maybe next time they won’t come up so limp.

Tim Miller is The Bulwark’s writer-at-large and the author of the best-selling book "Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell." He was previously political director for Republican Voters Against Trump and communications director for Jeb Bush 2016.

Dec. 2

Washington Post, Elon Musk says Kanye West suspended from Twitter after swastika tweet, Ellen Francis and Rachel Lerman, Dec. 2, 2022. Ye’s account was also restricted earlier this year after an antisemitic post.

Elon Musk, right, said Twitter suspended the rapper Ye on Friday after he shared an image of a swastika combined with the Star of David, weeks after his account was restored following a previous restriction.

It’s the latest fallout for Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, after he began making frequent antisemitic comments online and in interviews, which also caused him to lose several lucrative business deals. His tweets were a highly visible test of what new Twitter owner Musk — who has extolled his commitment to “free speech” — would allow on the site.

Musk and Twitter did not immediately say how long Ye would be unable to tweet on the social media site, where he had more than 31 million followers. Ye appeared to post a screenshot on Truth Social saying that he had been suspended from Twitter for 12 hours, using a recently created but verified account on the right-wing site, which is backed by former president Donald Trump.

His Twitter account appeared with a message saying “Account suspended” on Friday.

Musk had previously welcomed Ye back to Twitter, but this time the musician seemed to go too far.

“I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended,” Musk wrote overnight to a Twitter user telling him to “fix Kanye.”

Musk bought Twitter in October after months of legal wrangling, and his ownership so far has been marked by mass layoffs and upheaval within the company.

Infowars host Alex Jones at left, with (from left to right) ultra-right guests Ye, formerly Kanye West, Nick Fuentes and Ali Alexander.

Washington Post, Rapper Ye draws fresh denunciation for Hitler praise in Alex Jones interview, Azi Paybarah, Dec. 2, 2022 (print ed.). The rapper Ye praised Adolf Hitler and Nazis in an interview Thursday with far-right provocateur Alex Jones, drawing a fresh round of condemnation for his incendiary antisemitism a week after he dined with former president Donald Trump alongside white nationalist Nick Fuentes.

“I like Hitler,” a fully masked Ye told Jones. Minutes later, the rapper said, “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.”

Elon Musk says Ye, shown at right, suspended from Twitter after swastika tweet

Jones laughed and quickly added, “Well, I have to disagree with that.”

Ye’s comments prompted sharp denunciations from across the political spectrum, including from some onetime supporters of the rapper, formerly known as Kanye West.

The House Judiciary GOP Twitter account on Thursday deleted a tweet it posted in October that said simply: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a request for comment about Thursday’s show. Shortly after the Infowars segment ended, Ye’s Twitter account began retweeting posts about the “craziest interview in modern history.”

Trump’s dinner with antisemites provides test of GOP response to extremism

In a statement from the Republican Jewish Coalition, Chairman Norm Coleman, a former senator from Minnesota, and chief executive Matt Brooks called Jones, West and Fuentes “a disgusting triumvirate of conspiracy theorists, Holocaust deniers, and antisemites.”

 

Alex Jones, host and founder of the Texas-based Infowars show (file photo).

Washington Post, Alex Jones files for bankruptcy as he owes nearly $1.5B to Sandy Hook families, Justine McDaniel, Dec. 2, 2022. Infowars founder Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy Friday, weeks after courts ordered him to pay close to $1.5 billion in damages to the families of victims of the 2012 mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Jones, 48, has been ordered to pay $1.4 billion in a Connecticut case and $45.2 million in a Texas case for damage caused by his years of lies that the Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 children and six adults were killed, was a hoax. Jones and his attorney have said he will appeal.

Filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the southern district of Texas, Jones said his assets were worth between $1 million and $10 million and that his debts were between $1 billion and $10 billion. He said his debts were primarily business debts and estimated that he owed between 50 and 99 creditors.

Washington Post, Washington Post lays off Pulitzer-winning dance critic in spate of cuts, Sarah Ellison, Dec. 2, 2022 (print ed.). The Washington Post has laid off Pulitzer Prize winner Sarah L. Kaufman, one of the last full-time dance critics in the country, as part of a spate of job eliminations announced this week.

Kaufman, who has held her position for a quarter-century, was told her job had been cut Wednesday — the same day Post leaders announced plans to shutter the newspaper’s stand-alone Sunday magazine and lay off its 10 employees. The paper has also eliminated its weekly Style Invitational humor contest, which involved ending the contract of former longtime Post editor and current contributor Pat Myers.

“By eliminating the dance critic position and all that dance coverage can be, The Washington Post is narrowing its arts journalism and its scope. I can’t fathom why this institution is shutting itself off to what dancers and choreographers have to say about our lives and the world we live in,” Kaufman said in an interview.

“My principal concern is what is going to happen to those artists and the wider public knowledge of them,” she added.

The cuts are part of an industry-wide trend, including hundreds of layoffs announced by CNN this week. The Post did not offer laid-off staffers other roles at the paper. Shani George, the newspaper’s vice president of communications, said no further layoffs were planned this week.

The Washington Post Guild responded to the cuts in a tweet, saying, “there is no justification for layoffs amid a year of record hiring and growth.” Despite the layoffs, The Post has lately been adding positions in the coverage of technology, the climate, health and wellness, and in overseas news hubs.

Dec. 1

Kennedys & King, Analysis: JFK Assassination Records – A Watershed Moment? Mark Adamczyk, Dec. 1, 2022. A new lawsuit aimed at forcing the President and the National Archives to finally release JFK assassination records, as required by law, is before the courts. Mark E. Adamczyk, Esq., explains the issues involved.

On October 19, 2022, a lawsuit was filed by the Mary Ferrell Foundation against President Joseph R. Biden and the National Archives and Records Administration (“NARA”) to enforce the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The lawsuit seeks to compel the President and NARA to finally perform their duties under the federal law that governs the final declassification of JFK assassination records.

Some historical context is important. The John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the “JFK Records Act”) was unanimously passed by Congress in 1992. President Biden, a Senator at the time, voted in favor of the JFK Records Act. The JFK Records Act was unanimously approved by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. One can read the JFK Records Act in its entirety by searching “Public Law 102-526, 102d Congress, President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.”

The JFK Records Act is extremely favorable to the American public in terms of transparency and declassification of assassination records. On reading the JFK Records Act one does not have to go past the first page of the statute to see what Congress intended and how strong of an impact it was meant to have. For example:

Section 2(a)(2), JFK Records Act: “all Government records concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy should carry a presumption of immediate disclosure, and all records should be eventually disclosed to enable the public to become fully informed about the history surrounding the assassination.”

[Snip]

This is what your Congress declared in 1992, 30 years ago, and with the strongest of language. Congress declared that records pertaining to the JFK assassination had already been unreasonably withheld from the public for 30 years. Even the CIA felt the JFK Records Act was a different breed of declassification law, that had the teeth to go much further than FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) or any previous effort to shed light on deep government secrets. In a 1998 internal CIA Memorandum titled JFK Records Review – Lessons Learned, the CIA stated that, “The level of evidence required by the Board [the Assassination Records Review Board or ARRB] to postpone what was generally considered protectable information was extremely high and usually required documentation of ‘current harm’. Defenses based on general principles such as official cover or sources and methods were not acceptable.”

The Board closed down in 1998. In 2022, after another 30 years, and in spite of the strongest possible legislation, the President and responsible agencies are still withholding almost 15,000 records that are relevant to the JFK Assassination. Many records are still withheld in full. Others have been “released” with significant redactions. The point of this article is not to analyze which specific records have been withheld in full, which records still have significant redactions, or which records have not been turned over to NARA for inspection and preservation. The point of this article is to explain why legal action was necessary and also unfortunately for the American public, the last and only choice.

The JFK Records Act established and created the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). Upon creation of the JFK Records Act, agencies and government offices were ordered to deliver all assassination records to NARA. An assassination record is defined as any record related to the assassination of President Kennedy that was “created or made available for use by, obtained by, otherwise came into the possession of” (i) the Warren Commission; (ii) the Rockefeller Commission; (iii) the Church Committee; (iv) the Pike Committee; (v) the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA); (vi) any executive agency; and (vii) and other office of the Federal Government, or any state or local law enforcement office that performed work in connection with the federal inquiry in the Kennedy assassination. For anyone looking to understand the full scope of the JFK Records Act and the work of the ARRB, the ARRB’s Final Report is essential reading.

The above-defined assassination records became known as the JFK Records Collection, or the “Collection.” It was then the job of the ARRB, an independent body, to review the Collection and make legal determinations on which records might still qualify for classification under the standards of the JFK Records Act. What are those standards? For an agency or government office to request continued classification, section 6 of the JFK Records Act put the burden of proof on the objecting agencies. The burden of proof is not on researchers and the American public to demonstrate why an assassination record(s) should be released.

[Snip]

To its credit, the ARRB did a tremendous amount of work from 1994 to 1998, releasing more than 2 million pages of assassination records. In 1998, however, the ARRB’s authority had run its course according to its Congressional mandate and the ARRB was dissolved in late September of that year. NARA, and the American public, were then left with a Collection that still contained tens of thousands of classified records, totaling hundreds of thousands of pages. Agencies were required under the JFK Records Act to perform periodic review pursuant to the recommendations and Final Determinations of the ARRB in order to ensure timely declassification and release of the assassination records.

What happened after 1998? Virtually nothing. Without the independent ARRB to ensure that agencies and government offices continued their periodic review obligation, it was up to NARA to hope that agencies and government offices would finish the work on declassification. The intent of Congress is that maybe 1% (or less) of the Collection could plausibly still require classification as of 2017. Refer again to the declaration of Congress in the JFK Records Act: “most of the records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are almost 30 years old, and only in the rarest cases is there any legitimate need for continued protection of such records.” That declaration was made in 1992! Reflect on that for a moment.

October 26, 2017 was in fact the deadline for final declassification. Section 5(g)(2)(d) of the JFK Records Act required the President (Trump at the time) to take specific action to ensure that Congress’s mandate to release all assassination records by the deadline was completed. We are all aware of Trump’s tweets in which he committed to the final release of all assassination records on the eve of this deadline in 2017.

The President only has power to authorize continued classification of an assassination record if he certifies that “each” specific record continues to pose an identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations, as required by the Act; and that such identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure. In other words, the President is required to make decisions with regard to each assassination record under the same constraints and authority as the ARRB. The President was therefore required to finish the ARRB’s job by October 26, 2017, or provide published unclassified reasons, based on clear and convincing evidence for each assassination record withheld under the criteria set out in section 6 of the JFK Records Act, as outlined in detail above.

What happened instead? President Trump initially issued an order Executive Memorandum on October 26, 2017 delaying the release of assassination records. Plain and simple: This order was illegal and did not comply with the clear standards of the JFK Records Act. Trump’s first order in October 2017 authorized a 6-month delay for agencies and governments to continue their review of assassination records and make recommendations to Trump by April, 2018. Then it got worse. On April 26, 2018, President Trump issued another order Executive Memorandum authorizing another delay of over three (3) years.

In October of 2021, President Biden declassified about ten per cent of the outstanding documents. He then continued the trend of his predecessor, which is extremely troubling. President Biden issued another order Executive Memorandum giving agencies and government offices until December 15, 2022 to make final decisions on the release of assassination records. Let me say that again. President Biden has now empowered agencies and government offices to make their own decisions on declassification. This is exactly the opposite of how the JFK Records Act was intended to work. Like both of President Trump’s Memoranda, President Biden’s Executive Memorandum is simply unlawful.

Congress was abundantly clear that the purpose of the JFK Records Act was to publicly disclose all records related to the assassination of President Kennedy through an enforceable process of downgrading and declassification. In all but the “rarest of cases” was any assassination record to be kept secret beyond the final deadline for release on October 26, 2017. It therefore defies both reason and Congress that two Presidents, the Archivist, NARA, and a number of executive agencies have determined that the standards for continuing postponement of the withheld assassination records have somehow become less onerous now after that deadline for release and after 60 years have passed.

There is no reasonable expectation that President Biden will take appropriate action by December 15, 2022. If anything, he has empowered agencies and government offices to act with more secrecy in regard to the withheld assassination records. Thus the necessity of the legal action.

The government continues to operate under the findings of the Warren Commission, which is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the assassination and with no confederates. That Commission also concluded that Jack Ruby assassinated Oswald on his own and with no associates. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (“HSCA”) concluded in 1978 that there was a probable conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination and referred the matter to the U.S. Justice Department for further investigation. However, the Justice Department has done nothing to further investigate the murder of the 35th President of the United States. If Oswald did act alone, or even if he acted with other alleged “pro-Castro sympathizers”, why the continued secrecy? One can only assume that the thousands of withheld records will show a U.S. Intelligence connection to Oswald, which was covered up immediately after the assassination and is still being covered up. That is an article for another day, but it is the only logical conclusion at this time.

Only time will tell, and hopefully a Court will finally declare that there is no reasonable or legal reason to continue the sixty years of government secrecy.

 

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Elon Musk: the Julius Streicher of the digital age, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 22 books and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, Dec .1, 2022. Musk (shown above in a file photo) may fall victim to EU laws designed to combat the atrocities committed by Streicher.

By re-platforming in the name of "freedom of speech" previously banned neo-Nazi and pedophile Twitter users, Elon Musk has become the Julius Streicher of the digital age. Although Julius Streicher, one of the Nazi war criminals hanged in Nuremberg, is now largely remembered only in history books, his main avenue of propaganda, the Nazi weekly tabloid Der Stürmer ("The Storm"), lives on in QAnon and neo-Nazi conspiratorial lore.

Users linked to the neo-Nazi website "The Daily Stormer" continue to have a home on Twitter and Musk's announced policy of permitting all forms of hate speech on the social media platform will only increase the preponderance of such content. The homage paid to Der Stürmer by neo-Nazi Twitter users and QAnon, which uses the slogan "The Storm in Coming," is outrageous when one considers that Der Stürmer was considered so extreme in its vitriol against Jews that Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring banned his staff from reading it.

Politico, Never mind, Musk says — accusation against Apple was a ‘misunderstanding,’ Staff Report, Dec. 1, 2022 (print ed.). The billionaire writes that he and Apple CEO Tim Cook “resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store.”

Elon Musk had a much different tone Monday, when he issued a series of tweets accusing Apple of threatening to “withhold” Twitter from the App Store. See: Washington Post, Elon Musk says he’s launching a ‘war’ against Apple. It’s probably a losing battle, Naomi Nix.

Elon Musk publicly retracted his accusations that Apple had threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store — two days after his claim unleashed a tsunami of Republican attacks and threats of reprisals against the iPhone-maker.

In fact, the billionaire said in an unusually cordial tweet late Wednesday it was all just a big mix-up that Apple CEO Tim Cook managed to resolve in a “good conversation.”

 “Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store,” Musk wrote. “Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.”

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Musk did not explain how the alleged misunderstanding had occurred.

Cook is expected to be in Washington on Thursday, meeting with senators among others.

Musk had a much different tone Monday, when he issued a series of tweets accusing Apple of threatening to “withhold” Twitter from the App Store, among other unspecified “censorship actions” that he laid at Apple’s feet. Those tweets remained live on Musk’s Twitter feed as of Wednesday night.

Washington Post, Tech firms ‘facilitated’ covid aid fraud, collecting billions in fees, report finds, Tony Romm, Dec. 1, 2022. The findings, released Thursday and shared in advance with The Washington Post, come after an 18-month congressional investigation.

The probe revealed significant flaws that undermined the Paycheck Protection Program, a roughly $800 billion federal effort to support small businesses. Little-known firms such as Blueacorn and Womply allegedly collected taxpayer-funded fees as they overlooked signs of grift, according to a report released Thursday by congressional investigators

“The faster the better,” the workers were told at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as the little-known financial technology company Blueacorn raced to review small businesses that sought federal loans.

Speeding through applications, Blueacorn employees and contractors allegedly began to overlook possible signs of fraud, according to interviews and communications later amassed by investigators on Capitol Hill. The company weighed whether to prioritize “monster loans that will get everyone paid,” as the firm’s co-founder once said. And investigators found that Blueacorn collected about $1 billion in processing fees — while its operators may have secured fraudulent loans of their own.

The allegations against Blueacorn and several other firms are laid out in a sprawling, roughly 120-page report released Thursday by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, a congressional watchdog tasked to oversee roughly $5 trillion in federal pandemic aid. The 18-month probe — spanning more than 83,000 pages of documents, and shared in advance with The Washington Post — contends there was rampant abuse among a set of companies known as fintechs, which jeopardized federal efforts to rescue the economy and siphoned off public funds for possible private gain.

Some of the companies involved had never before managed federal aid, the report found. At the height of the pandemic, they failed to hire the right staff to thwart fraud. They amassed major profits from fees generated from the loans — large and small, genuine and problematic — that they processed and reviewed. And they repeatedly escaped scrutiny from the Small Business Administration, putting billions of dollars at risk, the probe found.

 

November

Nov. 30

Washington Post, Elon Musk says he’s launching a ‘war’ against Apple. It’s probably a losing battle, Naomi Nix, Nov. 30, 2022. Elon Musk launched a tirade against Apple this week after he said the phone-maker had mostly stopped advertising on Twitter and threatened to block the social media giant from its app store.

In some ways, the billionaire, right, seemed to be picking a losing fight. The amount Apple spends advertising on Twitter and the rules it sets for apps in its app store could play a big role in whether Twitter will be able to generate enough revenue to make Musk’s $44 billion deal to buy the platform worth it.

“If there’s one company for him not to pick a fight with in the world, it’s Apple, and he just poked the bear,” said Dan Ives, a financial analyst with Wedbush Securities. “It’s just another head-scratching battle that Musk has waged since his ownership of Twitter.”

In a series of tweets, Musk criticized Apple’s app store as a “monopoly” and raised whether the phone-maker supported censorship. Musk also signaled in a tweet that he intends to “go to war” with Apple.

It’s a risky strategy. Apple wields significant power over Twitter as the social media platform seeks to diversify its advertising business and boost subscription sales, according to experts. For starters, Twitter depends on Apple to reach the tens of millions of people who use Apple devices to search the web — a large and attractive market for the social media giant.

Judge’s ruling may take a bite out of Apple’s App Store, but falls short of calling the iPhone maker a monopolist

At the same time, Apple’s privacy rules probably will hurt Musk’s plans to build out Twitter’s targeted advertising business. And the 30 percent fee Apple extracts from app sales could put a dent in Musk’s plan to make money from subscriptions.

Musk joins a long line of other app-makers and regulators that have, so far, unsuccessfully sought to significantly rein in the power Apple wields over social media platforms. Facebook has launched a similar unsuccessful public relations campaign against Apple’s privacy rules, which cost Facebook billions in lost ad sales. Lawmakers to date have been unable to pass legislation that would give users the ability to download apps outside of Apple and Google’s app stores. And courts in the United States have so far not compelled Apple to significantly change the fees it collects on app sales.

Emptywheel, Analysis: On The Shoddy Journalistic Defense Of “Wikleaks,” Emptywheel, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Nov. 30, 2022. When it was first published, a letter that the NYT, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País signed, calling on the US government to drop the Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange, got the date of Assange’s arrest wrong — it was April 11, not April 12, 2019. The outlets have since corrected the error, though without crediting me for alerting them to it.

 As it currently exists, even after correcting that error, the Guardian version of the letter misspells WikiLeaks: “WikLeaks.”

For Julian Assange, publisher of WikLeaks, the publication of “Cablegate” and several other related leaks had the most severe consequences. On [April 11th] 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high-security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organised crime groups. He faces extradition to the US and a sentence of up to 175 years in an American maximum-security prison. [my emphasis]

The slovenly standards with which five major newspapers released this letter suggest the other inaccuracies in the letter may be the result of sloppiness or — in some cases — outright ignorance about the case on which they claim to comment.

[T]hese five media outlets seem to suggest that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act conspiracy alleged in “the indictment” is limited to Assange’s effort to crack a password.

It is — in the 2017 to 2019 charging documents. But not the one on which Assange is being extradited.

The hacking conspiracy, as currently charged, is a 5-year conspiracy that alleges far more than — and starts before — the password cracking seemingly described in the paragraph.

Are these media outlets upset that DOJ has charged Assange for a conspiracy in which at least six others have been prosecuted, including in the UK? Are they saying that’s what their own journalists do, recruit teenaged fraudsters who in turn recruit hackers for them? Or are these outlets simply unaware of the 2020 indictment, as many Assange boosters are?

New York Times, Major News Outlets Urge U.S. to Drop Charges Against Assange, Charlie Savage, Nov. 29, 2022 (print ed.). In a joint letter, news organizations warned that the indictment of Julian Assange could chill reporting about national security.

The New York Times and four European news organizations called on the United States government on Monday to drop its charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets.

In a joint open letter, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País said the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that threatened to undermine the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.

“Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”

Mr. Assange, who has been fighting extradition from Britain since his arrest there in 2019, is also accused of participating in a hacking-related conspiracy. The letter notably did not urge the Justice Department to drop that aspect of the case, though it said that “some of us are concerned” about it, too.

Each of the five organizations had worked with Mr. Assange in 2010 and 2011, during the events at the heart of the criminal case. WikiLeaks, which obtained leaked archives of classified American diplomatic cables and military files, gave early access to the troves to traditional news outlets, which published articles about notable revelations.

Nov. 29

New York Times, Meta Fined $275 Million for Breaking E.U. Data Privacy Law, Adam Satariano, Nov. 29, 2022 (print ed.). The penalty, imposed by Irish data regulators, brings European fines against Facebook’s parent company to more than $900 million since last year.

In the latest penalty against Meta for violating European privacy rules, the tech giant was fined roughly $275 million on Monday for a data leak discovered last year that led to the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users being published online.

The penalty, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, brings the total fines to more than $900 million that the regulator has imposed on Meta since last year. In September, the same regulator fined the company roughly $400 million for its mistreatment of children’s data. Last October, Irish authorities fined Meta, which was previously called Facebook, 225 million euros, or about $235 million, for violations related to its messaging service WhatsApp.

The accumulating penalties will be a welcome sign to privacy groups that want to see European Union regulators more aggressively enforce the General Data Protection Regulation. The law was hailed as a landmark moment in the regulation of technology companies when it took effect in 2018, but regulators have since faced criticism for not applying the rules strongly enough.

Ireland has been under pressure because of the key role it plays in enforcing E.U. data protection rules. The country is tasked with policing tech companies’ compliance with the 2018 law as a result of companies such as Meta, Google and Twitter all locating their E.U. headquarters in Ireland. TikTok, which also set up a E.U. hub in Ireland, is the subject of another investigation there.

Nov. 28

Washington Post, A letter from the editor: Introducing The Post’s expanded Climate coverage, Sally Buzbee (Washington Post Executive Editor), Nov. 28, 2022. Dear readers: Today, we are pleased to introduce The Washington Post’s expansion of Climate coverage, a major investment that is commensurate with the story of climate change and its profound impact on humanity and the planet.

The Post has long been a leader in covering the climate and environment. In 2020, our team won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for a series on global warming called “2C: Beyond the Limit,” and our coverage of environmental justice was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting this year.

 

Stella Moris and son Gabriel, right, and Max leave Belmarsh prison after visiting her partner and their father, Julian Assange. His two children could lose their father for the rest of their lives [Source: irishexaminer.com].

New York Times, Major News Outlets Urge U.S. to Drop Charges Against Assange, Charlie Savage, Nov. 28, 2022. In a joint letter, news organizations warned that the indictment of Julian Assange could chill reporting about national security.

The New York Times and four European news organizations called on the United States government on Monday to drop its charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets.

In a joint open letter, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País said the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that threatened to undermine the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.

“Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”

Mr. Assange, who has been fighting extradition from Britain since his arrest there in 2019, is also accused of participating in a hacking-related conspiracy. The letter notably did not urge the Justice Department to drop that aspect of the case, though it said that “some of us are concerned” about it, too.

Each of the five organizations had worked with Mr. Assange in 2010 and 2011, during the events at the heart of the criminal case. WikiLeaks, which obtained leaked archives of classified American diplomatic cables and military files, gave early access to the troves to traditional news outlets, which published articles about notable revelations.

A spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said that the company’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, in consultation with the legal department, decided to sign the letter. The newsroom was not involved, she said.

The case against Mr. Assange is complicated and does not turn on the question of whether he is considered a journalist, but rather on whether his journalistic-style activities of soliciting and publishing classified information can or should be treated as a crime.

The letter comes as Attorney General Merrick B. Garland has sought to rein in ways in which the Justice Department has made it harder for journalists to do their jobs. In October, he issued new regulations that ban the use of subpoenas, warrants or court orders to seize reporters’ communications records or demand their notes or testimony in an effort to uncover confidential sources in leak investigations.

Mr. Assange and WikiLeaks catapulted to global fame in 2010 when he began publishing classified videos and documents related to the United States’ wars and its foreign relations.

It eventually became clear that Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, had provided the archives to WikiLeaks. She was sentenced to 35 years in prison after a court-martial trial in 2013. President Barack Obama commuted most of her remaining sentence shortly before leaving office in January 2017.

Ms. Manning’s disclosures amounted to one of the most extraordinary leaks in American history. They included about 250,000 State Department cables that revealed many secret things around the world, dossiers about Guantánamo Bay detainees being held without trial and logs of significant events in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that divulged, among other things, that civilian casualties were higher than official estimates.

The letter noted that the same five institutions had publicly criticized Mr. Assange in 2011 when unredacted copies of the cables were released, revealing the names of people in dangerous countries who had helped the United States and putting their lives at risk. At Ms. Manning’s trial, prosecutors did not say anyone had been killed as a result, but officials have said the government spent significant resources in getting such people out of danger.

While the Obama administration and career law enforcement and national security officials disliked Mr. Assange, transparency advocates and antiwar activists treated him as an icon.

His public image shifted significantly after WikiLeaks published Democratic emails that had been hacked by the Russian government as part of its covert operation to help Donald J. Trump win the 2016 presidential election. But the criminal case against him is not about the Democratic emails.

The open letter notes that the Obama administration had weighed charging Mr. Assange in connection with the Manning leaks but did not do so — in part because there was no clear way to legally distinguish WikiLeaks’ actions from those of traditional news organizations like The Times that write about national security matters.

Politico, Musk draws GOP support after claiming Apple threatened to ban Twitter, Rebecca Kern, Nov. 28, 2022. Elon Musk’s latest broadsides have set the world’s richest tech billionaire against the world’s most valuable company, and pushed him further into the tech antitrust debate in Washington. Elon Musk alleged on Monday that Apple is threatening to remove Twitter from its App Store, a claim that brought swift condemnation from Republicans who have championed antitrust legislation aimed at the iPhone-maker.

Musk took a series of shots at Apple and CEO Tim Cook, saying Apple has threatened to “withhold” Twitter from the App Store but “won’t tell us why.” Apple did not respond to a request for comment, and Musk did not elaborate on what, if any, discussions he’s had with Apple.

The broadside by the world’s richest tech billionaire, right, attacking the world’s most valuable company, drew quick support from some GOP lawmakers while injecting his latest beef into the heart of Washington’s debates about Silicon Valley’s giants.

Smaller tech companies have complained for years about Apple’s ironclad control over its App Store, which it uses both to keep noxious content off its iPhones and iPads and to demand a share of app developers’ revenues. Apple and Google, which exerts similar oversight over the major marketplace for Android apps, most famously used that power to eject the conservative-friendly social media app Parler in January 2021, saying the platform had failed to squelch violent rhetoric after the pro-Trump insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

Monday’s unverified accusation from Musk provides new evidence that it’s time for Congress to rein Apple in, Republican lawmakers said.

Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah — the top Republicans on the House and Senate Judiciary committees’ antitrust panels — pushed for action on antitrust legislation that would ease Apple’s and Google’s control over their app markets.

“This is why we need to end the App Store duopoly before the end of this year. No one should have this kind of market power,” Buck tweeted.

Lee likewise pushed for passage of the Open App Markets Act (S. 2710, H.R. 5017), which Buck co-sponsored and seeks to prohibit companies from favoring their app stores over others.

“Apple and Google currently have a stranglehold on companies and have used their leverage to bully businesses,” added Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who is a co-sponsor of the Senate measure.

That bill and other antitrust measures aimed at the tech giants also have strong support from congressional Democrats. But they’re stalled for now and face dim odds of passage this Congress, as leadership for both parties focuses on an end-of-year spending package.

Any move by Apple to drop Twitter from its store could threaten the viability of Musk’s newly purchased $44 billion social media platform. Musk’s pledges of “free speech” on Twitter, along with the company’s mass layoffs, have raised complaints that the platform is already seeing a surge in the kinds of hate speech and disinformation that Apple’s policies prohibit.

Musk has announced he plans to offer a “general amnesty” this week for users that Twitter had previously banned for violating its rules. He already reinstated accounts for former President Donald Trump, whom it had booted after the assault on the Capitol, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

New York Times, Crypto Lender BlockFi Files for Bankruptcy as FTX Fallout Spreads, Lauren Hirsch, David Yaffe-Bellany and Ephrat Livni, Nov. 28, 2022.  BlockFi was financially entangled with FTX, and its stability was thrust into uncertainty after FTX collapsed.

BlockFi, a cryptocurrency lender and financial services firm, filed for bankruptcy on Monday, becoming the latest company in the crypto industry hobbled by the implosion of the embattled exchange FTX.

BlockFi had been reeling since the spring, when the collapse of several influential crypto firms pushed the market into a panic, sending the value of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin plunging. In June, FTX agreed to provide the company with a $400 million credit line, which BlockFi’s chief executive, Zac Prince, said would provide “access to capital that further bolsters our balance sheet.” The deal also gave FTX the option to buy BlockFi.

But that agreement meant that BlockFi was financially entangled with FTX, and its stability was thrust into uncertainty this month after a series of revelations about corporate missteps and suspicious management at FTX. A few days after the exchange collapsed, BlockFi suspended withdrawals, explaining that it had “significant exposure” to FTX, including undrawn amounts from the credit line and assets held on the FTX platform.

BlockFi is not the first crypto lender to collapse in a devastating year for the industry. After the spring crash, in which Bitcoin fell 20 percent in a week, two other lenders, Celsius Network and Voyager Digital, filed for bankruptcy.

New York Times, Meta Fined $275 Million for Breaking E.U. Data Privacy Law, Adam Satariano, Nov. 28, 2022. The penalty, imposed by Irish data regulators, brings European fines against Facebook’s parent company to more than $900 million since last year.

In the latest penalty against Meta for violating European privacy rules, the tech giant was fined roughly $275 million on Monday for a data leak discovered last year that led to the personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users being published online.

The penalty, imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, brings the total fines to more than $900 million that the regulator has imposed on Meta since last year. In September, the same regulator fined the company roughly $400 million for its mistreatment of children’s data. Last October, Irish authorities fined Meta, which was previously called Facebook, 225 million euros, or about $235 million, for violations related to its messaging service WhatsApp.

The accumulating penalties will be a welcome sign to privacy groups that want to see European Union regulators more aggressively enforce the General Data Protection Regulation. The law was hailed as a landmark moment in the regulation of technology companies when it took effect in 2018, but regulators have since faced criticism for not applying the rules strongly enough.

Ireland has been under pressure because of the key role it plays in enforcing E.U. data protection rules. The country is tasked with policing tech companies’ compliance with the 2018 law as a result of companies such as Meta, Google and Twitter all locating their E.U. headquarters in Ireland. TikTok, which also set up a E.U. hub in Ireland, is the subject of another investigation there.

 

Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has promoted chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, above, to a key role just half a year after the end of her U.S. extradition fight, setting up a potential family succession at one of China’s most important companies. Details: Washington Post, Huawei’s CFO promoted to a top post months after U.S. extradition deal, April 2, 2022. Meng, above, daughter of Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei, is now one of three rotating chairs who helm the tech giant for six-month intervals.

Washington Post, Analysis: FCC steps up campaign against Huawei and other Chinese tech companies, Tim Starks and Aaron Schaffer, Nov. 28, 2022. Last week’s long-awaited Federal Communications Commission ban of some Chinese telecommunications companies’ equipment is the latest step in a domestic and international push by the United States to isolate Huawei and other Chinese tech firms.

On Friday, the FCC said it voted unanimously to adopt rules banning U.S. sales and imports of Huawei and ZTE telecommunications equipment, Hytera digital radios and video surveillance systems made by Hikvision and Dahua, citing national security concerns. The ban focuses on equipment designed “for the purpose of public safety, security of government facilities, physical security surveillance of critical infrastructure, and other national security purposes.”

Washington Post, Shift in follower counts for Elizabeth Warren, Ted Cruz show how Twitter is beginning to change, Gerrit De Vynck, Jeremy B. Merrill and Luis Melgar, Nov. 28, 2022 (print ed.). High-profile Republican members of Congress gained tens of thousands of Twitter followers in the first few weeks of Elon Musk’s reign over the social media network, while their Democratic counterparts experienced a decline, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) all lost about 100,000 Twitter followers in the first three weeks of Musk’s ownership of Twitter, while Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) gained more than 300,000 each.

It’s difficult to tell exactly why follower counts go up and down, and the counts are often affected by Twitter banning bot accounts en masse. Not everyone following a specific politician is a supporter.

Still, the pattern suggests that tens of thousands of liberals may be leaving the site while conservatives are joining or becoming more active, shifting the demographics of the site under Musk’s ownership. The changes are in line with a trend that began in April, when Musk announced his intention to buy the company.

On average, Republicans gained 8,000 followers and Democrats lost 4,000. For its analysis, The Post analyzed data from ProPublica’s Represent tool, which tracks congressional Twitter activity.

Musk and Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.

‘Opening the gates of hell’: Musk says he will revive banned accounts

Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion late last month having pledged to bring his vision of free speech absolutism to the site. The day he took over, he said Twitter wouldn’t become “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” But users immediately started testing the boundaries of the new site under Musk, prompting hate speech to briefly surge.

Since then, Musk launched and rolled back Twitter Blue Verified, a $7.99 monthly membership that puts a check mark next to any account that pays. The move prompted an explosion of fake accounts. Musk also fired about half the staff, and required the rest of his workers to pledge to work long hours or leave the company, significantly reducing the number of people who are policing the site.

Musk also has restored several major rule-breaking accounts, including former president Donald Trump’s, following an unrepresentative and unscientific Twitter poll. On Thursday, after a similar poll, he said he would grant “general amnesty” for all banned accounts that didn’t post spam or break the law.

Advertisers have been fleeing, raising doubts about the site’s ability to make money. More than a third of Twitter’s top 100 marketers have not advertised on the social media network in the two weeks before Tuesday, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Musk says he is a political moderate, but has agreed with right-wing figures on the site who accuse Twitter’s previous management of being biased against conservatives. The day before the midterms, he called on his followers to vote Republican, breaking with tradition of other social media CEOs who typically do not explicitly endorse one party over another.

Washington Post, Bob Dylan apologizes for book controversy in rare public statement, Travis M. Andrews, Nov. 28, 2022. The legendary — and legendarily inscrutable — musician and Pulitzer Prize winner released a rare public statement Friday following a controversy concerning supposedly autographed copies of his new book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.”

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Dylan’s book of essays about more than 60 pop songs, offered fans the opportunity to purchase a hand-signed special edition for $600. Included with each copy was a letter from Jonathan Karp, the publisher’s CEO, which confirmed the signature’s authenticity.

Only, it turned out they weren’t authentic at all. Suspicious fans began comparing their signed copies on social media, only to notice that all the signatures looked exactly the same — quite a feat if Dylan himself had actually signed all reported 900 or so copies.

New York Times, Guest Essay: If We Ignore Donald Trump We Might See Who He Really Is, Patti Davis, Nov. 28, 2022. Ms. Davis is an author and a daughter of President Ronald Reagan.

When I was about 8 or 9, I was bullied ruthlessly in school by a boy in my class. I faked being sick so I wouldn’t have to go to school, but my parents figured out that something was going on and my father came in to talk to me. I confessed to him that I was scared of my tormentor, and what followed was a lesson in the beauty of ignoring another person. He explained that bullies crave attention and that if they are ignored, they sort of deflate. He then showed me how frustrating it is to feel like you’re invisible, by ignoring me when I tried to speak to him. It worked. I returned to school, I ignored the bully and he gave up his attacks on me.

Donald Trump is like the abusive boyfriend or ex-husband who won’t go away. In that situation, one would take out a restraining order, but obviously we can’t do that with Mr. Trump. So how about not making him the predominant news story? I have noticed, to be fair, that he is a little less predominant, but let’s face it, he is still everywhere in the news. I understand that announcing his candidacy for president is news. But does it have to be a front-page story? Does the end of his exile from Twitter have to dominate the day’s coverage? Does every move he makes, every ridiculous statement he utters, have to be reported?

With each news story, each segment on television, we are giving him the elixir that keeps him going — attention. There are plenty of things going on in the world that are more important than Donald Trump. We have a planet to save. Russia is still waging war on Ukraine, and still imprisoning American citizens like Brittney Griner. The West is running out of water. There are mass shootings so often it’s hard to keep track of them. Just to name a few really important issues.

What if there was a collective pledge among responsible news organizations to take Donald Trump off the front pages, to not talk about him every single day? He would huff and puff and try to blow the house down, but no one would be paying attention. Think of how much calmer the waters would be. Think of how many other stories would get the bandwidth they deserve.

Nov. 27

Washington Post, China sentences Canadian pop star Kris Wu to prison for rape, Joyce Lau and Claire Healy, Nov. 27, 2022 (print ed.). Chinese Canadian pop star Kris Wu was sentenced Friday to 13 years in prison by a Beijing court on charges including rape, in one of China’s more prominent #MeToo cases.

The sentence was welcomed by women’s rights advocates, who have clashed with Beijing’s growing intolerance for dissent and grass-roots activism under President Xi Jinping. Chinese lawyers said that Wu had the right to appeal his conviction. He had previously denied the allegations.

Wu, right, also known as Wu Yifan, rose to fame as part of the South Korean-Chinese boy band Exo and later became a solo performer. He was detained in 2021 after multiple accusations were levied against him, which led to public widespread condemnation. At the time, luxury brands such as French fashion label Louis Vuitton and German automaker Porsche distanced themselves from the pop idol, with whom they had commercial deals.

“It’s encouraging news, especially in the context of women’s rights in the country being continuously eroded in the past decade,” Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, said of the sentencing. “Now, other victims of sexual assault in China can feel empowered that they, too, can come forward with their stories and seek justice.”

However, Wang cautioned that censorship of women’s rights activists in China continued. She also noted that, in the case against Wu, the prosecution was “shrouded in secrecy” and “some of the criticism of authorities’ handling of his case was scrubbed from the Chinese internet,” she said.

 

 

 Washington Post, Elon Musk says he would support Ron DeSantis in 2024, Ruby Cramer, Nov. 27, 2022. His comments come after he urged his Twitter followers to back Republicans in the midterms.

Billionaire Twitter owner Elon Musk said he would back Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) if he runs for president in 2024. Tweeting into the night on Friday, Musk described DeSantis as a “sensible and centrist” choice.

He said he had been a “significant supporter” of the Obama administration and “reluctantly” supported President Biden over Donald Trump in 2020, but had been disappointed with the results of the last two years. On the eve of the midterm elections this month, Musk urged his more than 115 million followers to support Republicans.

Nov. 26

New York Times, Major Shareholder Raises Concerns About News Corp’s Merger With Fox, Lauren Hirsch, Maureen Farrell and Benjamin Mullin, Nov. 26, 2022 (print ed.). One of the largest shareholders in News Corp said on Friday that it had strong reservations about the plans of its chairman, Rupert Murdoch, to combine the two parts of his media business, News Corp and Fox — the biggest indicator yet that Mr. Murdoch could face significant opposition.

T. Rowe Price, which owns about 12 percent of News Corp — making it the company’s largest shareholder after the Murdoch family — said in an interview with The New York Times that a merger of the two companies would probably undervalue News Corp, which it believes is trading for less than the company is worth. It also said that because the Murdoch family owns a bigger share of Fox than News Corp, the family’s interests may lie more with Fox.

Both companies have appointed special committees of independent directors to review the proposal, which does not yet include a valuation for either company.

The deal, which could put Fox News under the same corporate umbrella as The Wall Street Journal, would reverse a decision made nearly a decade ago to divide the company’s film and TV holdings from its sprawling global portfolio of newspapers. Mr. Murdoch has said he sees cost-saving and moneymaking opportunities in joining the two companies, including ways to use the company’s assets for emerging business lines across the two companies, such as sports betting.

New York Times, Frustrations Simmer as Saudis Are Blocked From Watching the World Cup, Tariq Panja, Updated Nov. 26, 2022. A curious dispute between a Qatari broadcaster and Saudi media regulators has left millions of Saudis with no way to watch the matches.

In the stands at the World Cup, the fraternal bond between host Qatar and its neighbor Saudi Arabia has been clear. Fans have arrived to games dressed in the colors of both nations, and the countries’ rulers have made a show of publicly supporting one another.

Even so, the nations appear to be locked in a curious dispute about broadcasting that has made a majority of the World Cup’s games unavailable to viewers in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi-based customers of Tod TV, a streaming service launched in January by Qatar’s beIN Media Group, which owns rights to the tournament across the Middle East, were suddenly blocked from the platform an hour before the tournament’s opening game last Sunday. That meant they were not watching when their country’s crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, wearing a Qatar scarf, was given a seat next to the FIFA president Gianni Infantino, one removed from Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar.

Nov. 25

New York Times, Russia-Ukraine WarTech Giant Aims to Cut Ties With Russia, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Oleg Matsnev, Nov. 25, 2022 (print ed.). The parent firm of Russia’s most prominent technology company, Yandex, wants to cut ties with the country to shield its new businesses from the fallout of the war in Ukraine, a potential setback to President Vladimir V. Putin’s efforts to develop homegrown substitutes for high-tech Western goods and services that have been choked off by sanctions.

Under a sweeping overhaul, the Dutch holding company of Yandex — often referred to as “Russia’s Google” — would transfer its most promising new technologies to markets outside Russia and would sell its established businesses in the country, including a popular internet browser and food delivery and taxi-hailing apps, according to two people familiar with the matter who would not speak publicly because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

The company’s plan aims to shield itself from its home market, and highlights the stifling impact of Western sanctions on Russia’s once-thriving technology sector.

The people familiar with the matter said that the war in Ukraine has made the development of Yandex’s new technologies — such as self-driving cars, machine learning and cloud services — unviable. Such businesses, which require access to Western markets, experts and technology, would fail if they remain associated with Russia, one of them added.

Yandex’s Russian subsidiary would continue offering the same products in the country under the new owners, said the second person familiar with the matter.

It is not clear whether Yandex’s plan will go forward. The company must obtain the Kremlin’s approval to transfer Russian-registered technology licenses outside the country, one of the people said. It would also need to find buyers, most likely within Russia, for its businesses, and the overall restructuring plan would need to be approved by Yandex’s shareholders.

Yandex’s plan is backed by Aleksei Kudrin, Russia’s chief government auditor and a longtime confidant of Mr. Putin. Mr. Kudrin, one of few prominent economic liberals left in the Russian government, is acting for the company informally, but is expected to take a managerial role in the future.

Mr. Kudrin is expected to meet Mr. Putin this week to discuss Yandex’s future and other topics, said one of the people familiar with the matter. The Kremlin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Thursday that he had no information about such a meeting.

Yandex declined to comment. Russia’s Audit Chamber, Mr. Kudrin’s employer, did not respond to a request for comment.

The company’s restructuring plan was first reported by the Russian economic media outlet The Bell.

Western efforts to isolate Russia economically after its invasion of Ukraine have devastated the once-thriving company. The price of Yandex’s shares traded in Moscow has plunged 62 percent in the past year. The company’s New York-listed shares lost more than $20 billion in value before the Nasdaq stock exchange suspended their trading after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.

Thousands of Yandex’s more than 18,000 employees have left Russia since the start of the invasion. In March, the company’s deputy chief executive at the time, Tigran Khudaverdyan, defied the Kremlin line by calling it a “monstrous war” in a Facebook post.

To distance itself from the war’s political fallout, Yandex in August sold its online news aggregator, which had become filled with state propaganda because of increasingly draconian Russian media laws that bar criticism of the war.

The European Union imposed sanctions against Mr. Khudaverdyan in March for Yandex’s role in promoting the Kremlin’s war narrative. His boss, the company’s Israel-based founder, Arkady Volozh, was hit with sanctions by the bloc several months later. Both resigned from the company to allow it to continue operating in Europe.

Washington Post, Musk plans Twitter check mark feature again, this time with more colors, Rachel Lerman, Nov. 25, 2022. The second launch follows a chaotic rollout of the feature earlier this month.

Nov. 22

New York Times, A Lasting Legacy of Covid: Far-Right Platforms Spreading Health Myths, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Nov. 22, 2022. The Biden administration has pushed social media giants like Facebook to curb Covid misinformation. But it is thriving on fringe platforms like Gab, a hub for extremist content.

Not long after Randy Watt died of Covid-19, his daughter Danielle sat down at her computer, searching for clues as to why the smart and thoughtful man she knew had refused to get vaccinated. She pulled up Google, typed in a screen name he had used in the past and discovered a secret that stunned her.

Her father, she learned, had a hidden, virtual life on Gab, a far-right social media platform that traffics in Covid misinformation. And there was another surprise as well: As he fought the coronavirus, he told his followers that he was taking ivermectin, a drug used to treat parasitic infections that experts say has no benefit — and in fact can be dangerous — for patients with Covid-19.

“On two occasions I coughed so hard that larynx went into spasm and closed my airway,” he wrote in a post on Gab a few days before Christmas last year. “Frightening, yes, but relaxing instead of panicking allowed the airway to open in 15 to 20 seconds. Took second dose of ivermectin, along with ibuprofen for fever and my usual vitamin regimen. Rest, fluids, and prayer.”

Mr. Watt, a passionate songwriter and musician who loved the outdoors and had retired from an energy company in Ohio, died on Jan. 7. He was 64. His wife and two daughters are still struggling to understand what led him to a site like Gab, which his widow, Victoria Stefan Watt, blames for what she called his “senseless death.”

Around the country, countless Americans are suffering a very particular type of Covid grief — a mixture of anger, sorrow and shame that comes with losing a loved one who has consumed social media falsehoods. On Tuesday, in what was likely his last appearance in the White House briefing room before he retires from government service at the end of the year, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, pleaded with Americans to speak out against scientific misinformation.

“The people who have correct information, who take science seriously, who don’t have strange, way-out theories about things but who base what they say on evidence and data, need to speak up more,” Dr. Fauci said, “because the other side that just keeps putting out misinformation and disinformation seems to be tireless in that effort.”

Experts say the spread of health misinformation — particularly on fringe social media platforms like Gab — is likely to be a lasting legacy of the coronavirus pandemic. And there are no easy solutions.

“There has been such an incredible focus on developing vaccines quickly,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, adding: “But from my perspective, there’s a missing piece there — a missing social behavioral piece. You can get a vaccine out to people in 100 days but they think it’s poison? You’ve still got a big problem.”

In preparation for future pandemics, the White House recently released a new national biodefense strategy that calls for the government to “enhance messaging partnerships” before another biological threat emerges.

Nov. 21

 

Infowars radio host Alex Jones on Trial in Austin, TX in a civil trial (Pool photo by Briana Sanchez).

Washington Post, Sandy Hook families sued Alex Jones. Then he started moving money around, Jonathan O'Connell, Nov. 21, 2022. Records show Jones transferred millions from his media company to firms that he or his family members controlled.

Alex Jones was losing in court.

Parents of children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School had sued him and his media company for defamation after he repeatedly claimed the 2012 massacre in Connecticut was a hoax. Fans of the Infowars host had harassed and threatened grieving families. By the summer of 2020, two of the lawsuits weren’t going his way.

As the potential for damages mounted, Jones began moving millions of dollars out of his company, Free Speech Systems, and into companies controlled by himself, friends or relatives, according to a Washington Post review of financial statements, depositions and other court records. The transfers potentially put those funds out of reach of the Sandy Hook plaintiffs.

Between August 2020 and November 2021, Free Speech Systems signed promissory notes — essentially IOUs — for $55 million to cover what it said were past debts to a company called PQPR Holdings that Jones owns with his parents, according to financial records filed in court by Jones’s attorneys. PQPR, which is managed by Jones’s father, a dentist, had bought tens of millions of dollars in supplements for Jones that he then sold on his show, the records say. A lawyer for Free Speech systems has said in court that the debt accrued unnoticed due to sloppy bookkeeping.

then sold on his show, the records say. A lawyer for Free Speech systems has said in court that the debt accrued unnoticed due to sloppy bookkeeping.

 

New York Times, What Elon Musk Is Doing to Twitter Is What He Did at Tesla and SpaceX, Ryan Mac and Jack Ewing, Nov. 21, 2022. Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be “hard core.” Mr. Musk, above, has repeatedly used those tactics at many of his companies.

Elon Musk was sleeping at the office. He dismissed employees and executives at will. And he lamented his company was on the verge of bankruptcy.

That was back in 2018 and the company was Tesla, as Mr. Musk’s electric automaker struggled to build its mass-market vehicle, the Model 3.

“It was excruciating,” he told The New York Times at the time. “There were times when I didn’t leave the factory for three or four days — days when I didn’t go outside.”

The billionaire’s experience with what he called Tesla’s “production hell” has become a blueprint for the crisis he has created at Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion last month. Over the years, Mr. Musk has developed a playbook for managing his companies — including Tesla and the rocket manufacturer SpaceX — through periods of pain, employing shock treatment and alarmism and pushing his workers and himself to put aside their families and friends to spend all their energy on his mission.

At Twitter, Mr. Musk has used many of those same tactics to upend the social media company in just a few weeks.

Since late last month, the 51-year-old has laid off 50 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees and accepted the resignations of 1,200 or more. On Monday, he began another round of layoffs, two people said. He tweeted that he was sleeping at Twitter’s offices in San Francisco. And he has applied mission-driven language, telling Twitter’s workers that the company could go bankrupt if he wasn’t able to turn it around. Those who want to work on “Twitter 2.0” must commit to his “hard core” vision in writing, he has said.

New York Times, A Huge Merger’s Collapse Breaks a Pattern of Consolidation in Publishing, Elizabeth A. Harris, Alexandra Alter and Benjamin Mullin, Nov. 21, 2022. The deal to acquire Simon & Schuster would have made the buyer, Penguin Random House, even larger, and reduced the number of big publishers in the U.S. to four.

After two years of regulatory scrutiny and heated speculation in the publishing world, after a hard-fought court battle and hundreds of millions of dollars in expenses, Penguin Random House’s deal to buy Simon & Schuster officially collapsed on Monday.

The unraveling of this agreement stopped the largest publisher in the United States from growing substantially larger. It also paused consolidation in an industry that has been profoundly reshaped by mergers and acquisitions, with little regulatory intervention.

The implosion of the deal came three weeks after a federal judge ruled against Penguin Random House in an antitrust trial, blocking the sale from going forward on the grounds that the merger would be bad for competition and harmful to authors. In order to appeal the Oct. 31 ruling, Penguin Random House needed Paramount Global, Simon & Schuster’s parent company, to extend the purchase agreement, which expires on Tuesday. Instead, Paramount decided to terminate the deal, leaving Penguin Random House out of legal options and obligated to pay them a termination fee of $200 million.

“Penguin Random House remains convinced that it is the best home for Simon & Schuster’s employees and authors,” Penguin Random House said in a statement. “We believe the judge’s ruling is wrong and planned to appeal the decision, confident we could make a compelling and persuasive argument to reverse the lower court ruling on appeal. However, we have to accept Paramount’s decision not to move forward.”

 

New York Times, Todd and Julie Chrisley, Reality TV Stars, Are Sentenced to Prison for Fraud and Tax Evasion, Jesus Jiménez, Nov. 21, 2022. Todd and Julie Chrisley, shown above, the stars of the reality TV show “Chrisley Knows Best,” were sentenced on Monday to federal prison after being convicted of defrauding banks to obtain more than $30 million in personal loans and evading taxes to fund a lavish lifestyle.

Judge Eleanor Ross of U.S. District Court in Atlanta sentenced Mr. Chrisley, 54, to 12 years in prison, and Ms. Chrisley, 49, to seven years in prison, according to the Justice Department. They will also be on probation for three years upon their release, and they will have to pay restitution, an amount that will be determined later, the Justice Department said.

The couple, who presented themselves on television as real estate moguls with luxurious lifestyles, were convicted in June of conspiring to defraud banks and evading taxes for several years.

After a three-week trial, a jury found the couple guilty on eight counts of financial fraud and two counts of tax evasion; Ms. Chrisley was convicted of additional counts of wire fraud and obstruction of justice.

Nov. 17

New York Times, Resignations Roil Twitter as Elon Musk Tries Persuading Some Workers to Stay, Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac and David McCabe, Nov. 17, 2022. Mr. Musk, Twitter’s new owner, had given employees a Thursday deadline to decide whether to leave or stay “to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0.”

Hours before a Thursday deadline that Elon Musk had given Twitter employees to decide whether to stay or leave their jobs, the social media company appeared to be in disarray.

Mr. Musk and his advisers held meetings with some Twitter workers whom they deemed “critical” to stop them from leaving, four people with knowledge of the conversations said. He sent out confusing messages about the company’s remote work policy, appearing to soften his stance on not allowing people to work from home before warning their managers, according to those people and internal emails viewed by The New York Times.

All the while, two people said, resignations started to roll in. By the deadline, 5 p.m. Eastern time, hundreds of Twitter employees appeared to have decided to depart with three months of severance pay, the people said.

Their exits added to the turmoil at Twitter since Mr. Musk, 51, completed his $44 billion takeover last month. The billionaire has laid off half of Twitter’s 7,500 full-time workers, fired dissenters and told employees that they need to be “extremely hard core” to make the company a success.

On Wednesday, Mr. Musk gave Twitter’s remaining employees just under 36 hours to leave or commit to building “a breakthrough Twitter 2.0.” Those who departed would get the three months of severance pay, he said. He positioned the move as a way to make the company the most competitive it could be, though the action also provided an opportunity to further cut costs and purge the firm of disaffected workers.

The shedding of so many employees in such a compressed period has raised questions about how Twitter will keep operating effectively. While Mr. Musk has brought in some engineers and managers from his other companies, such as the electric automaker Tesla, many of them are just coming up to speed on how the social media service works, five people said.

Mr. Musk and Twitter, which no longer has a communications department, did not respond to requests for comment.

Twitter faces not just internal challenges with Mr. Musk’s ownership. On Thursday, seven Democratic senators called for the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether the company had violated a consumer privacy agreement with the agency since Mr. Musk took over. The letter followed the resignations of Twitter’s security executives last week after Mr. Musk appeared to change some of the company’s data security practices.

Those “reported changes to internal reviews and data security practices” at Twitter have put consumers “at risk,” the lawmakers wrote. They included Senators Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Nov. 16

 

Washington Post, Twitter ‘will need to be extremely hardcore,’ Musk says, telling staff to sign pledge or leave, Faiz Siddiqui and Jeremy B. Merrill, Nov. 16, 2022. Elon Musk told Twitter employees that they have until 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday to sign a pledge if they want to be part of the company. Anyone who does not would receive three months of severance pay, the email, which was shared with The Washington Post, added. It comes as Musk’s first major feature, Twitter’s Blue Verified, was halted while the company probes issues that arose from its launch.

Elon Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter employees Wednesday morning: commit to a new “hardcore” Twitter or leave the company with severance pay.

Employees were told they had to a sign a pledge to stay on with the company. “If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below,” read the email to all staff, which linked to an online form.

Anyone who did not sign the pledge by 5 p.m. Eastern time Thursday would receive three months of severance pay, the message said.

In the midnight email, which was obtained by The Washington Post, Musk said Twitter “will need to be extremely hardcore” going forward. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity,” he said. “Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

The pledge email, paired with a new policy mandating a return to the office, is expected to lead to even more attrition at a company whose staff Musk had already reduced by half. Musk said Twitter would be more of an engineer-driven operation going forward — and while the design and product-management areas would still be important and report to him, he said, “those writing great code will constitute the majority of our team and have the greatest sway.”

It also comes as Musk says he is tabling Twitter’s Blue Verified, his first major product since taking over last month as Twitter’s owner and CEO, while the company sorts out issues with the feature following a botched rollout.

A week ago, Twitter debuted the product, which gives users a blue check-mark icon next to their name for a fee of $7.99 a month, and promises to reduce the number of ads they see by half as well as giving their posts additional visibility. By Friday, the option disappeared amid fake accounts impersonating people such as President Biden and basketball star LeBron James.

Sign-ups were paused Thursday night, and Musk announced via a tweet late Tuesday that the service wouldn’t “relaunch” until Nov. 29 “to make sure that it is rock solid.”

But inside Twitter, staff are using the additional two weeks to conduct a postmortem on the launch, trying to understand why the impersonations spiraled out of control, according to a person with knowledge of the internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Washington Post, Broadcast networks take a pass on Trump campaign announcement, Jeremy Barr, Nov. 16, 2022. ABC, NBC, CBS stuck to regular entertainment programming while Fox News and CNN carried much of the speech but not all of it.

When Donald Trump announced on Tuesday night that he will mount another run for the White House — a rare case of a former president seeking his old job — the country’s three major broadcast networks opted not to carry his speech live.

ABC, NBC and CBS all decided to stick with previously scheduled entertainment programming — reality show “Bachelor in Paradise” on ABC, science fiction drama “La Brea” on NBC and a fictionalized show about the FBI on CBS.

On cable, Fox News Channel aired most of the speech live while CNN carried the first 25 minutes before switching back to a panel discussion after Trump formally announced his 2024 candidacy. MSNBC, however, chose not to air the speech, choosing instead to stick with Alex Wagner’s 9 p.m. show.

Fox’s decision to carry the speech is notable considering that several network commentators expressed a clear on-air preference last week for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to take over as the Republican 2024 standard-bearer after the party’s disappointing showing in the midterm elections. Two other properties in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, also signaled last week a preference for DeSantis, with the Post declaring him “DeFUTURE” on the tabloid’s cover and the Journal’s editorial board declaring that “Trump Is the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”

During the 2016 presidential race, CNN was frequently criticized for giving ample airtime to Trump’s speeches. The network’s new chief, Chris Licht, told employees on Tuesday that coverage decisions about Trump as a candidate would be made on a case-by-case basis.

Washington Post, Who’s the Queen of Christmas? Not Mariah Carey, trademark agency rules, María Luisa Paúl, Nov. 16, 2022. Some call it the holidays. Others call it Mariah Carey season, a nod to her chart-topping “All I Want For Christmas Is You” suddenly defrosting and playing on repeat. But while Carey, right, might’ve filed a petition to be the one and only “Queen of Christmas,” that royal title will remain free for anyone to claim this winter.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office denied Carey’s applications to trademark “Queen of Christmas.” Earlier this month, the agency also rejected the singer’s applications for “Princess Christmas” and “QOC.” Last year, the pop star had signaled she wanted to splash such phrases onto a wide range of items, from skin care products to dog leashes to coconut milk to music titles. What ensued was a legal battle with another “Queen of Christmas.”

Elizabeth Chan, a singer whose career is exclusively devoted to Christmas music, filed a series of oppositions to Carey’s trademarking bid — which would’ve prevented future use of the Yuletide moniker.

“The kind of music and the Christmas culture that allowed [Carey] and me to be a ‘Queen of Christmas’ is what I wanted to offer to generations after we’re long gone,” Chan told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “Whether it’s grandmothers baking cookies or Etsy sellers or Christmas movies, it takes a lot of people to help usher in the season, and for one person to outrightly own that is wrong.”

Nov. 15

Washington Post, Opinion: The media need a serious overhaul of their election coverage, Jennifer Rubin, Nov. 15, 2022. After the 2016 election, the mainstream media and pollsters were filled with remorse for horribly misreading the national mood and wrongly predicting a Hillary Clinton win. How had they missed the mark so badly?

Yet after a similar media failure in this year’s midterm elections? Mostly crickets so far. If the media really want to improve their credibility and serve the interests of democracy, they need another round of introspection. What’s needed is serious and permanent changes in the way the media cover elections — especially those involving former president Donald Trump.

The Trump challenge starts Tuesday night, when the former president is expected to announce his presidential campaign for 2024. The media would be wise not to cover the news conference live, which will almost certainly include a host of election conspiracy theories.

Indeed, as a general rule, the media must be especially clear whenever Trump lies (virtually every time he opens his mouth). They should continue to frame headlines to underscore when his statements are untrue. And while he might generate more clicks and attract more eyeballs, news outlets should not devote any more time or space to him than other top candidates. They dare not make the mistake as they did in 2016, when they acted as a free communications team.

Beyond Trump, pollsters and reporters need to recognize that women aren’t a minority or interest group. They are the average voter. Forget diners as the locale for interviews with voters; go to yoga studios, school pickup lines, supermarkets and other places where ordinary women can be found. Find out what their concerns are and what candidate qualities turn them off. If they do this, maybe next time the media will not underestimate women’s disgust with right-wing politicians.

The media should also acknowledge error in the widespread narrative that Latinos are fleeing the Democratic Party. They are not. Florida, where many Latinos live, has trended Republican, but nationwide, the majority of Latinos still vote Democratic.

Next, it’s long past time to stop allowing polls to shape coverage. A shift away from horserace coverage, which is often wrong and utterly irrelevant, would allow the media to focus on candidates’ experience and character, major policy issues and voters’ attitudes and demographic changes. Journalism should not be a Magic Eight Ball; it is about understanding and analyzing the recent past and present.

Emptywheel, Analysis: Devlin Barrett’s “People Familiar With The Matter,” Emptywheel, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Nov. 15, 2022. As Devlin Barrett’s sources would have it, a man whose business ties to the Saudis include a $2 billion investment in his son-in-law, a golf partnership of undisclosed value, and a new hotel development in Oman would have no business interest in stealing highly sensitive documents describing Iran’s missile systems.

I’ll let you decide whether the claim, made in Barrett’s latest report on the stolen documents case, means the FBI is considering the issue very narrowly or Barrett’s sources are bullshitting him.

That review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump’s possession, these people said. FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.

Barrett has a history of credulously repeating what right wing FBI agents feed him for their own political goals, which means it’s unclear how seriously to take this report. Particularly given several critical details Barrett’s story does not mention.

 

Partially redacted documents with classified markings, including colored cover sheets indicating their status, that FBI agents reported finding in former president Donald Trump’s office at his Mar-a-Lago estate. The photo shows the cover pages of a smattering of paperclip-bound classified documents — some marked as “TOP SECRET//SCI” with bright yellow borders and one marked as “SECRET//SCI” with a rust-colored border — along with whited-out pages, splayed out on a carpet at Mar-a-Lago. Beside them sits a cardboard box filled with gold-framed pictures, including a Time magazine cover. (U.S. Department of Justice photo.)

Washington Post, Investigators see ego, not money, as Trump’s motive on classified papers, Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey, Nov. 15, 2022 (print ed.). A review by agents and prosecutors found no discernible business interest in the Mar-a-Lago documents, people familiar with the matter said.

Federal agents and prosecutors have come to believe former president Donald Trump’s motive for allegedly taking and keeping classified documents was largely his ego and a desire to hold on to the materials as trophies or mementos, according to people familiar with the matter.

As part of the investigation, federal authorities reviewed the classified documents that were recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club, looking to see if the types of information contained in them pointed to any kind of pattern or similarities, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.

That review has not found any apparent business advantage to the types of classified information in Trump’s possession, these people said. FBI interviews with witnesses so far, they said, also do not point to any nefarious effort by Trump to leverage, sell or use the government secrets. Instead, the former president seemed motivated by a more basic desire not to give up what he believed was his property, these people said.

Several Trump advisers said that each time he was asked to give documents or materials back, his stance hardened, and that he gravitated toward lawyers and advisers who indulged his more pugilistic desires. Trump repeatedly said the materials were his, not the government’s — often in profane terms, two of these people said.

The people familiar with the matter cautioned that the investigation is ongoing, that no final determinations have been made, and that it is possible additional information could emerge that changes investigators’ understanding of Trump’s motivations. But they said the evidence collected over a period of months indicates the primary explanation for potentially criminal conduct was Trump’s ego and intransigence.

A Justice Department spokesman and an FBI spokeswoman declined to comment. A Trump spokesman did not return a request for comment Monday.

Trump and the Mar-a-Lago documents: a timeline

The analysis of Trump’s likely motive in allegedly keeping the documents is not, strictly speaking, an element of determining whether he or anyone around him committed a crime or should be charged with one. Justice Department policy dictates that prosecutors file criminal charges in cases in which they believe a crime was committed and the evidence is strong enough to lead to a conviction that will hold up on appeal. But as a practical matter, motive is an important part of how prosecutors assess cases and decide whether to file criminal charges.

Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor, said keeping hundreds of classified documents, many marked top secret, at a private home “is such a perplexing thing to do” that it makes sense for prosecutors to search for a motive.

“It makes perfect sense as to why prosecutors would be spending time scouring through the various records and documents to look for some kind of pattern or theme to explain why certain records were kept and why others were not,” Mintz said. “In presenting a case to a jury, prosecutors typically want to explain the motive for committing a crime. It’s not necessary to prove a crime, but it helps tell the story of exactly how a crime unfolded, according to the government.”

Court papers say the Justice Department has been investigating Trump and his advisers for three potential crimes: mishandling of national security secrets, obstruction, and destruction of government records.

The Washington Post has previously reported that among the most sensitive classified documents recovered by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago were documents about Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter.

At least one of the documents seized by the FBI at Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8 describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Other documents described highly sensitive intelligence work aimed at China, they said. The Post has also reported that some of the material focuses on the defense systems of a foreign country, including its nuclear capabilities.

Two advisers to the former president who personally reviewed boxes of material in Trump’s White House said he often threw hundreds of pieces of paper in boxes — mixing in highly sensitive documents with years-old schedules and other mundane material.

Top national security prosecutor joins Justice Dept.' Mar-a-Lago investigation

The FBI has recovered three batches of classified documents from Mar-a-Lago in the past year. The first batch, in January, came when Trump agreed to hand over to the National Archives and Records Administration 15 boxes of material that the agency believed contained historical presidential records. In those boxes, archivists found 184 classified documents, including 25 marked top secret, which were scattered throughout the boxes in no particular order, according to court filings.

Washington Post, Jim Bohannon, fixture of late-night radio, dies at 78, Emily Langer and Marc Fisher, Nov. 15, 2022. ‘The Jim Bohannon Show’ provided amiable companionship to millions of night owls during its decades in national syndication.

Jim Bohannon, a fixture of talk radio who provided amiable companionship to millions of night owls, chatting up celebrity guests and callers of all stripes during his decades in national syndication, died Nov. 12 at a hospice facility in Seneca, S.C. He was 78.

The cause was esophageal cancer, said his wife, Annabelle Bohannon.

Mr. Bohannon got his start more than half a century ago as a local radio host in Washington. But he was best known for “The Jim Bohannon Show,” a late-night program that aired for the past 29 years on more than 500 radio stations across the country.

Washington Post, World Cup: In Qatar, one of the World Cup’s first female refs will live an ‘impossible dream’, Thomas Floyd, Nov. 15, 2022. Kathryn Nesbitt, who left her analytical chemistry position to pursue officiating full time, is one of six women in FIFA’s pool of referees for the World Cup.

Kathryn Nesbitt had spent a decade balancing parallel careers in analytical chemistry and soccer officiating when, in 2019, she put her scientific brain to work and synthesized a solution for the most pragmatic path forward.

Two weeks before Nesbitt left for France to serve as an assistant referee at the Women’s World Cup, she stepped down from her assistant professor position at Towson University to focus on officiating full time. What data points informed that decision? She reached the pinnacle of women’s soccer refereeing that summer and had broken into top-flight men’s soccer as well, with dozens of MLS games under her belt. Knowing the 2026 men’s World Cup would be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico, Nesbitt mapped out a plan that would culminate in her being on the sideline of the sport’s premier spectacle.

“I had no idea if they’d ever let women officiate at that World Cup, but I wanted to see if I could do that,” said Nesbitt, 34. “I realized at the time that in order to even attempt that, I would need to dedicate all of my time and effort into one job.”

Washington Post, A fake tweet sparked panic at Eli Lilly and may have cost Twitter millions, Drew Harwell, Nov. 15, 2022 (print ed.). The pharmaceutical giant halted ad spending after fake blue-check accounts went viral. For $8, Twitter is ‘losing out on millions of dollars in ad revenue,’ a former Eli Lilly official said.

The nine-word tweet was sent Thursday afternoon from an account using the name and logo of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., and it immediately attracted a giant response: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”

The tweet carried a blue “verified” check mark, a badge that Twitter had used for years to signal an account’s authenticity — and that Twitter’s new billionaire owner, Elon Musk, had, while declaring “power to the people!” suddenly opened to anyone, regardless of their identity, as long as they paid $8.

But the tweet was a fake — one of what became a fast-multiplying horde of impersonated businesses, political leaders, government agencies and celebrities. By the time Twitter had removed the tweet, more than six hours later, the account had inspired other fake Eli Lilly copycats and been viewed millions of times.

Inside the real Eli Lilly, the fake sparked a panic, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand’s reputation or push false claims about people’s medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn’t react for hours.

The aftermath of that $8 spoof offers a potentially costly lesson for Musk, who has long treated Twitter as a playground for bawdy jokes and trolls but now must find a way to operate as a business following his $44 billion takeover.

By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns — a potentially serious blow, given that the $330 billion company controls the kind of massive advertising budget that Musk says the company needs to avoid bankruptcy. They also paused their Twitter publishing plan for all corporate accounts around the world.

 

Washington Post, U.S. to probe killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, spurring outrage in Israel, Shira Rubin and Erin Cunningham, Updated Nov. 15, 2022. The United States will launch an investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the veteran Palestinian American journalist for Al Jazeera who was killed while covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, right, said in a statement Monday.

He added that Israel, which has published its own probe, will not cooperate with the proceedings.

The investigation comes as Israel prepares to swear in the most right-wing government in its history. It marks a pivot for the Biden administration, which, in the six months since Abu Akleh’s killing, has maintained that the journalist’s death was a “tragic result of a gunfight in the context of an Israeli raid in the West Bank,” for which the United States was not seeking a criminal investigation, the State Department said in September.

How Shireen Abu Akleh was killed

In July, a U.S.-led forensic and ballistics analysis concluded that Abu Akleh probably was killed by unintentional Israeli gunfire, despite wearing clearly marked press gear in an area far from Palestinian gunmen, according to eyewitnesses and fellow journalists interviewed by The Washington Post.

Two months later, Israel published similar conclusions, although it said that the bullet, which was handed over to Israeli ballistics experts in the presence of American officials in July, was too damaged to provide conclusive results. Palestinian Authority officials have called the killing an “assassination.”

In an English-language statement shared with reporters, Gantz said the U.S. Justice Department had decided to investigate Abu Akleh’s death, and he called the move “a grave mistake.”

He said that the Israeli army “has conducted a professional, independent investigation, which was presented to American officials with whom the case details were shared. I have delivered a message to US representatives that we stand by the [Israel Defense Forces] soldiers, and that we will not cooperate with an external investigation.”

“This is more than a grave mistake; it’s an outrage,” said Yaki Dayan, a former chief of staff in Israel’s Foreign Ministry. “It’s basically a vote of no confidence on Israel.”

The U.S. Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Israel’s Channel 14 was first to report Monday that the FBI had decided to open an investigation into the killing.

Investigations by The Post, along with other news, investigative and human rights organizations, found that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh most probably originated from an Israeli soldier.

In recent months, Abu Akleh’s family has led a high-profile campaign for accountability, meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Pope Francis.

“Shireen is an American citizen, and every American citizen deserves protection,” Anton Abu Akleh, Shireen’s brother, told The Post in June. He said he was in regular contact with U.S. representatives since his sister’s killing on May 11.

Nov. 14

New York Times, TikTok Builds Itself Into an Ads Juggernaut, Kalley Huang, Isabella Simonetti and Tiffany Hsu, Nov. 14, 2022. The Chinese-owned video app’s ad business is thriving, even as a digital advertising slump hurts Meta, Snap and other rivals.

Last month, Tiffany & Company shared a sleek black-and-white video featuring the pop superstar Beyoncé dripping in gems and surrounded by nightclub revelers. The minute-long jewelry ad was posted on Instagram, where it drew 1.6 million views.

A week later, Tiffany posted a different video on TikTok, the viral short-video app. That ad showed the social media personality Kate Bartlett talking directly to viewers from a bathroom and then trying on small trinkets at a Tiffany store. It has been watched more than 5.2 million times.

TikTok was once best known for viral dance videos and pop songs. But in recent years, the app — which is owned by China’s ByteDance — has also built itself into a digital advertising juggernaut, selling access to its growing internet foothold to brands and developing products that make it easier to advertise on the platform.

This year, TikTok is on track to make nearly $10 billion in ad revenue, more than double what it generated last year, according to estimates from the research company Insider Intelligence. TikTok’s ad revenue this year is expected to eclipse that of rivals like Twitter and Snap, although its business remains small compared with Google and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

TikTok is growing even as digital advertising is slumping in a global economic slowdown. The slowdown has hurt Snap, Google and Meta. And TikTok, though not immune, appears to be compounding its rivals’ woes by stealing business from them.

New York Times, Amazon Is Said to Plan to Lay Off Thousands of Employees, Karen Weise, Nov. 14, 2022. The job cuts of approximately 10,000 would focus on Amazon’s devices organization, as well as its retail division and human resources.

Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, people with knowledge of the matter said, in what would be the largest job cuts in the company’s history.

The cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The number of layoffs remains fluid and is likely to roll out team by team rather than all at once as each business finishes plans, one person said. But if it stays around 10,000, it would represent roughly 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global work force of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers.

Amazon’s planned retrenchment during the critical holiday shopping season — when the company typically has valued stability — shows how quickly the souring global economy has put pressure on it to trim businesses that have been overstaffed or underdelivering for years.

Amazon would also become the latest technology company to lay off workers, which only recently it had been fighting to retain. The e-commerce giant more than doubled the cap on cash compensation for its tech workers this year, citing “a particularly competitive labor market.”

Washington Post, The tech CEO spending millions to stop Elon Musk, Gerrit De Vynck, Nov. 14, 2022 (print ed.). Dan O’Dowd says Tesla’s ‘Full Self Driving’ software shouldn’t be on the road. He’ll keep running over test dummies until someone listens.

When Dan O’Dowd had his midlife crisis, he bought two near-identical Tesla Roadsters, the first model the electric carmaker ever produced. This year, the 66 year-old tech entrepreneur added another to his collection: a Model 3 equipped with Full Self-Driving Beta — a software program that allows the car to drive on its own on highways and busy city streets.

The third Tesla is crucial for an unusual hobby: O’Dowd is waging a multimillion-dollar campaign to get Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software off the roads — before Tesla CEO Elon Musk follows through with plans to make the tech available worldwide by the end of the year.

O’Dowd, who made his fortune selling software to military customers, has been using the Model 3 to test and film the self-driving software. He’s documented what appear to be examples of the car swerving across the centerline toward oncoming traffic, failing to slow down in a school zone and missing stop signs. This summer, he triggered an uproar by releasing a video showing his Tesla — allegedly in Full Self-Driving mode — mowing down child-size mannequins.

“If Tesla gets away with this and ships this product and I can’t convince the public that a self-driving car that drives like a drunken, suicidal 13-year-old shouldn’t be on the road, I’m going to fail,” O’Dowd said in an interview from his Santa Barbara office, where glass cases display his collection of ancient coins and auction-bought mementos from NASA moon missions.

How auto regulators played mind games with Elon Musk

O’Dowd has run nationwide TV ads with the videos and even launched an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate as part of his one-man crusade to challenge what he sees as the cavalier development of dangerous technology. For O’Dowd and other skeptics, the program is a deadly experiment foisted on an unsuspecting public — a view underscored by a recently filed class-action lawsuit and a reported Department of Justice investigation into the tech.

Despite O’Dowd’s high-profile campaign, and the concern from some regulators and politicians, Tesla is charging ahead with what it claims is world-changing technology. The company and its supporters argue their approach will help usher in a future in which death from human errors on roadways is eliminated. At the end of September, during a four-hour event in which Tesla showed off its latest artificial intelligence tech, Musk said Full Self-Driving is already saving lives and keeping it off public roads would be “morally wrong.”

“At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people,” Musk said. Musk and Tesla, which does not typically answer media inquiries, did not respond to requests for comment.

Nov. 12

Washington Post, Alec Baldwin sues ‘Rust’ armorer and crew members over fatal shooting, Meryl Kornfield and Travis M. Andrews, Nov. 12, 2022 (print ed.). Alec Baldwin is suing the armorer and other people associated with the film “Rust” after he was given a loaded gun on set that fired last year, killing a cinematographer.

Baldwin alleges in the lawsuit that the shooting was caused by the negligence of armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was in charge of guns and ammunition on the set; assistant director Dave Halls, who handed the gun to Baldwin and said it was safe; Sarah Zachry, who was in charge of props; and Seth Kenney, who supplied the guns and ammunition on the set and assisted the armorer. Baldwin, who was sued after the shooting, “seeks to clear his name” and hold the defendants “accountable for their misconduct,” according to the counterclaim filed Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court by the actor’s attorney, Luke Nikas.

“This tragedy happened because live bullets were delivered to the set and loaded into the gun, Gutierrez-Reed failed to check the bullets or the gun carefully, Halls failed to check the gun carefully and yet announced the gun was safe before handing it to Baldwin, and Zachry failed to disclose that Gutierrez-Reed had been acting recklessly off set and was a safety risk to those around her,” Nikas wrote.

In October 2021, Baldwin was inside a church building on Bonanza Creek Ranch in Santa Fe, N.M., practicing cocking the gun when it went off, killing cinematographer Halyna Hutchins and injuring director Joel Souza. It was not clear why the prop had live ammunition.

According to interviews conducted by the Sante Fe County Sheriff’s Office, people on the set saw and heard Halls retrieve a .45 Long Colt revolver from Gutierrez-Reed, announce it was a “cold gun” and hand it to Baldwin. The industry term means there are no live rounds in a weapon.

Washington Post, Layoff spree in Silicon Valley spells end of an era for Big Tech, Gerrit De Vynck, Nov. 12, 2022. A crypto-collapse, layoffs at Facebook and carnage at Twitter are rocking the tech industry. It’s stoking memories of the dot-com crash 20 years ago.

Over the past week, Silicon Valley companies have laid off 20,000 employees, a swift ramp-up of the job cuts and hiring freezes that have been ricocheting through the tech industry for months.

Twitter, Facebook parent Meta, payment platform Stripe, software service firm Salesforce, ride-hailing company Lyft and a growing list of smaller companies all laid off double-digit percentages of their workers. That means tens of thousands of engineers, salespeople and support staff in one of the country’s most important and highest-paying industries are out of a job. Meanwhile, other companies including Google and Amazon have recently instated hiring slowdowns and freezes.

The departures are solidifying a feeling in Silicon Valley that the bull market of the past decade — which created massive amounts of wealth for tech investors, workers and the broader economy — is decidedly over, conjuring an image of what the rest of the economy could experience if a predicted recession materializes.

“It does feel a little like 2000,” said Lise Buyer, a longtime tech analyst, executive and investor, referring to the turn-of-the-century dot-com crash. “Hire engineers, hire engineers, hire engineers, and then suddenly companies get a cold bucket of water in their face.”

Slate, Ron DeSantis’ Wife Begins Stealth Campaign to Turn Her Family Into the Kennedys, Heather Schwedel, Nov. 12, 2022. Casey DeSantis is ready.

After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ easy victory for a second term on Tuesday, chatter about a possible 2024 presidential run as the GOP candidate hit new heights. If you’re a right-leaning media outlet like the New York Post, your next step is clear: Time to get to work humanizing this fella. This impulse is likely what brought us a Wednesday article headlined “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ not-so-secret political weapon—his wife, Casey.” The article features some predictable gushing over Casey, a mother of three, former news anchor, and recent cancer survivor, who, it probably doesn’t hurt, is quite pretty, too, bearing a bit of a resemblance to television presenter Maria Menounos.

The Daily Mail also chose to highlight Florida’s first lady this week, albeit with one of its trademark convoluted headlines, calling her an “emotional tuning fork” with “Nancy Reagan–style influence.” The National Review joined the fun with a blog post titled “Casey DeSantis Is the Greatest Political Mind in Modern History,” though I would be remiss not to note that it seemed to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Fox News’ website was a little less obvious in its fawning, running an article called “Who is Casey DeSantis? Get to know the First Lady of Florida.” Taken all together, the message is clear: Now that Gov. DeSantis is ascendant—maybe!—the soft-launching of his wife and marriage as a national preoccupation begins.

Though Casey DeSantis has only received a smattering of coverage in the national press before this week, the broad strokes of her background have trickled out over the years: The 42-year-old grew up in Ohio and attended the College of Charleston in South Carolina, where she was on the equestrian team. After graduating, she moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to work in broadcast journalism, where she was by all accounts successful—she became an anchor and earned an Emmy nomination. One oft-repeated detail that almost sounds too good to be true is that she met her future husband while golfing. They got married at Disney World (how could they have known it would become a future political foe?), and a few years later, in 2012, Ron was elected to Congress.

Casey apparently stopped working in journalism during Ron’s first gubernatorial run in 2018—can’t be an enemy of the people, right? Her political aspirations for herself and her husband are reportedly grand: Earlier this year, a former colleague of hers remembered an exchange with a shared colleague in Vanity Fair: “I remember I once said, ‘Casey wants to be a senator’s wife.’ And he said, ‘No, she fully intends on being a president’s wife.’ ”

Washington Post, Paul Haggis, director of ‘Crash,’ ordered to pay $7.5 million in rape case, Sonia Rao, Nov. 12, 2022 (print ed.). A New York jury found filmmaker Paul Haggis liable in a sexual assault case brought forward by a publicist who alleged he raped her at his Manhattan apartment in 2013, according to the Associated Press.

The jury ordered Haggis, 69, to pay Haleigh Breest, 36, at least $7.5 million in damages, the AP reported, noting that the jury also decided he would be responsible for paying additional punitive damages later on.

Ilann Maazel, an attorney representing Breest, said in a statement, “We are thankful and grateful for the jury’s verdict. Justice was done today. This is a great victory for Haleigh and for the entire #MeToo movement.”

Haggis’s attorney Priya Chaudhry stated that they were “disappointed and shocked by this verdict.” She said they were “not allowed to tell the jury so many critical things,” and that Haggis could not have had a fair trial.

Haggis is known for having written the films “Million Dollar Baby” and “Crash,” the latter of which won him two Academy Awards in 2006 for best picture and best original screenplay. He also directed “Crash,” and shares a writing credit on the film with Bobby Moresco.

Breest filed the lawsuit against Haggis in December 2017 under New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act. According to the complaint, Breest was working at a New York film premiere in January 2013 and accepted a ride home from Haggis. The document alleges that he pressured her to have a drink with him at his SoHo apartment, instead of at a public bar as she said she suggested.

Nov. 11

Washington Post, Twitter pauses paid sign-ups as fake accounts spread online, Rachel Lerman and Cat Zakrzewski, Nov. 11, 2022. Twitter accounts impersonating celebrities and politicians spread on the site after the company rolled out paid check marks.

Twitter paused allowing people to sign up for its paid subscription feature that grants blue check marks amid a flood of fake accounts, just days after it launched the controversial feature.

A note to Twitter employees sent Thursday night said it was decided to temporarily disable sign-ups for Twitter Blue, its new $7.99 offering that allows accounts to receive a blue check mark. The pause was intended to “help address impersonation issues,” according to the note, which was viewed by The Washington Post.

A number of new accounts sporting a blue check mark surfaced this week impersonating politicians, celebrities and brands — including President Biden — after the new program launched on Wednesday. It’s part of Elon Musk‘s plan to create more streams of revenue following his $44 billion acquisition of the site two weeks ago.

Twitter’s content moderation chief quits

A fake account purporting to be basketball star LeBron James falsely tweeted that the athlete was requesting a trade. Another fake account with a blue check mark pretending to be former president George W. Bush tweeted “I miss killing Iraqis.”

And a fake account pretending to be pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly gained 1,500 retweets and more than 10,000 likes and remained online after three hours Thursday afternoon. An Eli Lilly spokesperson told The Post on Thursday they “are in communication with Twitter to address the issue.”

Washington Post, Review: We got ‘verified’ in minutes posing as a comedian and a senator, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Nov. 11, 2022. Twitter has been selling blue check marks to any account for $8, including our test imposter accounts for Blaire Erskine and Sen. Ed Markey. That makes it mostly worthless.

Nov. 10

 

The chair of the five-member Federal Trade Commission is Lisa Khan, shown above, confirmed by the Senate in a 69-28 vote in June 2021 and considered a critic of the Big Tech sector.

Washington Post, Stunning exodus of Twitter executives prompts federal regulators to warn of action, Joseph Menn, Cat Zakrzewski, Faiz Siddiqui, Nitasha Tiku and Drew Harwell, Nov. 10, 2022. The resignations of three Twitter executives prompted federal regulators to warn they might step in.

Several top privacy and security executives resigned from Twitter on Thursday, citing fears over the risks from Elon Musk’s leadership in a stunning exodus that prompted federal regulators to warn they might step in.

Chief Information Security Officer Lea Kissner tweeted that they had made the “hard decision” to resign, and the company’s chief privacy officer and chief compliance officer also quit, according to screenshots of an employee’s internal Slack message shared with The Washington Post.

One current Twitter employee said several other members of the site’s privacy and security unit also had resigned, while another said those remaining were trying to stop a wave of abuse in the company’s expanded paid service, Twitter Blue.

The departures prompted a rare warning from the Federal Trade Commission, which has emerged as the government’s top Silicon Valley watchdog. It marked the second time in two days that a federal official has expressed concern about the chaotic developments at the company, coming less than 24 hours after President Biden said Musk’s relationships with other countries deserved scrutiny.

The agency said that it was “tracking the developments at Twitter with deep concern” and that it was prepared to take action to ensure the company was complying with a settlement known as a consent order, which requires Twitter to comply with certain privacy and security requirements because of allegations of past data misuse.

Twitter was first put under a consent order in 2011 and it agreed to a new order earlier this year. If the FTC finds Twitter is not complying with that order, it could fine the company hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially damaging the company’s already precarious financial state.

 

Alex Jones, host and founder of the Texas-based Infowars show (file photo).

Washington Post, Judge orders Alex Jones to pay $473 million more to Sandy Hook families, Andrea Salcedo, James Bikales and Joanna Slater, Nov. 10, 2022. A Connecticut judge Thursday ordered Infowars founder Alex Jones and his company to pay an additional $473 million to the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.

The families and an FBI agent who responded to the shooting sued Jones for spreading misinformation about the 2012 slaying in which 20 children and six teachers were killed in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

Judge Barbara Bellis’s order comes nearly a month after Jones was ordered to pay $965 million in damages to the families in the culmination of the multiyear legal battle. The verdict was unanimous.

Alex Jones ordered to pay nearly $1 billion to Sandy Hook families

Jones, who has said he will appeal the verdict, was also ordered not to transfer his assets outside of the United States until further notice from the court. This is the first time a court has ordered Jones to freeze his assets.

“This is the first step in making sure that Jones personally will pay every penny he has to the families he spent years tormenting,” Chris Mattei, who represents the families in the case against Jones, said in a statement shared with The Washington Post.

Jones reacted to the news live Thursday while recording his “Infowars” podcast, calling the penalty “preposterous” and saying he doesn’t have the funds to pay it.

“If I weigh 260 pounds, they ask for a trillion pounds, I don’t have that much flesh,” he said.

Jones’s attorney, Norm Pattis, told Jones on the podcast that the plaintiffs’ aim is to “put you on a financial leash with an aim of silencing you.”

“I think the goal is to try to pile you up with a judgment debt, the likes of which no one else has ever seen, no private person or non-corporation,” Pattis said, adding that he believes “this unprecedented verdict remains vulnerable.” Hours after the 2012 elementary school shooting, Jones told his audience that it was staged as an excuse for confiscating guns. He also suggested the parents of the victims were actors. Years later, he repeatedly referred to the massacre as a hoax.

In their suit, the families of the victims argued Jones’s false claims caused them years of additional suffering. During the trial, the families testified that conspiracy theorists who accused them of staging their children’s deaths repeatedly harassed and threatened them.

They shared they did not feel safe when home and felt they had to keep their guard off when in public. It got so bad, some of them testified, that they had no option but to move away from Newtown.

Washington Post, D.C. sues Daniel Snyder, Commanders and NFL, alleging efforts to deceive fans, Mark Maske and Nicki Jhabvala, Nov. 10, 2022. The office of D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) said Thursday it filed a consumer protection lawsuit against the Washington Commanders, Daniel Snyder, the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell, accusing them of colluding to deceive and mislead customers about an investigation of the team’s workplace to maintain the franchise’s fan base in pursuit of revenue.

“Faced with public outrage over detailed and widespread allegations of sexual misconduct and a persistently hostile work environment at the Team, Defendants made a series of public statements to convince District consumers that this dysfunctional and misogynistic conduct was limited and that they were fully cooperating with an independent investigation,” the lawsuit says. “These statements were false and calculated to mislead consumers so they would continue to support the Team financially without thinking that they were supporting such misconduct.”

The D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine (D) has accused the Commanders, Snyder, the NFL and Commissioner Roger Goodell of colluding to mislead D.C. residents. (Video: Reuters)

The lawsuit was filed in the civil division of the D.C. Superior Court. It alleges the team and league violated the District of Columbia Consumer Protection Procedures Act with “public misrepresentations, omissions, and ambiguities of material fact.” Racine’s office said it is seeking “financial penalties under the CPPA for every incident in which the Commanders, Mr. Snyder, the NFL, and Commissioner Goodell lied to District residents dating back to July 2020,” adding that the defendants “could face millions of dollars in penalties.”

Nov. 9

New York Times, Meta Lays Off More Than 11,000 Employees Amid Financial Struggles, Sheera Frenkel and Adam Satariano, Nov. 9, 2022. The parent of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp reduced its work force by about 13 percent and extended a hiring freeze.

Since Mark Zuckerberg, left, founded Facebook in 2004, the Silicon Valley company has steadily hired more employees. At the end of September it had amassed its largest-ever number of workers, totaling 87,314 people.

But on Wednesday, the company — now renamed Meta — began cutting jobs, and deeply.

Meta said it was laying off more than 11,000, or about 13 percent of its work force, in what amounted to the company’s most significant job cuts. The layoffs were made across departments and regions, though some areas, like recruiting and business teams, were affected more than others.

“I want to take accountability for these decisions and for how we got here,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to employees. “I know this is tough for everyone, and I’m especially sorry to those impacted.”

The cuts — nearly triple what Twitter announced last week — represent a stunning reversal of fortune for a once high-flying company whose ambition and room for growth had seemed limitless. It spent lavishly over the years, accumulating users, buying companies such as Instagram and WhatsApp, and showering its employees with envious perks. Not even scrutiny over its data privacy practices and the toxic content on its apps could dent its financial performance, as its stock continued climbing and its revenues soared. At one point last year, Meta was valued at $1 trillion.

But the company has struggled financially this year as it has tried to move into a new business — the immersive world of the so-called metaverse — while also grappling with a global economic slowdown and a decline in digital advertising, the main source of its revenue. New competitors like TikTok emerged to capture a younger audience while Meta’s services lost their sheen. Last month, Meta posted a 50 percent slide in quarterly profits and its second straight sales decline. Its stock has dropped roughly 70 percent this year.

Mr. Zuckerberg, 38, attributed the cuts to growing too quickly during the pandemic, when a surge in online commerce led to a big spike in revenue. Like changes at other businesses, he said he thought the shift would be permanent, leading him to significantly increase spending. Meta’s employee head count at the end of September was up 28 percent from a year earlier.

“Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected,” Mr. Zuckerberg said on Wednesday. “I got this wrong, and I take responsibility for that.”

Washington Post, Opinion: Biggest loser of the midterm elections? The media, Dana Milbank, Nov. 9, 2022. We don’t yet know precisely who won the 2022 midterms, but we certainly know who lost.

I’m sorry to say that my colleagues in the political press blew it.

The headlines coming into Tuesday’s elections almost uniformly predicted a Democratic wipeout. Here’s just a small sampling:

• The bottom is dropping out of the 2022 election for Democrats
• Democrats, on Defense in Blue States, Brace for a Red Wave in the House
• Red tsunami watch
• The Republican wave is building fast

I pulled those from The Post, the New York Times, CNN, Axios and Politico — but the rest of the news media called it much the same.

I was baffled. What were they seeing that I and, more important, the Democratic operatives I spoke to weren’t seeing?

So what happened? Political journalists were suckered by a wave of Republican junk polls in the closing weeks of the campaign.

Politico, Dem megadonor's crypto exchange forced to sell as liquidity concerns grow, Sam Sutton, Nov. 9, 2022 (print ed.). FTX downfall draws Washington scrutiny, threatens crypto lobbying campaign.

Regulators and lawmakers are beginning to dig into Tuesday’s near-collapse of crypto exchange giant FTX, a seismic industry event that is poised to upend the Washington policy debate around how to police digital assets.

FTX on Tuesday morning announced it was selling itself to competing crypto exchange Binance after it struggled to meet customer withdrawals. In response, officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates financial derivatives markets, said they were monitoring the Bahamas-based FTX’s cash crunch to ensure it doesn’t spill over to U.S. operations that are registered with the agency and aren’t being included in the Binance sale.

The crisis also drew the attention of state regulators. Texas State Securities Board enforcement director Joseph Rotunda said FTX’s capitalization and sale could be relevant in his investigation into whether the company violated securities laws by offering yield-bearing deposit accounts.

The unexpected collapse of FTX will recast the landscape for lawmakers, regulators and lobbyists who have been ramping up work on drafting rules for the crypto industry for the last year. FTX and founder Sam Bankman-Fried — who emerged as a political megadonor ahead of the midterms — have been at the center of the debate and now see their clout likely diminished in the halls of Congress.

“The recent events show the necessity of congressional action,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.), who’s poised to chair the House Financial Services Committee if Republicans win a majority in the midterms. “I look forward to learning more from FTX and Binance in the coming days about these events and the steps they will take to protect customers during the transition.”

Bankman-Fried — a 30 year-old billionaire — was among the most prolific single political donors during the 2022 midterms before announcing he was putting his political efforts on hold last month.

He had also been aggressively lobbying Congress to support a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senate Agriculture Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.) that would give the CFTC oversight of crypto brokerages and trading platforms.

Nov. 8

 

New York Times, Facing a Tide of Criticism, Elon Musk Is Tweeting Through It, Ryan Mac, Nov. 8, 2022 (print ed.). Twitter’s new billionaire owner (shown above in a file photo) has embarked on a tweeting spree to push back, spar and justify his actions.

Under pressure and facing a wave of criticism, Elon Musk has increasingly turned to his favorite release valve: Twitter.

Since Saturday, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man and the new owner of Twitter, has embarked on a tweeting spree so voluminous that he is on a pace to post more than 750 times this month, or more than 25 times a day, according to an analysis from the digital investigations company Memetica. That would be up from about 13 times a day in April, when Mr. Musk first agreed to buy Twitter.

His recent tweets have covered an increasingly broad range of topics. Over the last four days, Mr. Musk, 51, needled the comedian Kathy Griffin and beefed with the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on the platform. He made masturbation jokes aimed at a rival — and much smaller — social media platform. He posted, then deleted, a tweet engaging with a quote from a white nationalist. And he defended his ownership of Twitter, including why he had laid off 50 percent of the company’s staff and why people should not impersonate others on the service.

All in all, Mr. Musk, who described himself in his Twitter profile as “Chief Twit” before later changing the description to “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator,” has tweeted more than 105 times since Friday, mainly about Twitter, according to a tally by Memetica.

Mr. Musk is under tremendous scrutiny 11 days after completing his $44 billion deal for Twitter, which was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. On Friday, he cut roughly 3,700 of the company’s 7,500 employees, saying he had no choice because Twitter was losing $4 million a day. At the same time, he has found himself embroiled in the same content debates that have plagued other social media companies, including how to give people a way to speak out without spreading misinformation and toxic speech.

On Friday, Mr. Musk, who has more than 114 million followers on Twitter, proposed a “thermonuclear name & shame” campaign against brands that had stopped advertising on the platform. He said that he had done everything he could to appease advertisers but that activists had worked against him to cause brands to drop out of spending on Twitter.

At the same time, the billionaire was embroiled in a fight over his plan to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a subscription service, Twitter Blue, which would give a check mark to anyone who paid. The check mark had been free for notable people whose identities had been verified by the company, including celebrities, politicians and journalists, as a way to protect against impersonation.

Critics were unhappy about Mr. Musk’s plans to monetize the check mark, saying it could lead to the spread of misinformation and fraud on the platform. In protest, some Twitter accounts that had check marks changed their display names and photographs to match Mr. Musk’s account over the weekend, a move intended to illustrate why it would be confusing if anyone could buy a check mark.

New York Times, Apple Built Its Empire With China. Now Its Foundation Is Showing Cracks, Tripp Mickle, Chang Che and Daisuke Wakabayashi, Nov. 8, 2022 (print ed.). Every September, Apple unveils its latest phones at its futuristic Silicon Valley campus. A few weeks later, tens of millions of its newest handsets, assembled by legions of seasonal workers hired by its suppliers, are shipped from Chinese factories to customers around the world.

The annual release of Apple’s iPhones usually runs like clockwork, a prime example of how the U.S. tech giant has become the most profitable company of the globalization era by seamlessly navigating the world’s two largest economies.

But this year, a smooth rollout for the iPhone 14 was the latest casualty of the growing difficulties of doing business in China. Beijing’s no-holds-barred approach to stopping Covid-19 and heightened tensions with the United States have forced Apple to re-examine major aspects of its business.

A recent outbreak of coronavirus cases in the region surrounding Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in Zhengzhou, in central China, prompted local officials to order a seven-day lockdown last week. As a result, the company said on Sunday, it will not be able to produce enough phones to meet the demands of the holiday season.

For much of this year, Apple has also been the focus of a bipartisan intervention in Washington, where alarm over Beijing’s military provocations and technology ambitions has upended orthodoxy about free trade.

Word trickled out in March that Apple was in talks with an obscure Chinese memory chip maker, Yangtze Memory Technology Corporation, or YMTC, to supply components for the iPhone 14.

That collided with work being done by a coalition of lawmakers and more than a dozen congressional aides, which had spent months examining the ins and outs of Apple’s supply chain in China. The Commerce Department issued restrictions last month that prohibited American companies from selling machinery to YMTC, making it difficult for Apple to go ahead with the deal.

Apple has confirmed publicly that it talked with YMTC, which didn’t respond to requests for comment. But an Apple spokesman declined to comment when asked if the company had abandoned the possibility of working with the Chinese memory maker.

The recent developments underscore how Apple’s close ties to China, once considered a strength of its business, have turned into a liability.

 

Washington Post, Trump once reconsidered sticking with Truth Social. Now he’s stuck, Nov. 8, 2022 (print ed.). The former president has told his allies that he can’t leave his Twitter clone because he’s propping it up, and he doesn’t want a site so closely associated with his brand to collapse.

The co-founders of former president Donald Trump’s post-presidential start-up, Trump Media & Technology Group, had a name for June 11, 2021: “meltdown day.”

Andy Litinsky and Wes Moss, former contestants on Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” had a week earlier traveled with an 11-person entourage to Trump’s palatial golf club in Bedminster, N.J., to show off what they’d worked for months to build: a web of conservative-aimed business ventures, including the Twitter clone Truth Social, that heavily promoted and depended on Trump’s name and brand.

Trump, however, was already considering other ideas. On June 11, Trump met at Bedminster with another suitor: his former aide Jason Miller, who was launching a rival conservative social network, Gettr, and had offered Trump at least $5 million a year and a stake in the company to join.

A Trump defection would have triggered a disastrous meltdown of everything Litinsky and Moss had created. Trump Media lawyers scrambled to mount a counterattack, according to people familiar with the episode, which has not been previously reported.

Would Trump really “do a side deal?” the Trump Media co-founders wrote in a daily log that company whistleblower Will Wilkerson shared with government investigators and The Washington Post.

Trump ultimately stuck with Truth Social, helping the site attract a modest following. But the billionaire industrialist Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter could put Trump’s commitment to a new test, and some in his orbit wonder whether he’ll be able to stay loyal to a small site that is struggling to gain an audience and faces looming financial threats.

Trump has told his allies that he can’t leave Truth Social, because he’s propping it up, and he doesn’t want a site so closely associated with his brand to collapse, according to people familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. A spokesman for Trump did not respond to a detailed request for comment for this story.

Musk has called Twitter’s ban of Trump, after the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, a mistake and pledged to reinstate Trump’s account, although when that might occur remains unclear. Trump, however, has said he would not return even if he were invited back, saying he wanted to focus his efforts on Truth Social.

“If I choose to run, I will only use Truth” to post his thoughts, Trump told Fox News on the day after Musk’s takeover of Twitter became official. “When I put out a Truth, it is all over the place.” The platform feels “like home,” he said, and he likes “the way it works.” In a Truth Social post, he added, “I LOVE TRUTH!”

But Trump’s 4 million followers on the platform are a small fraction of the 88 million he once had on Twitter, and his dozens of posts — called “truths” — there in recent weeks have received none of the broad engagement and traction he counted on during his presidency.

Washington Post, Trump speeches use dozens of lies, exaggerations to draw contrast with Biden, Isaac Arnsdorf, Nov. 8, 2022 (print ed.). The former president’s rally script centers on juxtaposing conditions two years ago with now, relying on misrepresentations of both.

Even in a midterm marked by misinformation, conspiracy theories and false or misleading attacks, nobody does it like Donald Trump.

The former president, in a burst of campaigning for Republican candidates while he readies his own third bid for the White House, is honing a stump speech based around juxtaposing current conditions with those during his presidency — a contrast he heightens by misrepresenting and exaggerating on both ends. His speech Thursday at a rally in Sioux City, Iowa, contained at least 58 false or misleading statements, and he added at least another 24 distinct falsehoods at a Saturday speech in Latrobe, Pa., according to a Washington Post analysis.

Many of the inaccuracies were repeat offenses for Trump and consistent with his exhaustively documented record of dispensing with the truth. But lately his speeches have also become a clearinghouse for the vast array of rumors, memes and myths that spread in right-wing media and fill up many other Republicans’ campaign speeches and ads.

Nov. 7

New York Times, Amazon Considers Disclaimer to Antisemitic Film Irving Shared Online, Karen Weise, Nov. 7, 2022 (print ed.). The company said it was working with the Anti-Defamation League to potentially add language to the page that viewers see before buying or renting the film.

The Brooklyn Nets and the Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Amazon asking the company to address the “deeply and unequivocally antisemitic” documentary and related book at the heart of the Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving's suspension. The company said it was working with the A.D.L. to explore adding a disclaimer to the film.

The letter — signed by the A.D.L.’s chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, but on behalf of the Nets as well — called on Amazon to take down or add explanatory context to the film and the related book, saying they were “designed to inflame hatred and, now that it was popularized by Mr. Irving, will lead directly to the harm of Jews.” A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

Cory Shields, an Amazon spokesman, said the potential disclaimer would appear on the documentary’s main detail page, which viewers would see before buying or renting the film. A similar note potentially would be added to a page where customers could buy the book that the film is based on.

More than a week ago, Mr. Irving tweeted a link to Amazon for a documentary called “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” which includes “extensive antisemitism,” such as claims that Jews control the media and that millions of Jews did not die during the Holocaust.

Though he deleted the tweet, Mr. Irving was suspended by the Nets for declining to say he had no antisemitic views. He later apologized on Instagram for posting the documentary “without context and a factual explanation outlining the specific beliefs in the Documentary I agreed with and disagreed with.” He said he did not intend to “disrespect any Jewish cultural history regarding the Holocaust or perpetuate any hate.”

The Nets and others said his apology did not go far enough.

The four-page letter, whose existence was first noted by reporters for the Athletic, was dated Friday and addressed to Amazon’s executive chairman, Jeff Bezos; its chief executive, Andy Jassy; and David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel. It details problematic content in the book and film, and discussed why it was troubling at the current moment of heightened antisemitism in the United States.

The film was self-produced by its director, Ronald Dalton Jr., in 2018, according to its listing on Amazon, and is available to rent for $12 or to buy for $50. It has more than 1,200 reviews and was made available on Amazon through its Prime Video Direct program, a self-service platform it started in 2016 to allow filmmakers and content creators to upload their works and reach the company’s millions of customers.

The company said at the time that the service, which focuses on feature-length movies and TV shows, wanted to make “it even easier for content creators to find an audience, and for that audience to find great content.”

Amazon keeps half of the purchase price or rental fees and passes on the remaining half to the content provider, according to its website for filmmakers.

Mr. Greenblatt said in a statement last week that Mr. Irving’s antics drew attention and sales to the film and its related book, making it a best seller in multiple categories on Amazon.

The company’s guidelines tell filmmakers that “all titles undergo manual and automated reviews” before it licenses them and that certain content is prohibited, such as violating a copyright or explicit sexuality. Amazon also says it prohibits “hateful content,” such as speech that contains “derogatory comments, hate speech, or threats specifically targeting any group or individuals.”

Amazon said the film did undergo review before becoming available online, though it declined to provide details of the review and how it concluded that the film did not violate the prohibition on hate speech.

The self-service distribution is similar to the self-publishing model Amazon developed for books, which allowed it to vastly expand its offerings without negotiating with publishers. Amazon has long been hesitant to remove sensitive or controversial books, though in recent years, it has updated its policy to allow itself the discretion to remove “offensive” content. “As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important, including content that may be considered objectionable,” its policy states.

Nov. 6

Politico, Musk delays Twitter's subscription service until after midterms, Staff report, Nov. 6, 2022. Twitter had previewed the new service. Elon Musk’s plan to set up a new subscription service for Twitter — which would include a “blue check” verification for subscribers — will be delayed until after the midterm elections, multiple news outlets reported Sunday.

Twitter had previewed the new service Saturday, with a message on Apple’s app store offering a new $7.99 subscription to “Twitter Blue.” But the option hasn’t gone live yet, and it won’t until sometime after Tuesday’s election, according to the reports. Some of the reports said that the rollout will be delayed because of concerns within Twitter that users could pay for a verified account and use that account to impersonate someone else, such a politician or public official.

Musk, the company’s new owner, himself tweeted on Sunday: “Going forward, any Twitter handles engaging in impersonation without clearly specifying ‘parody’ will be permanently suspended.”

After Musk cut the company’s payroll in half at the end of last week — firing thousands across Twitter — Washington has watched anxiously for signs that the platform is losing control of misinformation and content, particularly with the election so close at hand. Musk himself added fuel to that fire when he tweeted a false story about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband last weekend, a move that drew criticism and helped drive advertisers away from the platform.

New York Times, Twitter Begins Offering $7.99-a-Month Verification Subscriptions, David Yaffe-Bellany, Nov. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The new system for assigning check marks to users’ profiles is among a raft of changes the company has been discussing since Elon Musk’s takeover.

Twitter announced on Saturday that it would begin charging customers $7.99 a month to receive a verification check mark on their profiles, one of a raft of product changes that the company has been discussing since Elon Musk’s takeover a little over a week ago.

The announcement was included in notes accompanying a new update to the Twitter app that appeared in Apple’s App Store. The notes explained that the paid verification system was now a feature of the website’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.

“Power to the people,” the announcement said. “Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.”

To fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Mr. Musk loaded the company with $13 billion in debt, which comes with more than $1 billion a year in interest payments. That has put Twitter under enormous pressure to cut costs and raise revenue. This week, Twitter laid off roughly half the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs.

In addition to charging for verification, Mr. Musk and his advisers have been weighing numerous other ideas to bring in more revenue, from putting certain videos behind paywalls to reviving Vine, the now-defunct short-form video platform.

The update notes unveiled on Saturday also promised that subscribers would receive other benefits, including “half the ads & much better ones,” as well as the ability to post longer videos on Twitter.

And in a series of tweets on Saturday, Mr. Musk said that the company was working on an update that would give users the ability to attach long-form text to tweets, which he said would eliminate “the absurdity of notepad screenshots.”

But the change to Twitter’s signature verification system has proved especially controversial. In the past, the company manually assigned a blue circle with a white check mark to high-profile figures and businesses. With the midterm elections approaching on Tuesday, some election-integrity advocates have voiced fears that the new paid verification system could make it easier for bad actors to impersonate political candidates or other public figures.

Washington Post, With Musk at the helm, tweeting the boss may actually change Twitter, Ben Brasch, Jeremy B. Merrill and James Bikales, Nov. 6, 2022 (print ed.). Elon Musk turned his hobby into a career when he purchased Twitter a week ago.

When he purchased Twitter a week ago, Elon Musk turned a hobby into a career.

Musk has always been extremely engaged online, responding to Twitter users with followings big and small. But the billionaire is now in charge, and he’s listening.

The new Twitter owner has not slowed down tweeting since taking over the company last Thursday — the past week was his third-most active in the past six months, according to a Washington Post analysis. The analysis stretches from last Wednesday when he entered the company headquarters carrying a sink — a stunt encouraging employees to let his takeover “sink in” — to this Thursday, a day before he enacted massive layoffs.

Musk-helmed Twitter dubbed ‘cruel,’ ‘toxic’ by staffers as pink slips pile up

Experts say his tweets now send important signals: Who he is listening to, who and what is acceptable on his platform, and how he intends to run the company. His tweets and decisions have the ability to foster healthy debates online or give sanctuary to hate speech and misinformation, they say.

“When he says something on Twitter now, it’s much bigger news because it is seen as a bellwether of where he’s taking the entire platform, rather than just Elon Musk being outrageous or being responsive,” said Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

HuffPost, Elon Musk Appears To Threaten Advertisers Wary Of His Twitter Takeover, Sara Boboltz, Nov. 5, 2022. A "thermonuclear name & shame" is coming for companies that stop advertising with Twitter, apparently.

Newly minted Twitter CEO Elon Musk launched an apparent attack on skittish advertisers late Friday as he faces a potentially devastating advertising exodus from the social media giant he just took over.

After Musk, right, said that Twitter “has had a massive drop in revenue” because of “activist groups pressuring advertisers,” a supporter tweeted that the billionaire weaponize his 114 million Twitter followers.

“Name and shame the advertisers who are succumbing to the advertiser boycott. So we can counter-boycott them,” wrote Mike Davis, a Republican former Senate and White House aide.

Musk replied: “A thermonuclear name & shame is exactly what will happen if this continues.”

Several companies, including General Motors, Volkswagen Group and Pfizer, have halted their advertising spend on Twitter ― at least temporarily ― as the platform adjusts to Musk’s leadership and his pledge to champion “free speech.”

Before taking over the company late last month, Musk promised advertisers that Twitter would not become a “free-for-all hellscape.” Twitter’s new leadership has reportedly been holding meetings with ad buyers to assure them Musk would not tank Twitter.

Advertisers have long sought to avoid placing their products alongside hateful or violent content. The problem of users posting hateful or violent content on Twitter has been well-documented in the past. The company has tried to implement various solutions, such as labels that warn when content is potentially misleading.

But now it must do so with around half the manpower.

Following the departure of several high-level executives, thousands of Twitter employees were laid off in the past week. Musk promised that the cuts would save the company hundreds of millions, but certain teams were decimated, including those that dealt with managing public trust and safety. Musk says he wants to diversify Twitter’s revenue by charging $8 for a blue check, a badge indicating Twitter has verified that the user is who they say they are.

The turmoil has some people flocking to alternative platforms, such as Mastodon.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, right, was moved to issue an apology Saturday morning for his former company’s situation.

“I realize many are angry with me. I own the responsibility for why everyone is in this situation: I grew the company size too quickly,” Dorsey said. “I apologize for that.”

CNN Business, With Twitter in chaos, Mastodon is on fire, Rachel Metz, Nov. 5, 2022. In the week since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the number of people signing up for a small social network called Mastodon has surged,  You may not have heard of Mastodon, which has been around since 2016, but now it’s growing rapidly. Some are fleeing Twitter for it or at least seeking out a second place to post their thoughts online as the much more well-known social network faces layoffs, controversial product changes, an expected shift in its approach to content moderation and a jump in hateful rhetoric.

There may be no clear alternative to Twitter, a uniquely influential platform that is fast-moving, text-heavy, conversational and news-oriented. But Mastodon scratches a certain itch. The service has a similar look to Twitter, with a timeline of short updates sorted chronologically rather than algorithmically. It lets users join a slew of different servers run by various groups and individuals, rather than one central platform controlled by a single company like Twitter, Instagram, or k

Unlike larger social networks, Mastodon is both free to use and free of ads. It’s developed by a nonprofit run by Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko, and is supported via crowdfunding.

Mastodon is a free open source software for running self-hosted social networking services.

Rochko said in an interview Thursday that Mastodon gained 230,000 users since October 27, when Musk took control of Twitter. It now has 655,000 active users each month, he said. Twitter reported in July that it had nearly 238 million daily active monetizable users.

“It is not as large as Twitter, obviously, but it is the biggest that this network has ever been,” said Rochko, who originally created Mastodon as more of a project than a consumer product (and, yes, its name was inspired by the heavy metal band Mastodon).

Mastodon’s new sign-ups include some Twitter users with big followings, such as actor and comedian Kathy Griffin, who joined in early November, and journalist Molly Jong-Fast, who joined in late October.

Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and faculty director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, started using Mastodon in earnest on October 30, just after Musk took over Twitter. (She had created another account years ago, she said, but didn’t really get into it until recently because of the popularity of Twitter among people in academia.)
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk provides an update on the development of the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket at the companys Launch facility in south Texas.

Elon Musk wants Twitter users to pay to be verified. It could create a new set of headaches for the company

Roberts, who worked at Twitter as a staff researcher earlier this year while taking a leave from UCLA, said she was inspired to start using Mastodon due to concerns about how Twitter’s content moderation may change under Musk’s control. She suspects some newcomers are simply sick of social media companies that capture lots of user data and are driven by advertising.

And she pointed out that Twitter users may migrate to Mastodon in particular because its user experience is pretty similar to Twitter’s. A lot of Mastodon’s features and layout (particularly in its iOS app) will look and feel familiar to current Twitter users, though with some slightly different verbiage; you can follow others, create short posts (there’s a 500 character limit, and you can upload images and videos), favorite or repost other users’ posts, and so on.

“It’s about as close as it gets,” she said.

I’ve been a Twitter user since 2007, but as a growing number of the people I follow on the social network began posting their Mastodon usernames in recent weeks, I got curious. This week, I decided to check out Mastodon for myself.

There are some key differences, particularly in how the network is set up. Because Mastodon users’ accounts are hosted on a slew of different servers, the costs of hosting users is spread among many different people and groups. But that also means users are spread out all over the place, and people you know can be hard to find — Rochko likened this setup to having different email providers, like Gmail and Hotmail.

This means the entirety of the network isn’t under any one person or company’s control, but it also introduces some new complications for those of us used to Twitter — a product that has also been criticized over the years for being less intuitive than more popular services like Facebook and Instagram.

On Mastodon, for instance, you have to join a specific server to sign up, some of which are open to anyone, some of which require an invitation (you can also run your own server). There is a server operated by the nonprofit behind Mastodon, Mastodon.social, but it’s not accepting more users; I’m currently using one called Mstdn.social, which is also where I can sign in to access Mastodon on the web.

And while you can follow any other Mastodon user, no matter which server they’ve signed up with, you can only see the lists of who follows your Mastodon friends, or who your Mastodon friends follow, if the followers happen to belong to the same server you’re signed up with (I realized this while trying to track down more people I know who recently signed up).

At first, it felt as if I was starting over, in a sense, as a complete newcomer to social media. As Roberts said, it is quite similar to Twitter in terms of its look and functionality, and the iOS app is easy to use.

But unlike on Twitter, where I can easily interact with a large audience, my Mastodon network is less than 100 followers. Suddenly I had no idea what to post — a feeling that never nags me on Twitter, perhaps because the size of that network makes any post feel less consequential. I got over it quickly, though, and realized the smaller scale of Mastodon can be calming compared to Twitter’s endless stream of stimulation.

I’m not quite ready to close my Twitter account, though; for me, Mastodon is a sort of social-media escape hatch in case Twitter becomes unbearable.

Roberts, too, hasn’t yet decided if she will close her Twitter account, but she was surprised by how quickly her following grew on Mastodon. Within a week of signing up and alerting her nearly 23,000 Twitter followers, she has amassed over 1,000 Mastodon followers.

Nov. 5

New York Times, Twitter Begins Offering $7.99-a-Month Verification Subscriptions, David Yaffe-Bellany, Nov. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The new system for assigning check marks to users’ profiles is among a raft of changes the company has been discussing since Elon Musk’s takeover.

Twitter announced on Saturday that it would begin charging customers $7.99 a month to receive a verification check mark on their profiles, one of a raft of product changes that the company has been discussing since Elon Musk’s takeover a little over a week ago.

The announcement was included in notes accompanying a new update to the Twitter app that appeared in Apple’s App Store. The notes explained that the paid verification system was now a feature of the website’s subscription service, Twitter Blue.

“Power to the people,” the announcement said. “Your account will get a blue checkmark, just like the celebrities, companies, and politicians you already follow.”

To fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, Mr. Musk loaded the company with $13 billion in debt, which comes with more than $1 billion a year in interest payments. That has put Twitter under enormous pressure to cut costs and raise revenue. This week, Twitter laid off roughly half the company’s work force, or about 3,700 jobs.

In addition to charging for verification, Mr. Musk and his advisers have been weighing numerous other ideas to bring in more revenue, from putting certain videos behind paywalls to reviving Vine, the now-defunct short-form video platform.

The update notes unveiled on Saturday also promised that subscribers would receive other benefits, including “half the ads & much better ones,” as well as the ability to post longer videos on Twitter.

And in a series of tweets on Saturday, Mr. Musk said that the company was working on an update that would give users the ability to attach long-form text to tweets, which he said would eliminate “the absurdity of notepad screenshots.”

But the change to Twitter’s signature verification system has proved especially controversial. In the past, the company manually assigned a blue circle with a white check mark to high-profile figures and businesses. With the midterm elections approaching on Tuesday, some election-integrity advocates have voiced fears that the new paid verification system could make it easier for bad actors to impersonate political candidates or other public figures.

 

Washington Post, Elon Musk begins mass layoffs at Twitter, Faiz Siddiqui, Nov. 5, 2022 (print ed.). Layoffs started at the social media giant, as Musk moves to make his first big mark on the company. Estimates of expected layoffs range from a quarter to 50 percent of staff.

Elon Musk is beginning mass layoffs at Twitter, sharply reducing the company’s workforce of 7,500 and kicking off his wholesale overhaul of the company.

An email went out to the company’s employees late Thursday notifying employees of plans to cut jobs, informing them that by 9 a.m. Pacific time Friday, workers would receive an email with the subject line: “Your Role at Twitter.”

Those keeping their jobs would be notified on their company email. Those losing them would be told via their personal email.

“Team, In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global workforce on Friday,” according to multiple versions of the email obtained by The Washington Post. “We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward.”

At Elon Musk’s Twitter, silence has workers bewildered

Anyone who did not receive an email by 5 p.m. Pacific time was told to follow up with the company. The offices would be closed Friday.

• Washington Post, Opinion: World’s richest man decides to set $44 billion on fire, Catherine Rampel

Washington Post, With Musk at the helm, tweeting the boss may actually change Twitter, Ben Brasch, Jeremy B. Merrill and James Bikales, Nov. 5, 2022. Elon Musk turned his hobby into a career when he purchased Twitter a week ago.

When he purchased Twitter a week ago, Elon Musk turned a hobby into a career.

Musk has always been extremely engaged online, responding to Twitter users with followings big and small. But the billionaire is now in charge, and he’s listening.

The new Twitter owner has not slowed down tweeting since taking over the company last Thursday — the past week was his third-most active in the past six months, according to a Washington Post analysis. The analysis stretches from last Wednesday when he entered the company headquarters carrying a sink — a stunt encouraging employees to let his takeover “sink in” — to this Thursday, a day before he enacted massive layoffs.

Musk-helmed Twitter dubbed ‘cruel,’ ‘toxic’ by staffers as pink slips pile up

Experts say his tweets now send important signals: Who he is listening to, who and what is acceptable on his platform, and how he intends to run the company. His tweets and decisions have the ability to foster healthy debates online or give sanctuary to hate speech and misinformation, they say.

“When he says something on Twitter now, it’s much bigger news because it is seen as a bellwether of where he’s taking the entire platform, rather than just Elon Musk being outrageous or being responsive,” said Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Washington Post, Kyrie Irving apologizes after Nets suspend him for refusing to disavow antisemitism, Ben Golliver, Nov. 5, 2022 (print ed.). Irving was suspended for at least five games because he is “currently unfit to be associated” with the organization, the club said.

Following a week-long saga that saw interventions from the Anti-Defamation League and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the Brooklyn Nets suspended guard Kyrie Irving for at least five games without pay on Thursday, deeming the all-star guard “currently unfit to be associated” with the organization following his repeated refusals to apologize for a social media post about an antisemitic film and book.

Irving, below left, who agreed Wednesday to donate $500,000 to support anti-hate causes in partnership with the ADL, said he “took responsibility” for the post but did not apologize when he met with reporters Thursday afternoon.

“Over the last several days, we have made repeated attempts to work with Kyrie Irving to help him understand the harm and danger of his words and actions, which began with him publicizing a film containing deeply disturbing antisemitic hate,” the Nets said in a statement. “We believed that taking the path of education in this challenging situation would be the right one and thought that we had made progress with our joint commitment to eradicating hate and intolerance.

“We were dismayed today, when given an opportunity in a media session, that Kyrie refused to unequivocally say he has no antisemitic beliefs, nor acknowledge specific hateful material in the film. This was not the first time he had the opportunity — but failed — to clarify.”

The Nets concluded that Irving’s refusal to “disavow antisemitism when given a clear opportunity” was “deeply disturbing” and constituted “conduct detrimental to the team.”

In a message posted to Instagram late Thursday evening, Irving finally relented and apologized “to all Jewish families and communities that are hurt and affected from my post,” acknowledging that he had linked to a film that “contained some false antisemitic statements, narratives and language that were untrue and offensive.”

Irving continued: “I initially reacted out of emotion to being unjustly labeled antisemitic, instead of focusing on the healing process of my Jewish Brothers and Sisters that were hurt from the hateful remarks made in the documentary. I want to clarify any confusion on where I stand fighting against antisemitism by apologizing for posting the documentary without context and a factual explanation outlining the specific beliefs in the documentary I agreed with.”

Following a week-long saga that saw interventions from the Anti-Defamation League and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, the Brooklyn Nets suspended Kyrie Irving for at least five games without pay on Thursday, deeming the all-star guard “currently unfit to be associated” with the organization following his repeated refusals to apologize for a social media post about an antisemitic film and book.

Irving, who agreed Wednesday to donate $500,000 to support anti-hate causes in partnership with the ADL, said he “took responsibility” for the post but did not apologize when he met with reporters Thursday afternoon.

“Over the last several days, we have made repeated attempts to work with Kyrie Irving to help him understand the harm and danger of his words and actions, which began with him publicizing a film containing deeply disturbing antisemitic hate,” the Nets said in a statement. “We believed that taking the path of education in this challenging situation would be the right one and thought that we had made progress with our joint commitment to eradicating hate and intolerance.

“We were dismayed today, when given an opportunity in a media session, that Kyrie refused to unequivocally say he has no antisemitic beliefs, nor acknowledge specific hateful material in the film. This was not the first time he had the opportunity — but failed — to clarify.”

The Nets concluded that Irving’s refusal to “disavow antisemitism when given a clear opportunity” was “deeply disturbing” and constituted “conduct detrimental to the team.”

In a message posted to Instagram late Thursday evening, Irving finally relented and apologized “to all Jewish families and communities that are hurt and affected from my post,” acknowledging that he had linked to a film that “contained some false antisemitic statements, narratives and language that were untrue and offensive.”

Irving continued: “I initially reacted out of emotion to being unjustly labeled antisemitic, instead of focusing on the healing process of my Jewish Brothers and Sisters that were hurt from the hateful remarks made in the documentary. I want to clarify any confusion on where I stand fighting against antisemitism by apologizing for posting the documentary without context and a factual explanation outlining the specific beliefs in the documentary I agreed with.”

•  New York Times, Nets Suspend Kyrie Irving Indefinitely After Antisemitic Movie Post, Tania Gangul

CNN, Bob Costas: Here's how much Kyrie Irving stands to lose, Nov. 5, 2022. Sportscaster Bob Costas joins CNN's Alisyn Camerota to discuss the fallout for NBA star Kyrie Irving after the Brooklyn Nets suspended Irving for comments regarding his tweet linking to an antisemitic documentary.

Skip and Shannon, UNDISPUTED Commentary: Kyrie Irving issues an apology following a 5 game suspension by Brooklyn Nets, Nov. 4, 2022. The Brooklyn Nets have suspended Kyrie Irving without pay for failure to “unequivocally say he has no antisemitic beliefs.”

Kyrie issued an apology on his Instagram for posting an antisemitic film following the announcement, but earlier in day he refused to apologize in a post-practice media session. Skip Bayless and Shannon Sharpe react to Kyrie's suspension and subsequent apology.

Washington Post, Perspective: Delusional, defiant Kyrie Irving is a stain the NBA could no longer ignore, Jerry Brewer, Nov. 4, 2022. Kyrie Irving, who is nothing more than a contrarian with a crossover, cannot be trusted to lead a pedestrian across the street, much less an NBA franchise in a borough of the nation’s largest city.

Yet there he stood — noted anti-vaxxer, suspected antisemite, overexposed anti-logic windbag — in a position to hijack attention and humiliate a league that has gone to great lengths to promote social equality.

For nearly a week, he failed to muster the humility to quell his latest controversy, and this time he stirred something far more dangerous than the usual Kyrie nonsense. Given ample time, Irving wouldn’t apologize for posting a link on Twitter to a movie and book that contains atrocious misinformation about Jewish people. He dared his employer, the Brooklyn Nets, to show him that he’s not his own boss. On Thursday night, the Nets finally ended the ludicrous standoff and suspended Irving.

He will be gone for at least five games without pay. The Nets prolonged the pain and shame of this incident with their indecision, but in the end they were forceful in declaring Irving “currently unfit to be associated with the Brooklyn Nets.”

New York Times, Worries Grow That TikTok Is New Home for Manipulated Video and Photos, Tiffany Hsu, Nov. 5, 2022 (print ed.). Misleading edits, fake news stories and deepfake images of politicians are starting to warp reality on the popular video platform.

Edited or synthesized material also appears on other online platforms, such as Facebook, which has nearly three billion monthly active users. But experts said it was especially difficult to catch on TikTok, which encourages its estimated 1.6 billion active users to put their own stamp on someone else’s content, and where reality, satire and outright deceit sometimes blend together in the fast-moving and occasionally livestreamed video feed.

Washington Post, MSNBC severs ties with host Tiffany Cross, Sarah Ellison, Nov. 5, 2022.  The network canceled ‘The Cross Connection’ and has let her contract lapse after incendiary comments that drew conservative backlash.

MSNBC has cut ties with Tiffany Cross, an outspoken weekend host who made race and issues central to the Black community a focus of her coverage and commentary.

The network canceled her almost two-year-old show, “The Cross Connection,” and has let her contract lapse, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations between the former host and MSNBC. A network spokesperson declined to comment.

Cross, who previously was the D.C. bureau chief for BET Networks, had made incendiary comments on air that made her a target of right-wing criticism.

Most recently, Cross appeared as a guest on Charlamagne tha God’s Comedy Central show, where the host asked his guest panelists which state the Democrats could afford to lose in the upcoming midterm election. Cross flippantly suggested Florida, using a vulgarity to describe the shape of the state and adding, “Let’s castrate Florida.”

Nov. 4

Washington Post, Musk-helmed Twitter dubbed ‘cruel,’ ‘toxic’ by staffers as pink slips pile up, Faiz Siddiqui and Naomi Nix, Nov. 4, 2022. The company was hailed for its welcoming and relaxed work environment. Elon Musk made that a relic of the past.

Elon Musk is rapidly transforming Twitter, throwing out old strategies, taking aim at its trademark perks and imposing mass layoffs that are driving advertisers away.

A coalition of civil rights and activists groups including the NAACP called on brands to suspend advertising on Twitter following the layoffs on Friday.

And current and newly former employees say Musk has instilled a culture of fear in his new company, as he quickly established he will be a stiff and efficiency-focused leader, aiming to unlock Twitter’s moneymaking potential once and for all. Musk has announced he wants to charge for blue check marks and employees are working on a new plan for paywalled videos. Advertisers are getting cold feet, and many are worried about the potential consequences for the midterms.

Twitter will charge $8 a month for verification. Here’s what you need to know.

On Friday, Musk alluded to the challenges he faces in a tweet which said Twitter has experienced a massive drop in revenue because of activists pressuring advertisers. He reiterated that nothing has changed with the company’s moderation.

Nov. 3

 

President Biden speaks at Union Station in D.C. on Wednesday (AFP photo by Jim Watson via Getty Images).

Washington Post, Biden warns GOP could set nation on ‘path to chaos’ as democratic system faces strain, Rosalind S. Helderman and Yasmeen Abutaleb, Nov. 3, 2022 (print ed.). The president delivered his warning in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol and just days after Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked.

Signs of strain in the nation’s democratic system mounted Wednesday with less than a week left before the midterm elections, as President Biden warned that candidates who refuse to accept Tuesday’s results could set the nation on a “path to chaos.”

Biden’s grim assessment in a speech Wednesday evening came as the FBI and other agencies have forecast that threats of violence from domestic extremists are likely to be on the rise after the election. In Arizona, voters have complained of intimidation by self-appointed drop-box monitors — some of them armed — prompting a federal judge to set strict new limits. And the GOP has stepped up litigation in multiple states in an effort to toss out some ballots and to expand access for partisan poll watchers.

Speaking at Washington’s Union Station — steps from the U.S. Capitol, which was attacked by a pro-Trump mob in the wake of the nation’s last major election — Biden warned of an ongoing assault on American democracy. The president spoke as a growing number of major Republican candidates have said they may follow in former president Donald Trump’s footsteps and refuse to concede should they lose.

“It’s unprecedented. It’s unlawful. And it is un-American,” Biden said. “As I’ve said before, you can’t love your country only when you win.”

A majority of GOP nominees deny or question the 2020 election results

The virtually unprecedented presidential message — a plea to Americans to accept the basic tenets of their democracy — came as millions of voters have already cast their ballots or are planning to go to the polls on Election Day, and as some election officials expressed confidence that the system would hold.

Biden spoke days after an assailant armed with a hammer broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and, according to police and prosecutors, bludgeoned her 82-year-old husband, Paul. Biden opened by addressing the gruesome early Friday morning assault.

“We must, with one overwhelming unified voice, speak as a country and say there’s no place, no place for voter intimidation or political violence in America, whether it’s directed at Democrats or Republicans,” he said. “No place, period. No place, ever.”

CQ/ Roll Call, Amazon, other PACs resume donations to electoral objectors, Kate Ackley, Nov. 3, 2022. Nearly 20 businesses and groups restarted giving to lawmakers who voted against certifying the presidential election.

After suspending donations to Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential election, a collection of PACs, including those of Amazon and Caterpillar, restarted contributions ahead of midterm elections in which the GOP is favored to win House control.

Most business and industry political action committees that announced pauses after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had already resumed giving to all lawmakers, including the 147 lawmakers who opposed certifying electoral votes from two states after the attack, Federal Election Commission filings show.

In total, company and trade group PACs donated more than $2.2 million to those 147 members in September and early October alone, according to a new analysis of FEC records by Accountable.us, shared first with CQ Roll Call. Since the Jan. 6 attack, business and industry PACs’ donations to those lawmakers have totaled more than $30 million, the group said.

The initial PAC freezes following Jan. 6, combined with a reduced number of in-person events because of the pandemic, led to a decline in donations from such coffers earlier in the election cycle. But by this fall, the fundraising scene had returned almost to normal.

Some of the 147 Republicans will hold important leadership roles and committee gavels in the next Congress, if their party wins control. They include Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who could become speaker; Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana; and Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik of New York. Two of the three contenders for the top GOP spot on the House Ways and Means panel (Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Jason Smith of Missouri) are among the 147.

Appeal-Democrat (California's Sutter and Yuba counties), Wheatland man guilty of murder: Influenced by conspiracy theories, Robert Summa, Nov. 3, 2022. Banks had ‘hit list’ of potential victims.

As the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation continues to creep into every corner of American life, the consequences of movements such as QAnon have shown to be fatal – the most recent well-covered example being the attack on Paul Pelosi at his home allegedly by a man who fell deep into the conspiracy rabbit hole.

On Oct. 28, a Wheatland man, 44-year-old Rory Banks, who also seemed to be affected by misinformation online, was found guilty by a Yuba County jury for the May 12, 2021, murder of 55-year-old Ralph Mendez. The jury found that Banks was guilty of burglary and the premeditated murder of Mendez.

At around 12:45 a.m. on that day in May of last year, the Wheatland Police Department received a 911 call related to a shooting that had taken place in the 200 block of G Street in Wheatland, the Appeal previously reported. Mendez was found by law enforcement officers with a gunshot wound. Lifesaving measures were performed but he was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the department.

After an investigation, Banks was determined to be the shooting suspect.

“Banks broke into Mendez’s home, waking Mendez and his 88-year-old mother. Banks executed Mendez, shooting him in the torso and the head,” Yuba County District Attorney Clint Curry said in a statement. “Banks then used Mendez’s home phone to call 911. Wheatland Police officers arrived within minutes, finding Banks covered in blood in the driveway, with a pistol on the ground nearby. Banks surrendered and confessed to the murder.”

He was taken into custody without incident and booked into Yuba County Jail for murder and residential burglary. The weapon used in the fatal shooting was recovered at the scene.

“This was not a random act,” Wheatland Police Chief Damiean Sylvester said at the time. “We believe the victim was targeted by the suspect.”

In fact, according to evidence presented during the trial, it was determined that what Banks had done was not random, but was the act of a person convinced certain conspiracy theories were real.

“Rory Banks set out just after midnight on May 12, 2021, armed with two handguns, four knives, OC spray, strobe lights, a hit list with four names and addresses, and an intent to murder every person in Wheatland listed on California’s sex-offender registry,” Curry said. “Banks did not know any of them personally, but appointed himself judge, jury, and executioner.”

Curry said Mendez was one of four men on Banks’ kill list.

 

Washington Post, Musk’s Trump-style management by tweet rattles Twitter workers awaiting layoffs, Will Oremus, Nov. 3, 2022. Rumors swirl on anonymous apps amid silence from Elon Musk’s leadership team as layoffs loom.

With rumors of impending layoffs by new owner Elon Musk, above, swirling inside Twitter on Wednesday, an employee noticed that the Google Calendar of one of their new bosses was publicly viewable. On it was an entry at 5 p.m. that day titled “RIF Review” — an acronym for Reduction in Force, or layoffs.

Another Twitter employee was able to view a group on Slack, the workplace chat tool, in which company administrators appeared to be finalizing the precise number of workers to be laid off, and how much they’d receive in severance.

By day’s end, word had spread across the company that layoffs — half the staff — would probably come Friday, and that Musk would require Twitter’s remaining employees to return to the office full-time. But that word didn’t come from Musk, or anyone on his leadership team. It came via Blind, the anonymous workplace gossip site that some Twitter employees say has become their best, and often only, source of information about what’s going on inside the company in the chaotic, surreal week since Musk acquired it for $44 billion.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the company’s leadership has not confirmed the layoff plans.

Since Musk closed the deal on Oct. 27, employees say, they have not received a single official communication from anyone in a leadership position at the company. They have not been told that Musk completed the purchase, that their CEO and top executives were summarily fired, or that Musk dissolved the board and installed himself as chief executive.

Instead, they have read about Musk’s dramatic plans to overhaul the company via media reports, Musk’s tweets, back-channel private chats and Blind. Twitter’s formerly open corporate culture, centered on all-staff meetings and freewheeling Slack channels where employees and managers shared ideas, plans and jokes, has turned suspicious and secretive, several Twitter employees told The Wasington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

Washington Post, Widow of Fox journalist killed in Ukraine seeks answers: Why was security team not with her husband? Jeremy Barr, Nov. 3, 2022. Pierre Zakrzewski, above, right, and Oleksandra Kuvshynova, above left, died and Benjamin Hall was severely injured when their vehicle was hit by an explosion. Michelle Ross-Stanton tried to reconstruct what happened.

Michelle Ross-Stanton has spent months investigating the March 14 attack on her husband, Pierre Zakrzewski, and his colleagues outside Kyiv.

Pierre Zakrzewski had always come home. From Syria. From Libya. From Afghanistan.

As a cameraman and photographer who had spent most of his long career in conflict zones, he knew when to duck, when to run, the dicey scenarios to navigate, the trouble spots to avoid.

So when Michelle Ross-Stanton received a phone call from Fox News chief executive Suzanne Scott on the evening of March 14 saying that her husband had been missing in Ukraine for five hours, she figured that he was hunkered down somewhere. Probably tending to the members of his team, as he’d always done.

New York Times, U.S. officials met with the basketball star Brittney Griner, who is “doing as well as can be expected,” the White House said, James C. McKinley Jr., Chris Cameron and Edward Wong, Nov. 3, 2022. U.S. officials met with the jailed American basketball star Brittney Griner on Thursday for the first time since a Russian court rejected her appeal on a drug-possession conviction, and the White House said she was doing “as well as can be expected.”

Ms. Griner has become unwillingly ensnared in a geopolitical battle between Russia and the west, and has been grappling with the decision by a Russian appeals court to uphold a nine-year sentence in a penal colony on charges of drug possession. Ms. Griner, who recently turned 32 in Russian custody, pleaded guilty to drug-smuggling charges and apologized for what she called an inadvertent offense.

New York Times, Nets Suspend Kyrie Irving Indefinitely After Antisemitic Movie Post, Tania Ganguli, Nov. 3, 2022. Irving posted a link to the movie to his Twitter last week but has declined to apologize. His suspension will last at least five games.

The Nets suspended guard Kyrie Irving indefinitely Thursday for his “failure to disavow antisemitism” since he posted a link to an antisemitic movie on Twitter last week, though he had said there were some things in the movie he did not agree with.

“I didn’t mean to cause any harm,” Irving said after a Nets practice Thursday. “I’m not the one that made the documentary.”

Irving, left, declined to apologize for the post, and when asked what specific points in the movie he did not agree with, he responded vaguely.

“Some of the criticism of the Jewish faith and the community, for sure,” Irving said. “Some points made in there that were unfortunate.”

The Nets said in a statement that Irving’s suspension would last at least five games, adding that Irving’s “failure to disavow antisemitism when given a clear opportunity to do so is deeply disturbing, is against the values of our organization, and constitutes conduct detrimental to the team.”

Last week, Irving posted a link on Twitter to the movie “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” which is driven by antisemitic tropes about Jewish people lying about their origins. Its false and outlandish claims about Jews include the assertion that the Holocaust never happened.

“Those falsehoods are unfortunate,” Irving said when asked if he believed that the Holocaust occurred, despite what the movie said. “And it’s not that I don’t believe in the Holocaust. I never said that. Never ever have said it. It’s not come out of my mouth. I never tweeted it. I never liked anything like it. So, the Holocaust in itself is an event that means something to a large group of people that suffered something that could have been avoided.”

In a statement Wednesday night, Irving and the Nets said they would each donate $500,000 to unspecified causes and organizations that combat hate in their communities. The statement was jointly released by Irving, the Nets and the Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit that fights antisemitism. When asked Thursday if he had met with the Anti-Defamation League, Irving said he was told that the organization wanted a meeting and “we handled it.”

Irving did not apologize in the statement Wednesday, but he said he took responsibility for his post.

 

New York Times, Les Moonves and Paramount to Pay $9.75 Million in State Case Tied to Sexual Misconduct, Rebecca Robbins and Benjamin Mullin, Nov. 3, 2022 (print ed.). The New York attorney general’s office found that CBS, whose parent company is now Paramount, concealed allegations about its former chief executive from investors.

Paramount, the parent company of CBS, and the network’s former chief executive Leslie Moonves, right, agreed to pay $9.75 million after a state investigation found that the network and its senior leadership had concealed accusations of sexual misconduct against Mr. Moonves and, in the case of one executive, engaged in insider trading related to the allegations.

Paramount said it would pay $7.25 million into a settlement fund as part of the deal. Mr. Moonves will pay $2.5 million. Separately, Paramount has agreed to pay $14.75 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit related to the claims.

Paramount confirmed in a statement that it had reached a resolution with the New York attorney general’s office without admitting wrongdoing or liability.

“The matter involved alleged misconduct by CBS’s former C.E.O., who was terminated for cause in 2018, and does not relate in any way to the current company,” the statement read.

Nov. 2

Tech Dirt, Analysis and Opinion: Bullshit Reporting: The Intercept’s Story About Government Policing Disinfo Is Absolute Garbage, Mike Masnick, Nov. 2, 2022.  Do not believe everything you read. Even if it comes from more “respectable” publications.

The Intercept had a big story this week that is making the rounds, suggesting that “leaked” documents prove the DHS has been coordinating with tech companies to suppress information. The story has been immediately picked up by the usual suspects, claiming it reveals the “smoking gun” of how the Biden administration was abusing government power to censor them on social media.

The only problem? It shows nothing of the sort.

The article is garbage. It not only misreads things, it is confused about what the documents the reporters have actually say, and presents widely available, widely known things as if they were secret and hidden when they were not.

The entire article is a complete nothingburger, and is fueling a new round of lies and nonsense from people who find it useful to misrepresent reality. If the Intercept had any credibility at all it would retract the article and examine whatever processes failed in leading to the article getting published.

Let’s dig in. Back in 2018, then President Donald Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act into law, creating the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency as a separate agency in the Department of Homeland Security. While there are always reasons to be concerned about government interference in various aspects of life, CISA was pretty uncontroversial (perhaps with the exception of when Trump freaked out and fired the first CISA director, Chris Krebs, for pointing out that the election was safe and there was no evidence of manipulation or foul play).

While CISA has a variety of things under its purview, one thing that it is focused on is general information sharing between the government and private entities. This has actually been really useful for everyone, even though the tech companies have been (quite reasonably!) cautious about how closely they’ll work with the government (because they’ve been burned before). Indeed, as you may recall, one of the big revelations from the Snowden documents was about the PRISM program, which turned out to be oversold by the media reporting on it, but was still problematic in many ways. Since then, the tech companies have been even more careful about working with government, knowing that too much government involvement will eventually come out and get everyone burned.

With that in mind, CISA’s role has been pretty widely respected with almost everyone I’ve spoken to, both in government and at various companies. It provides information regarding actual threats, which has been useful to companies, and they seem to appreciate it. Given their historical distrust of government intrusion and their understanding of the limits of government authority here, the companies have been pretty attuned to any attempt at coercion, and I’ve heard of nothing regarding CISA at all.

That’s why the story seemed like such a big deal when I first read the headline and some of the summaries. But then I read the article… and the supporting documents… and there’s no there there. There’s nothing. There’s… the information sharing that everyone already knew was happening and that has been widely discussed in the past.

Let’s go through the supposed “bombshells”:

Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information.

[Snip]

 I had tremendous respect for The Intercept, which I think has done some great work in the past, but this article is so bad, so misleading, and just so full of shit that it should be retracted. A credible news organization would not put out this kind of pure bullshit.

NBC News, Former Miss Argentina and ex-Miss Puerto Rico reveal they are married, Jay Valle, Nov. 2, 2022. They both competed in last year’s Miss Grand International beauty pageant in Thailand.

A former Miss Argentina and an ex-Miss Puerto Rico announced on Instagram over the weekend that they are married.

In a joint post shared to both their accounts, Mariana Varela of Argentina and Fabiola Valentín of Puerto Rico wrote, “After deciding to keep our relationship private, we now open our doors to a special day.” The message included what appeared to be their wedding date, Oct. 28, along with heart and ring emojis.

Varela, 26, and Valentín, 22, appear to have met last March, when they competed in the Miss Grand International beauty pageant in Thailand. In a joint Instagram post, the newlyweds said: "After deciding to keep our relationship private, we opened the doors to them on a special day 28/10/22."

Nov. 1

 

 

Christina Applegate in the final season of “Dead to Me,” premiering Nov. 17 on Netflix. “This is the first time anyone’s going to see me the way I am,” she said (Photo by Saeed Adyani for Netflix).

New York Times, Christina Applegate Pours One Out for ‘Dead to Me,’ Alexis Soloski, Nov. 1, 2022. Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis during filming of the show’s final season, Applegate was determined to finish the story. She said it was the hardest thing she’s ever done. Christina Applegate in the final season of “Dead to Me,” premiering Nov. 17 on Netflix. “This is the first time anyone’s going to see me the way I am,” she said.

When Christina Applegate looks back, she can recognize the signs. Filming a dance sequence during the first season of the Netflix wine-mom dramedy “Dead to Me,” she found herself off balance. Later, her tennis game began to falter. At the time, Applegate, an actress with an aversion to special pleading, didn’t make excuses. She had to work harder, she told herself. She had to try again.

“I wish I had paid attention,” she said during a recent video call from her home in Los Angeles. “But who was I to know?”

Over several years, the tingling and numbness in her extremities grew worse. And in the summer of 2021, on set for the third and final season of “Dead to Me,” she received a diagnosis. She had multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that disrupts communication between the brain and body. Production shut down for about five months as she began treatment.

“There was the sense of, ‘Well, let’s get her some medicine so she can get better,’” Applegate, 50, recalled. “And there is no better. But it was good for me. I needed to process my loss of my life, my loss of that part of me. So I needed that time.”

“Although it’s not like I came on the other side of it, like, ‘Woohoo, I’m totally fine,’” she added. “Acceptance? No. I’m never going to accept this. I’m pissed.”

This was on a recent morning. Applegate was sitting up in bed — her happy place, where she watches reality television. (“That’s my meditation,” she said.) She had pulled her hair into a scrappy bun. Black glasses sat astride her nose. And her resting face did have a certain indignant quality.

But she wanted to do this interview, because the last season of “Dead to Me” arrives on Netflix later this month, on Nov. 17.

“This is the first time anyone’s going to see me the way I am,” she said. “I put on 40 pounds; I can’t walk without a cane. I want people to know that I am very aware of all of that.”

In truth, her illness is nearly invisible onscreen — a feat of savvy blocking and Applegate’s talent and resolve. Still, she wanted to offer context.

 

 

New York Times, Company Backed by J.D. Vance Gives Platform for Russian Propaganda, Danny Hakim, Updated Nov. 1, 2022. In June, two American veterans fighting as volunteers in Ukraine, Alex Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh (shown above), were captured by Russian forces. They were taken to a black site where they were beaten, run into walls with bags over their heads and hooked up to a car battery and “electrocuted,” the men said after being freed in late September.

Between beatings, they told The New York Times, they were interviewed on Russian media outlets, including RT, one of the Kremlin’s primary propaganda organs in the West.

“They stayed away from our faces because they knew that we were going to be on camera, that they were going to try and use this for propaganda.,” Mr. Drueke said. “So they wanted our faces to look OK. But they took care of our bodies pretty good.”

RT had been largely taken off the air in the United States and banned by the European Union in March after Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. But in June, its version of the captives’ story appeared on Rumble, a video-sharing platform that stepped in this year and began carrying RT’s live feed, in addition to its clips. There, a glum-looking Mr. Huynh says they joined the fight in Ukraine after being duped by “propaganda from the West” that “Russian forces were indiscriminately killing civilians.”

Rumble has become a leading destination for conservative content by positioning itself as a platform for unfettered speech, an alternative to the content moderation — or “censorship,” to many on the right — of mainstream social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Last year, Rumble received a major investment from a venture capital firm co-founded by J.D. Vance,  the Republican Senate candidate in Ohio. The firm, Narya Capital, got a seat on Rumble’s board, and its more than seven million shares place it among the company’s top 10 shareholders, according to securities filings.

Mr. Vance, shown at left in a Gage Skidmore photo also took a personal Rumble stake worth between $100,000 and $250,000, his financial disclosures show.

Narya is backed by the prime patron of Mr. Vance’s Senate campaign, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. And it was Mr. Thiel who played a leading role in Narya’s Rumble investment last year, becoming what the platform’s chief executive described as its first outside investor.

The investment fits into an enduring narrative of Mr. Thiel, who has expressed skepticism of democracy and advocated keeping the airwaves open for hard-right voices since his student days at Stanford. It also helps illuminate the relationship between Mr. Vance and Mr. Thiel, left, who mentored the candidate in his Silicon Valley business empire and has contributed more than $15 million to his campaign and affiliated political action committees. (Mr. Thiel has contributed another $15 million to support the candidacy of another protégé, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters.)

Asked about Rumble’s hosting of RT, the Vance campaign issued a statement. “J.D. does not play an active role at Rumble, nor does he set Rumble’s content moderation policies,” the campaign said. “It’s a dishonest straw man to suggest that just because someone believes in free speech rights online that they also personally endorse that speech. It’s embarrassing that an industry like the media, which relies on the First Amendment, has so much trouble comprehending that.” Mr. Thiel’s spokesman did not comment.

New York Times, Judge Blocks Merger of Top U.S. Book Publisher and a Main Rival, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, Nov. 1, 2022 (print ed.). The government’s case blocked the merger of two of the United States’ largest publishers and reflected a more aggressive approach to curbing consolidation. It was closely watched by the publishing industry.

A federal judge blocked on Monday a bid by Penguin Random House, the biggest book publisher in the United States, to buy one of its main rivals, Simon & Schuster, in a significant victory for the Biden administration, which is trying to expand the boundaries of antitrust enforcement.

The judge, Florence Y. Pan, who heard the case in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, said in an order that the Justice Department had demonstrated that the merger might “substantially” harm competition in the market for U.S. publishing rights to anticipated top-selling books.

The full order laying out Judge Pan’s reasoning is temporarily under seal because it contains confidential information, and will be released later after both parties file redactions.

Penguin Random House and its parent company, Bertelsmann, said in response on Monday that they planned to appeal.

In a statement, Penguin Random House called the decision “an unfortunate setback for readers and authors” and argued that “the Department of Justice’s focus on advances to the world’s best-paid authors instead of consumers or the intense competitiveness in the publishing sector runs contrary to its mission to ensure fair competition.”

The victory is a notable one for the Justice Department. Judges have ruled against several of its previous challenges to corporate deals, including UnitedHealth Group’s purchase of a technology company. In a statement on Monday, the Justice Department hailed the ruling as a win for authors and readers.

“The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy,” said Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter of the department’s antitrust division.

New York Times, Elon Musk, Plus a Circle of Confidants, Tightens Control Over Twitter, Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, Nov. 1, 2022 (print ed.). The billionaire and a group of his advisers are working on layoff plans and how to swiftly change Twitter’s product, said people with knowledge of the matter.

Elon Musk, right, and a group of his advisers have tightened their grip over Twitter, meeting with company executives to work on layoffs, ordering up product changes, talking with advertisers and reviewing content moderation policies, according to more than a dozen current and former employees involved in the efforts.

The priorities for the world’s richest man and his advisers at Twitter are twofold, five of the people said: They are working on how to trim the company’s ranks while also exploring a slew of changes to Twitter’s mobile app.

For now, the timing and scope of layoffs remains fluid as lists of the top and lower performers at the company are finalized, the people said. Mr. Musk’s advisers have also assigned a team of Twitter’s engineers to work on its “verification” program, the system that doles out badges to high-profile or notable users to confirm their profiles’ authenticity. Twitter could charge users $20 a month to retain their verified status, two people with knowledge of the discussions said.

Mr. Musk, 51, flew to New York on Sunday after spending much of last week at Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, according to one person familiar with his movements and a Twitter account that tracks the location of his private jet. Some of his trusted confidants remain in San Francisco, the people said, including David Sacks, a venture capitalist, and Sriram Krishnan, a former Twitter product leader and partner at the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Mr. Musk’s buyout of Twitter.

 

Washington Post, Musk’s inner circle worked through the weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Faiz Siddiqui, Nov. 1, 2022 (print ed.). The first round of layoffs is expected to target 25 percent of Twitter’s workforce.

Members of billionaire Elon Musk’s inner circle huddled with Twitter’s remaining senior executives throughout the weekend, conducting detailed discussions regarding the site’s approach to content moderation, as well as plans to lay off 25 percent of the workforce to start.

Alex Spiro, a well-known celebrity lawyer who has represented Musk for several years, led those conversations. Spiro is taking an active role in managing several teams at Twitter, including legal, government relations, policy and marketing, according to four people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe them, as well as tweets from some of the people involved.

Longtime Musk associates David Sacks and Jason Calacanis appeared in a company directory over the weekend, according to photos obtained by The Washington Post. Both had official company emails and their titles were “staff software engineer.” Musk’s title in the directory was CEO, although that position has not been publicly announced. He refers to himself as “Chief Twit.”

Washington Post, Twitter wants to charge for verification. Here’s what you need to know, Heather Kelly and Gerrit De Vynck, Nov. 1, 2022. Whether you use Twitter or not, the change could have broader implications for everything from misinformation to elections. The coveted blue check mark could soon cost up to $20 a month.

The first big new Twitter feature under Elon Musk could cost you.

The company is considering charging users to get verified and display the signature blue check mark next to their account name. It’s something Twitter has offered to some accounts for free in the past, with mixed success.
Help Desk: Technology coverage that makes tech work for you

Over the weekend, Jason Calacanis, a longtime Musk associate who has been brought in to help run Twitter, posted a poll asking how much people would be willing to pay for the honor. The vast majority voted “wouldn’t pay.”

If undeterred, Twitter could charge as much as $20 a month for the privilege of having the blue check, according to a person familiar with the issue who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. Twitter’s existing paid version, called Twitter Blue, would be combined with the verification process, and some of its existing features may be cut, according to the person.

What apps to use if you leave Twitter

Whether you use Twitter or not, the change could have broader implications for everything from misinformation to elections. Here’s what you need to know.

Washington Post, Musk mulls Twitter verification charge, barters with Stephen King on fee, Adela Suliman, Nov. 1, 2022. Twitter’s new owner and CEO, Elon Musk, appeared to confirm reports that the platform is considering charging people $20 to maintain the coveted blue check mark of verification on their account in an exchange with the horror author Stephen King.

King lambasted the idea of requiring payment, tweeting to his almost 7 million followers on Monday: “They should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron,” he said, alluding to the energy company that collapsed in scandal and filed for bankruptcy.

In response, Musk suggested that charging for verification would help the site to make a profit and appeared to negotiate with King, tweeting: “We need to pay the bills somehow! Twitter cannot rely entirely on advertisers. How about $8?”

“I will explain the rationale in longer form before this is implemented. It is the only way to defeat the bots & trolls,” Musk added. King did not reply.

Twitter wants to charge for verification. Here’s what you need to know.

The billionaire Tesla and SpaceX owner completed his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion last week after several months of negotiations and legal wrangling.

In the run-up to his Twitter acquisition, Musk made the issue of fake Twitter accounts run by “bots” a point of major contention as he demanded more internal data from the company to evaluate the number of fake users on the site.

He has since said that the “whole verification process is being revamped” without sharing more details, though he has yet to confirm whether any payment will be requested for verification.

The blue verification badge signifies that an account is “authentic, notable, and active,” according to Twitter, and is generally held by public figures in government, news and entertainment, among other limited fields.

Musk’s inner circle worked through weekend to cement Twitter layoff plans

Tech investor and longtime Musk associate Jason Calacanis, who since Musk’s acquisition has appeared in Twitter’s company directory, also solicited interest in various payment amounts for a blue check on Monday, administering a poll of prices ranging from $5 to $15 a month. While the poll remains open, an overwhelming 82 percent of respondents have so far indicated they wouldn’t pay. Musk responded to Calacanis’s poll, saying: “Interesting.”

Washington Post, It’s true, Martin Luther King Jr. paid the hospital bill when actress Julia Roberts was born, Sydney Page, Nov. 1, 2022. Before Julia Roberts’s birth, her parents had welcomed the King children into their theater school and became friends with Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King.
*
Washington Post, Taylor Swift claims every spot in the Billboard Top 10, making music history, María Luisa Paúl, Nov. 1, 2022. Last month, Taylor Swift kept fans up with her 12 a.m. debut of “Midnights,” her tenth and latest album. Three hours later, the pop star — who has a penchant for surprising fans — dropped seven extra tracks in a deluxe version aptly titled “Midnights (3am Edition).”

The sleepless night — mirroring the ones she croons about on the record — paid off. “Midnights” turned Swift into the first artist to snag every one of the top 10 slots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, all with songs from the 13-song album.

It is a previously unheard-of, tremendous achievement for any artist, experts told The Washington Post. Amid the music industry’s changing ecosystem in the age of streaming, the feat could only be pulled off by someone who brings to the table exactly what Swift does: an established stardom, a loyal fan base, a savvy social media strategy and a relentless marketing machine.

 Washington Post, Rapper Takeoff of the group Migos fatally shot in Houston, his representative confirms to AP, Andrea Salcedo, Sonia Rao and Annabelle Timsit, Nov. 1, 2022. Rapper Takeoff, one third of the group Migos, was killed in a shooting at a private party early Tuesday in Houston, his representative confirmed to the Associated Press.

Houston police said they would not be identifying the person killed in the shooting “until his family is notified & ID verified by Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.” Police said the victim was a Black male in his 20s. The shooting took place at a bowling alley, at 2:40 a.m., local news outlet Click2Houston reported.

A reporter for Fox 26 in Houston shared a clip of a news conference, with a spokesperson confirming police “were informed” that members of the hip-hop trio Migos — Takeoff, 28, and Quavo — were at the scene. It is not known whether Offset, the third member of the group, was at the private gathering. All three members of Migos are related; Takeoff, whose real name is Kirshnik Khari Ball, is the nephew of Quavo, born Quavious Keyate Marshall. Offset, whose name is Kiari Kendrell Cephus, is Quavo’s cousin.

 

New York Times, Truth Social’s Influence Grows Despite Its Business Problems, Stuart A. Thompson and Matthew Goldstein, Nov. 1, 2022. The right-wing social network faces two federal investigations and an uncertain financial future. But it has still managed to outpace its rivals.

Truth Social, the right-wing social network, has faced one business calamity after the next since it launched in February. Two executives resigned after its app launch was mired with problems. Another executive was fired after filing a whistle-blower complaint, claiming that Truth’s parent company was relying on “fraudulent misrepresentations.” Two federal investigations are putting $1.3 billion in much-needed financing in jeopardy.

Yet users logging into Truth Social each day saw something quite different during that time: a vibrant right-wing ecosystem increasingly brimming with activity.

Truth Social’s long-term future remains in doubt, but experts say the app itself has only grown more influential in conservative circles ahead of the midterm election.

Much of that is owed to former President Donald J. Trump, one of the app’s founders and its star, who now uses Truth Social as his primary megaphone to the world. His posts on the site reach more than four million followers and regularly reverberate across mainstream news and social media sites.

The Nick Bryant Podcast, Speaking on the Media with investigative reporter Andrew Kreig, Nick Bryant (author or co-author of such investigative books as The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, & Betrayal and Confessions of a DC Madam, and such articles as "Jeffrey Epstein’s Black Book" and "Obama's Veiled Past," Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2022 (82:35 mins.).

Attorney Andrew Kreig directs the non-partisan Justice Integrity Project, which reports misconduct, primarily in the justice and political systems, that harms individuals, communities and democratic values.

When Andrew and the host discussed his book Presidential Puppetry, Nick Bryant cited similar findings in an article he wrote on Obama's background for readers of his blog.

New York Times, Man Planned to Kidnap Nancy Pelosi and Break Her Kneecaps, Prosecutors Say, Glenn Thrush, Kellen Browning and Luke Vander Ploeg, Nov. 1, 2022 (print ed.). Intruder Wanted to Break Speaker Pelosi’s Kneecaps, Federal Complaint Says.

Federal prosecutors filed charges on Monday against the man the police said broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and struck her husband with a hammer.

Federal prosecutors charged the man accused of breaking into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with attempting to kidnap Ms. Pelosi and with assaulting a relative of a federal official, according to charging documents filed on Monday.

The suspect, David DePape, 42, above, was apprehended by the police at the Pelosi home in the early morning hours on Friday. The police said he forcibly entered through the back door of the house, encountered Ms. Pelosi’s husband, Paul Pelosi, 82, and, following a struggle over a hammer, struck him with it.

Mr. DePape was looking for Ms. Pelosi, who was in Washington at the time, to interrogate the speaker on an unspecified political matter, according to the federal complaint. If she told the “truth,” he would let her go; if she “lied,” he intended to break her kneecaps because he saw her as “the ‘leader of the pack’ of lies told by the Democratic Party” and wanted her to be wheeled into Congress as a lesson to other Democrats, Mr. DePape told police officers in an interview.

He had “a roll of tape, white rope, a second hammer, a pair of rubber and cloth gloves, and zip ties” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California, which filed the charges.

The swift action by the Justice Department in bringing federal charges — on the same day the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office filed its own charges against Mr. DePape — reflects the department’s urgency in addressing what it sees as a politically motivated crime shortly before the 2022 midterm elections. There has been a surge in threats and attacks against figures of both political parties in recent years, and Ms. Pelosi, in particular, has long been the subject of vilification and threats.

Federal prosecutors filed charges on Monday against the man the police said broke into House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and struck her husband with a hammer.

Later on Monday, Brooke Jenkins, the San Francisco district attorney, announced additional state charges. Mr. DePape was charged with six felonies: attempted murder, residential burglary, elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, false imprisonment of an elder and threatening family members of public officials. Mr. DePape was expected to be arraigned in superior court on Tuesday.
Sign up for California Today The news and stories that matter to Californians (and anyone else interested in the state), delivered weekday mornings. Get it sent to your inbox.

Mr. Pelosi, who alerted the police, underwent surgery on Friday after sustaining a fractured skull and serious injuries to his hands and right arm, according to a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. Mr. Pelosi remains in the intensive care unit of a San Francisco hospital, surrounded by his family, according to a person familiar with the situation.

Law enforcement officials said that Mr. DePape sustained “minor injuries” and was treated at a hospital.

The affidavit from an F.B.I. agent that accompanied the charges provided the most complete, and chilling, narrative of the break-in to date. It detailed a groggy early-morning home invasion that culminated with a single, sudden hammer blow, delivered in the presence of shocked police officers.

Mr. DePape broke a glass door and entered the residence, awakening Mr. Pelosi, who confronted him and then ducked into a bathroom to call 911 at 2:23 a.m. Officers with the San Francisco Police Department arrived eight minutes later to find the two men struggling over a hammer.

When they asked what was going on, Mr. DePape “responded that everything was good,” the agent wrote. At that moment, Mr. DePape yanked the hammer from Mr. Pelosi’s grip and struck him once in the head, rendering him unconscious on the floor.

The officers quickly restrained Mr. DePape, who told them he had left his backpack near the smashed door window on the rear porch. When they examined its contents, they found another hammer, tape, rope, two pairs of gloves — rubber and cloth — and a journal.

The police recovered the zip ties in the bedroom. Mr. DePape later told officers he had intended to tie up Mr. Pelosi until the speaker arrived home.

New York Times, Republicans are continuing to spread baseless claims about the attack, Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, Nov. 1, 2022 (print ed.). Some of the conspiracy theories have already seeped into the Republican mainstream.

Donald Trump Jr., the former president’s son, continues to post jokes about it.

Dinesh D’Souza, the creator of a discredited film about the 2020 election called “2000 Mules,” accused the San Francisco Police Department on Monday of covering up the facts.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, wrote that the “same mainstream media democrat activists” who questioned former President Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia were now silencing the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk.

The reason: Mr. Musk deleted a post linking to a newspaper that once claimed Hillary Rodham Clinton was dead when she ran for president in 2016.

In the days since Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was attacked by an intruder asking, “Where is Nancy?”, a litany of Republicans and conservatives have spread baseless conspiracy theories about the assault and its motives.

Although the police have not yet detailed all the circumstances of the crime, these theories have already seeped into the Republican mainstream. While many Republican officials have denounced the violence, others have at the very least tolerated, and in some cases cheered, a violent assault on the spouse of a political rival.

The disinformation “isn’t just political,” said Angelo Carusone, the president and chief executive of Media Matters for America, a progressive nonprofit. “It’s much bigger than that; it’s deeper. They’re really rethinking and reshaping a lot of our norms.”

The attack on Mr. Pelosi in the couple’s home in San Francisco early on Friday morning has raised fears about the rise of political violence against elected officials — increasingly, it seems, inspired by a toxic brew of extremism, hate and paranoia that is easily found online.

The assailant, identified by the police as David DePape, 42, posted a series of notes in the days before the attack suggesting that he had fallen under the sway of right-wing conspiracy theories and antisemitism online. Some of the flurry of posts by others questioning the circumstances of the attack appeared intended to deflect attention from Mr. DePape’s views.

No top Republican lawmakers joined in peddling unfounded claims about the attack, but few denounced them, either. Mrs. Clinton, the former first lady and senator who lost to Mr. Trump in 2016, pointedly blamed the party for spreading “hate and deranged conspiracy theories.”

 

October

Oct. 31

Washington Post, Alleged assailant filled blog with delusional thoughts in days before Pelosi attack, Aaron C. Davis and Dalton Bennett, Oct. 31, 2022 (print ed.). San Francisco Bay area resident David DePape wrote that an invisible fairy had attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird. Other posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats and the media.

The San Francisco Bay area man arrested in the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband filled a blog a week before the incident with delusional thoughts, including that an invisible fairy attacked an acquaintance and sometimes appeared to him in the form of a bird, according to online writings under his name.

David DePape, 42, also published hundreds of blog posts in recent months sharing memes in support of fringe commentators and far-right personalities. Many of the posts were filled with screeds against Jews, Black people, Democrats, the media and transgender people.

During October, DePape published over 100 posts. While each loads, a reader briefly glimpses an image of a person wearing a giant inflatable unicorn costume, superimposed against a night sky. The photos and videos that followed were often dark and disturbing.

He published a drawing of the Devil kneeling and asking a caricature of a Jewish person to teach him the arts of “lying, deception, cheating and incitement.” Several contain lifelike images of rotting human flesh and blood, including a zombified Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton. Others depict headless bodies against bleak, dystopian landscapes.

Before those writings were removed Saturday, The Washington Post reviewed them, as well as gory photos, illustrations and videos on a website that DePape registered under his name in early August and that his daughter confirmed was his. Notably, the voluminous writings do not mention Pelosi. Police say DePape broke into the home Pelosi shares with her husband early Friday, yelled “Where is Nancy?” and attacked 82-year-old Paul Pelosi with a hammer.

Pelosi remained hospitalized Saturday, recovering from surgery to repair a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hand, according to the speaker’s office. San Francisco’s police chief and district attorney provided no update, but on Friday local, state and federal authorities said they were working together to investigate DePape’s motive.

 

Social media responders promptly created the above caricature of Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, portrayed wearing a tinfoil hat after his weekend moves to retweet with no evidence an ultra-right smear lewd smear of the QAnon type suggesting that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul Pelosi had been involved in lewd behavior when he was attacked at night at his home by a Trump supporter fracturing Pelosi's head with a hammer. Shown below is Musk's Tweet spreading the smear. That prompted many Twitter users to suggest he would be using his newfound power over the platform to spread disinformation helping ultra-right interests, with a goal in part on to help Republicans regain power in the mid-term elections occurring now until Nov. 8 in the United States.

 

 

Musk made news also over the weekend by setting in motion massive firings at Twitter, especially among content moderators, with one reputed goal being to deprive workers of vesting in stock option rights that many were expecting as of Nov. 1. 

Washington Post, Elon Musk, right-wing figures push misinformation about Pelosi attack, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Oct. 31, 2022 (print ed.). Twitter’s new owner sowed doubt about law enforcement’s account as suggestions of a “false flag” flooded the site.

An online forum devoted to former White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon’s right-wing radio show alerted its 78,000 subscribers to “very strange new details on Paul Pelosi attack.”

Roger Stone, a longtime political consigliere to former president Donald Trump, took to the fast-growing messaging app Telegram to call the assault on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband an “alleged attack,” telling his followers that a “stench” surrounded mainstream reporting about the Friday break-in that left Pelosi, 82, with a skull fracture.

The skepticism didn’t stay in right-wing echo chambers but seeped also into the feeds of popular online personalities, including Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, right.

“There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” he wrote Sunday morning, pointing his 112 million followers to a sensationalist account of the episode published by a site known for spreading right-wing misinformation.

The rush to sow doubt about the assault on Pelosi’s husband illustrates how aggressively influential figures on the right are seeking to dissuade the public from believing facts about the violence, seizing on the event to promote conspiracy theories and provoke distrust. The House speaker has long been a bugbear for the right, which has intensified its rhetorical blitz on her in recent years — even as extreme threats against members of Congress have increased.

These merchants of misinformation, said Carl Cameron, a former longtime Fox News political correspondent, deceive their massive audiences using rumors and lies about everything from the integrity of elections to the details of a police report.

“They are creating a dystopia wherein lying and physical violence become part of our politics,” he said.

• New York Times, Twitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One, Kevin Roose

Proof via Twitter, Commentary: Is it a dangerous situation when the Twitter CEO is digitally illiterate? @SethAbramson (journalism professor, best-selling author of the "Proof" series and attorney), Oct. 30, 2022.  When he indulges conspiracy theories because—as an egomaniacal billionaire—he wants to think he knows better than everyone else? And because no one can lecture him on anything?

Yes.

I’ve diagnosed the problem. @ElonMusk is what academics call “digitally illiterate.” Clinton posted a Los Angeles Times article, and Musk replied with *a post from a fake-news site* that’s already down. Then he wrote “tiny possibility” as a hedge against spreading disinformation.

Politico, Top Republicans deny any link between GOP rhetoric and Paul Pelosi assault, Olivia Olander, Oct. 31, 2022 (print ed.). Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel called it “unfair” that Democrats would draw a direct line between her party’s villainizing of Pelosi and the Friday home invasion that left the speaker’s husband hospitalized.

And National Republican Congressional Committee Chair Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who posted a video last week of himself firing a gun with the hashtag #FirePelosi, deflected a question about whether he should have used a weapon along with the hashtag.

 

New York Times, Can Elon Musk Make the Math Work on Owning Twitter? It’s Dicey, Lauren Hirsch, Oct. 31, 2022 (print ed.). Mr. Musk faces financial challenges in owning Twitter. The site frequently loses money and took on $13 billion in debt for the blockbuster deal.

Now that Elon Musk has completed his $44 billion deal for Twitter, let’s walk through the math of owning the social media company.

It’s not just an academic exercise. Mr. Musk’s ability to make the numbers work will have a direct impact on the health of a service called the world’s town square, determining what direction he takes the business and the platform. If the financial case is grim, any plans to invest in Twitter may have to take a back seat to simply paying the bills.

The numbers are already daunting. The $44 billion acquisition was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. To do the deal, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, loaded about $13 billion in debt on the company, which had not turned a profit for eight of the past 10 years. The deal was inked before the global economy looked to be headed toward a recession as interest rates surged higher. And digital advertising, which makes up 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, has been falling at social media companies.

“Technology companies should be left with enough flexibility to pay for new research and development and new levels of innovation,” said Drew Pascarella, a senior lecturer of finance at Cornell University who previously worked as a banker advising on acquisitions. This buyout “completely eliminates flexibility.”

 

Ye, the performer, designer and political provocateur formerly known Kanye West, poses with the logo of Addisdas, his former business partner and a company with roots in the Nazi era of Germany that can no longer afford association with Ye despite the huge profits they have made together. The graphic illustrate how a different athletic shoe company later repulshed his overtures.

New York Times, Opinion: The Self-Destruction of Ye, Charles M. Blow, Oct. 31, 2022 (print ed.). Honestly, I never expected this episode of Kanye West drama to last as long as it has. I certainly didn’t expect myself to care much about it. I figured I’d weigh in once and move on.

“Billionaire Maker of Ugly Shoes and Oversized Jackets Ends Career With Reckless Mouth.”

That, I thought, would be it. But it hasn’t been. His embrace of anti-Black, antisemitic and white supremacist language wasn’t the only thing that interested me. I have also been watching the reactions to his fall, which, in all their strange contradictions, have exposed ugly truths about power in this country — who can and will demand accountability, how corporations exploit culture and character until they imperil profits, how some people absorb and accept insult and give too long a leash to those with the most money and most fame.

Let me first say this: West, who now goes by Ye, should have become a pariah when he was talking about slavery as a choice, making a mockery of Black ancestors whose suffering was anything but a choice. But Ye wasn’t vanquished. He offered a weak-tea apology, and the odiousness of the offense faded. People packed his concerts and bought his clothing. Corporations flocked to be associated with him.

He should have become a pariah when he gushed over Donald Trump in the Oval Office and said of his MAGA hat: “There was something about when I put this hat on, it made me feel like Superman.”

But nothing. The deals continued. The legend grew.

So long as he was a Black man positioning himself in opposition to Black people’s interests, he was a phenom. He was counterculture. He was a disrupter. He was above and beyond conventional thinking and conventional labels.

But of course, he wasn’t beyond labels. Black people have known for centuries what to call people like Ye, who claim to be the epitome of Blackness but enrich themselves by defaming it and commodifying its culture. There are many names for what he is, but one of the printable ones is “sellout.”

The Nick Bryant Podcast, Speaking on the Media with investigative reporter Andrew Kreig, Nick Bryant (author or co-author of such investigative books as The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, & Betrayal and Congressions of a DC Madam, and such articles as "Jeffrey Epstein’s Black Book" and "Obama's Veiled Past," Oct. 28-Nov. 3, 2022 (82:35 mins.).

Attorney Andrew Kreig directs the non-partisan Justice Integrity Project, which reports misconduct, primarily in the justice and political systems, that harms individuals, communities and democratic values.

When Andrew and the host discussed his book Presidential Puppetry, Nick Bryant cited similar findings in an article he wrote on Obama's background for readers of his blog.

Oct. 30

Washington Post, Attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband follows years of GOP demonizing her, Ashley Parker, Hannah Allam and Marianna Sotomayor, Oct. 30, 2022 (print ed.). This year, the House speaker emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads.

In 2010, Republicans launched a “Fire Pelosi” project — complete with a bus tour, a #FIREPELOSI hashtag and images of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) engulfed in Hades-style flames — devoted to retaking the House and demoting Pelosi from her perch as speaker.

Eleven years later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) joked that if he becomes the next leader of the House, “it will be hard not to hit” Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel.

And this year, Pelosi — who Republicans have long demonized as the face of progressive policies and who was a target of rioters during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — emerged as the top member of Congress maligned in political ads, with Republicans spending nearly $40 million on ads that mention Pelosi in the final stretch of the campaign, according to AdImpact, which tracks television and digital ad spending.

The years of vilification culminated Friday when Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was attacked with a hammer during an early-morning break-in at the couple’s home in San Francisco by a man searching for the speaker and shouting “Where is Nancy? Where is Nancy?” according to someone briefed on the assault.

Police arrested the suspect, 42-year-old David DePape, who attacked Paul Pelosi, 82, and authorities plan to charge him with attempted murder and other crimes, San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said at a news conference Friday. Paul Pelosi was taken to a hospital and is expected to make a full recovery, the speaker’s office said.

• Washington Post, Assailant shouted ‘Where is Nancy?’; Paul Pelosi undergoes surgery for skull fracture
• Washington Post, What we know about the attack and the suspect now in custody
• Washington Post, Youngkin draws ire with Pelosi comment that Democrats call insensitive, Oct. 29, 2022.

Politico, Law enforcement agencies rush to assess new threats to lawmakers, Erin Banco, Sam Stein and Heidi Przybyla, Oct. 30, 2022. Local law enforcement officials are trying to understand the scale of potential threats to the physical safety of high-profile politicians and election workers before the midterms.

New York Times, Twitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One, Kevin Roose, Oct. 30, 2022 (print ed.). A decade ago, when Twitter — then a scrappy, young microblogging service — burst into the mainstream, it felt like a tool for challenging authority.

Pro-democracy activists in Libya and Egypt used Twitter to help topple dictatorships. Americans used it to occupy Wall Street. And in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing an unarmed Black teenager named Trayvon Martin, #BlackLivesMatter took root on Twitter.

These campaigns fueled one of the defining ideas of the 2010s: that social media was an underdog’s dream, a tool for bottom-up organizing that would empower dissidents and marginalized groups, topple corrupt institutions and give ordinary people the ability to communicate on equal footing with tycoons and tyrants. Or, as the Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei put it in 2010, “Twitter is the people’s tool, the tool of the ordinary people, people who have no other resources.”

That narrative — shaky as it might have been all along — officially ended this week, when Twitter became the property of the richest man in the world.

Elon Musk, left, the billionaire industrialist whose on-again, off-again bid for Twitter this year has been marked by chaos and confusion, has now added the company to a portfolio that includes Tesla, SpaceX and the Boring Company.

The deal, which cost Mr. Musk and his investment partners $44 billion, made history for several reasons. It was the largest buyout in tech history and the first time in years that a major social media network has been sold to an outsider.

It was also a symbolic bookend to a decade in which social media evolved to be, in many ways, more useful to the powerful than the powerless.

• The Independent via Twitter, Elon Musk shares lurid conspiracy theory about Paul Pelosi, Oct. 30, 2022.
• Duty To Warn via Twitter, The lunatic is running the asylum. Hate speech up 500%, Kanye is back, and Elon is retweeting misinformation about Paul Pelosi. And that’s just our first day.

Proof via Twitter, Commentary: Is it a dangerous situation when the Twitter CEO is digitally illiterate? @SethAbramson (journalism professor, best-selling author of the "Proof" series and attorney), Oct. 30, 2022.  When he indulges conspiracy theories because—as an egomaniacal billionaire—he wants to think he knows better than everyone else? And because no one can lecture him on anything?

Yes.

I’ve diagnosed the problem. @ElonMusk is what academics call “digitally illiterate.” Clinton posted a Los Angeles Times article, and Musk replied with *a post from a fake-news site* that’s already down. Then he wrote “tiny possibility” as a hedge against spreading disinformation.

Washington Post, Musk’s planned Twitter layoffs appear to be imminent, Faiz Siddiqui, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Gerrit De Vynck, Oct. 30, 2022. Tesla engineers were on-site to evaluate the Twitter staff’s code, workers said, as anxiety built around Musk’s silence.

Elon Musk’s plans to lay off large number of Twitter employees are getting underway, a course of action that could prompt fundamental changes in the way more than 200 million daily users experience the site.

Layoffs are expected to be broad, according to three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters. One of the first organizations to be impacted will likely be legal, trust, and safety, the organization that sets policy and oversees content moderation, one of the people said. Managers in information security and privacy were also among those drawing up lists of layoff targets Saturday, a fourth person who spoke under the same conditions added.

Two of the people said that layoffs were likely to happen before Nov. 1, when employees are set to receive stock grants, cutting them off from compensation they had expected to receive.

The Washington Post previously reported that Musk planned to cut nearly 75 percent of the workforce of 7,500. One of the people familiar with the discussions said this week the cuts would be closer to 50 percent.

Musk’s new ownership is expected to bring sweeping changes to the social media company, which has long been regarded as an underperformer in Silicon Valley. Musk broke with the previous management over the company’s approach to policing speech online. He is expected to ease its content moderation efforts, and indicated Friday in a tweet that he would not reinstate any banned accounts until he convened a new council on content moderation — as well as saying he had not yet made any changes to those policies at Twitter.

But the uncertainty inside the company is most evident around staff cuts and changes, as workers have waited for weeks to learn if they might still have a role at Twitter following the acquisition.

Elon Musk, the Twitter deal and his quest to save ‘all life on Earth’

Musk has a reputation as a fierce manager who demands the most out of his employees, quick to replace those who underperform and even subjecting some to “rage firings.” But he is also revered in his field, with a unique ability to attract talent to his companies as they embark on missions regarded as world-changing.

New York Times, Nets Owner Rebukes Kyrie Irving for Posts About Antisemitic Documentary, Shauntel Lowe, Oct. 30, 2022 (print ed.). The Nets owner Joe Tsai spoke out against his team’s star guard Kyrie Irving on Friday after Irving tweeted a link to a documentary that promotes antisemitic tropes.

“I’m disappointed that Kyrie appears to support a film based on a book full of anti-semitic disinformation,” Tsai wrote in a Twitter post late Friday. “I want to sit down and make sure he understands this is hurtful to all of us, and as a man of faith, it is wrong to promote hate based on race, ethnicity or religion.

“This is bigger than basketball.”

Tsai posted on Twitter just before 11:30 p.m. Friday. A representative for Irving did not immediately respond to a text message.

The documentary, “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America,” was written and directed by Ronald Dalton Jr. and released in 2018. Dalton also released a book with the same title. On Thursday, Irving tweeted a link to a site where users can rent or buy the documentary. He also shared a screenshot of the site on Instagram. In response, Rolling Stone magazine reported on the antisemitic messaging of the documentary and the book.

Irving, 30, is a seven-time All-Star in his fourth season with the Nets, but his off-court actions have often overshadowed his basketball career.

He did not play in most of the Nets’ games last season in part because he refused to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, which New York City required for him to compete in home games. The Nets initially barred him from road games as well but relented about two months into the season as the team struggled.

In September, Irving was widely criticized for sharing a conspiracy-theory video by the Infowars host Alex Jones, who for years falsely said the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that killed 26 children and adults was a hoax.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the N.B.A. Hall of Famer, chastised Irving for sharing Jones’s video, writing on Substack that “Kyrie Irving would be dismissed as a comical buffoon if it weren’t for his influence over young people who look up to athletes.”

In 2018, Irving was mocked for falsely suggesting that the Earth might be flat.

“Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round?” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know.”

Irving joined the Nets as a free agent in 2019 after playing for the Boston Celtics and the Cleveland Cavaliers, with whom he won a championship in 2016 alongside LeBron James. The Nets have made the playoffs in each of Irving’s seasons with the team, but they are struggling this year. Five games into the season, they have won just once. Their next game is Saturday at home against the Indiana Pacers.

Washington Post, Opinion: American Jews start to think the unthinkable, Dana Milbank, right, Oct. 30, 2022 (print ed.). The fear of exile has become common as Jews see the unraveling rule of law.

On the holiest night of the Jewish year earlier this month, my rabbi looked up from his Kol Nidre sermon — a homily about protecting America’s liberal democracy — and posed a question that wasn’t in his prepared text: “How many people in the last few years have been at a dining room conversation where the conversation has turned to where might we move? How many of us?”

He was talking about the unthinkable: that Jews might need to flee the United States. In the congregation, many hands — most? — went up.

The fear of exile has become common as Jews see the unraveling rule of law, ascendant Christian nationalists and anti-Israel sentiments turning antisemitic on the far left. Wondering where Jews might move “is among the most frequently asked questions that I get,” Jonathan Greenblatt, head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.

Oct. 29

 

Politico, Musk owns Twitter — and Washington awaits Trump's return, Rebecca Kern, Oct. 28, 2022 (print ed.). Elon Musk, shown above, will own Twitter, after the two sides finally closed a $44 billion deal Thursday to sell the company to the world’s richest man.

Musk’s takeover — reported by multiple news outlets on Thursday night — could have huge implications for the future of Washington’s favorite social media app, especially if former President Donald Trump is allowed back on the platform, and if Musk loosens the rules to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation.

With just 12 days until the midterm elections, a resurrected Trump Twitter account could have electoral implications, giving the former president a megaphone to again challenge election results, blast his opponents and spread falsehoods.

What exactly Musk does next is an open question, to say nothing of Trump.

In an effort seemingly aimed at easing concerns from nervous advertisers, Musk, a self-professed “free-speech absolutist,” promised on Thursday that the platform would not descend into “a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”

New York Times, Analysis: The Moguls Have Been Unleashed, David Streitfeld, Oct. 29, 2022 (print ed.). Silicon Valley moguls used to buy yachts and islands. Now they are rich enough, and perhaps arrogant enough, to acquire companies they fancy.

Forget about the endless drama, the bots, the abrupt reversals, the spectacle, the alleged risk to the Republic and all we hold dear. Here is the most important thing about Elon Musk’s buying Twitter: The moguls have been unleashed.

In the old days, when a tech tycoon wanted to buy something big, he needed a company to do it. Steve Case used AOL to buy Time Warner. Jeff Bezos bought Whole Foods for Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook to buy Instagram and WhatsApp and Oculus and on and on. These were corporate deals done for the bottom line, even if they might never have happened without a famous and forceful proprietor.

Mr. Musk’s $44 billion takeover of Twitter, which finally became a reality on Thursday, six months after he agreed to the deal, is different. It is an individual buying something for himself that 240 million people around the world use regularly. While he has other investors, Mr. Musk will have absolute control over the fate of the short-message social media platform.

It’s a difficult deal to evaluate even in an industry built on deals, because this one is so unusual. It came about whimsically, impulsively. But, even by the standards of Silicon Valley, where billions are casually offered for fledging operations — and even by the wallet of Mr. Musk, on most days the richest man in the world — $44 billion is quite a chunk of change.

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: The Trump administration: the worst counterintelligence disaster in U.S. history, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 22 books and former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, Oct. 28-29, 2022. In an era marked by unprecedented events, it is not hyperbole to state that the Donald Trump administration and the twice-impeached disgraced ex-president's post-presidency represent the worst counterintelligence disaster in U.S. history.

An examination by WMR of court records, including criminal cases dealing with violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and Trump's misappropriation of highly-classified documents at his private properties, points to over a dozen foreign intelligence services, most of them hostile to U.S. national interests, having gained access to America's most guarded secrets.

• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary QAnon: Russia-style, Wayne Madsen, left, author and former Navy intelligence officer, Oct. 26-27, 2022. Russia's dangerous religious rhetoric is setting the stage for modern-day pogroms in Ukraine.

Oct. 28

 

Ye, the performer, designer and political provocateur formerly known Kanye West, poses with the logo of Addisdas, his former business partner and a company with roots in the Nazi era of Germany that can no longer afford association with Ye despite the huge profits they have made together. The graphic illustrate how a different athletic shoe company later repulshed his overtures.

New York Times, Kanye West Faces Costly Fallout: A Timeline, Remy Tumin, Oct. 28, 2022. The entertainer has been widely condemned for a series of antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.

Kanye West has defined most of his career with smash hits and a healthy dose of spectacle and theatrics, helping to redefine the modern concept of celebrity along the way. For a long time, those disruptions were largely welcomed in the music and fashion industries as he cut new creative paths.

But the rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been at the center of several controversies in recent years after increasingly erratic behavior.

In the past 12 months, he’s been burning bridges in the music industry where he made his name. He was disinvited from performing at the Grammy Awards last spring, and abruptly withdrew from headlining this year’s Coachella festival.

In October, his behavior began to have an impact on the more lucrative corner of his empire — fashion — as he came under fire for marking a series of antisemitic remarks, including accusing Jews of a “Holocaust” against Black Americans, and wearing a shirt with a slogan associated with white supremacists.

The fallout across industries has been swift.

At Paris Fashion Week, Ye’s shirt takes center stage.

Sept. 15

In mid-September, Ye notified Gap that he was terminating their much anticipated partnership and said that he would move ahead with plans to open his own stores. Gap said in a statement that their visions were “not aligned.

Oct. 3

A little more than two weeks later, Ye held a surprise, off-schedule show at Paris Fashion Week to present his latest fashion collection under his label YZY, formerly known as Yeezy.

The empire continues to crumble.

Oct. 25-27

Ye’s enterprises beyond fashion also faced pushback. Aaron Donald of the Los Angeles Rams and Jaylen Brown of the Boston Celtics said on Twitter that they were cutting ties with Donda Sports, Ye’s marketing agency, because of the antisemitic remarks.

On Oct. 26, the organizers of two prominent high school boys’ basketball tournaments revoked invitations for Ye’s Donda Academy team to play in national showcases this season. Ye founded Donda Academy last year in Simi Valley, Calif. The private school is named after Ye’s mother, Donda West, who died in 2007. The school is not accredited and was built around online learning.

The same day, the footwear company Skechers said Ye had been escorted from its corporate offices in Los Angeles after an “unannounced and uninvited” visit.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Donald Trump does not have a magic wand when it comes to this, Bill Palmer, Oct. 28, 2022. It’s entirely possible that Musk will go ahead and reinstate Donald Trump (among other right wing criminals) on Twitter in the coming hours or days, with no one there to stop him.

Here’s the thing: it won’t matter.

For one thing, Donald Trump was on Twitter throughout the entire 2020 election cycle, tweeting up a storm, and he still lost that election by seven million votes. So no, Trump getting back on Twitter will not somehow magically make him a more viable political candidate going forward. Even if Trump were still in the “legitimately a political candidate” stage of his life, being back on Twitter wouldn’t help him.

For that matter, Trump has now moved on to the criminal defendant stage of his life. As we’ve seen in some other high profile DOJ criminal cases, Trump’s tweets will be used against him, both in the indictment and at trial. So if Trump does get back on Twitter, and he begins posting tweets that are aimed at obstructing justice or count as a confession to crimes, those tweets will only increase the odds that the DOJ gets a conviction once Trump is on trial.

Trump will not help himself in any way by being back on Twitter, and if he gets carried away, he’ll harm himself and cement his own downfall. And while Trump does love trying to incite violence, he can’t just tweet a magic combination of words that causes his supporters to magically take over the government. Nothing works that way. Trump couldn’t even pull that off back when he was still President. For all the fear and loathing over January 6th, everyone forgets that Trump’s attempt at violently keeping himself in office was a complete failure. And now his supporters are more afraid to get violent, because Trump no longer controls federal law enforcement.

Nor will Trump being back on Twitter somehow magically help the Republicans in the midterms. Trump’s rallies haven’t helped Republican candidates one bit in the general election thus far. His tweets won’t either. Trump has had some fun meddling in Republican primaries over the years, but he never has had the ability to boost Republican candidates in general elections.

So no, there’s no reason to sit around and fret about the possibility of Donald Trump getting back on Twitter. Now more than ever, Trump is a powerless broken man who’s merely playing defense as the Feds close in on him. His future consists of indictments and prison bars. If he wants to humiliate himself with some more stupid tweets along the way, so be it.

 

Fired Twitter executives Ned Segal, left, Parag Agrawal, center, and Vijaya Gadde, right, leave the company with $187 million of Elon Musk's money.

CNN, Elon Musk will have to pay three fired Twitter executives nearly $200 million, Chris Isidore, Oct. 28, 2022. The three top Twitter executives whom Elon Musk fired Thursday will walk out the door with about $187 million of Musk's money.

Former CEO Parag Agrawal, former CFO Ned Segal and former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde were ousted after Musk took control of the company late Thursday, according to a source familiar with the situation.

They would have received a large chunk of that money even if they had stayed on board under the new ownership -- they and other shareholders will receive payouts from Musk after he bought their shares for $54.20 each.

Agrawal, who only assumed the CEO title a little less than a year ago, had the smallest stock holdings of the three: 155,000 shares worth $8.4 million at the price Musk paid. Segal will get $22 million for the 406,000 shares he owns while Gadde will walk away with $34.8 million for her 642,000 shares.

But they also receive "Golden Parachute Compensation" in the merger agreement approved by shareholders. That includes a year's base pay -- $1 million for Agrawal and $600,000 each for Segal and Gadde. They also will get a year of health insurance, worth about $73,000 among the three.
Elon Musk's bumpy road to owning Twitter: A timeline
Elon Musk's bumpy road to owning Twitter: A timeline

The most lucrative part by far is the accelerated vesting of stock they stood to receive in the future but had not yet qualified for. That will end up being worth $56.4 million for Agrawal, $43.8 million for Segal and $19.4 million for Gadde. Agrawal and Segal get the accelerated vesting of all of their shares while Gadde gets accelerated vesting of only half of her shares.

Added up, the parachute payments come to $121.8 million. Add on the $65.2 million for the purchase of the shares they already own and you get $187 million.

Reuters, U.S. appeals court to reconsider if citizen journalist can sue over arrest, Nate Raymond, Oct. 28, 2022. 5th Circuit to again weigh lawsuit by Priscilla Villarreal against police.

A federal appeals court on Friday said it would reconsider whether a citizen journalist in Texas can sue over her arrest for asking police questions, marking the latest twist in a case that has already divided parts the court's conservative faction.

The full New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said it would revisit its 2-1 decision reviving Priscilla Villarreal's lawsuit against Laredo, Texas, police officers, county prosecutors and the city over her 2017 arrest.

That earlier panel decision was authored by U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho, a conservative appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump who has made headlines for his off-the-bench crusades about "cancel culture" and law school campus free speech.

Villarreal is one of Laredo's most popular news sources, according to Ho, with 120,000-plus people following her Facebook page where she regularly reports on crime, events and government.

She was charged with two felony counts of misuse of information after she published the identities of suicide and car crash victims on Facebook, using information she verified by speaking to an officer in Laredo.

The Texas statute she was charged under made it a crime to solicit non-public information from a government official with an intent to obtain a benefit. Prosecutors alleged she used the information to amass more Facebook followers.

A Texas state court judge in March 2018 tossed the charges, finding the statute unconstitutionally vague. She filed her federal lawsuit in 2019, but a judge ruled officers and prosecutors were entitled to qualified immunity.

Ho, joined by U.S. Circuit Judge James Graves, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, in November disagreed, writing: "It should be obvious to any reasonable police officer that locking up a journalist for asking a question violates the First Amendment."

But in a dissenting opinion published later in August, Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Priscilla Richman said Ho was "off base" in saying no reasonably competent officer could have thought Villarreal obtained information with an "intent to benefit."

Richman, an appointee of former Republican President George W. Bush, said journalists generally gather information with the intent to benefit by selling newspapers or attracting TV viewers.

Ho said in response that if true, that would make it a crime to be a journalist in Texas. He lamented that the court could not rule unanimously in such an "exceedingly troubling case."

"If any principle of constitutional law ought to unite all of us as Americans, it’s that government has no business telling citizens what views they may not hold, and what questions they may not ask," he said.

Oct. 27

BuzzFeed News, A New York Post Employee Was Fired For Posting Violent, Racist Tweets On The Newspaper's Account, Julia Reinstein, Oct. 27, 2022. Some of the tweets, which a spokesperson for the paper called "vile and reprehensible," called for President Joe Biden and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be murdered.

Violent and racist content that appeared on the New York Post's website and Twitter account Thursday morning were posted by one of the newspaper's own employees, a company spokesperson said.

The tweets, which were posted just after 9 a.m. and seen by BuzzFeed News, called for the murder of President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. Others mentioned "slaughtering illegals," joked about New York Gov. Kathy Hochul being "rape[d] and batter[ed]," and called New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who is Black, a "fried chicken eating monkey."
Advertisement

Articles on the paper's website were tampered with as well. The headline of an op-ed about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was changed to "We must assassinate AOC for America," and its byline was edited to look like it was by right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro.
Twitter

The offensive posts were deleted shortly after they went up, and the newspaper tweeted that they had been "hacked" and were "investigating the cause."

But an external hack was not, in fact, behind the tweets — it turned out to be a New York Post employee, a spokesperson for the paper later said.

The employee, who was not publicly identified, has been fired.

"The New York Post’s investigation indicates that the unauthorized conduct was committed by an employee, and the employee has been terminated," the spokesperson said. "This morning, we immediately removed the vile and reprehensible content from our website and social media accounts."

Politico, Musk owns Twitter — and Washington awaits Trump's return, Rebecca Kern, Oct. 27, 2022. Elon Musk, shown above, will own Twitter, after the two sides finally closed a $44 billion deal Thursday to sell the company to the world’s richest man.

Musk’s takeover — reported by multiple news outlets on Thursday night — could have huge implications for the future of Washington’s favorite social media app, especially if former President Donald Trump is allowed back on the platform, and if Musk loosens the rules to prevent the spread of hate speech and misinformation.

With just 12 days until the midterm elections, a resurrected Trump Twitter account could have electoral implications, giving the former president a megaphone to again challenge election results, blast his opponents and spread falsehoods.

What exactly Musk does next is an open question, to say nothing of Trump.

In an effort seemingly aimed at easing concerns from nervous advertisers, Musk, a self-professed “free-speech absolutist,” promised on Thursday that the platform would not descend into “a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said with no consequences.”

New York Times, Garland Formally Bars Justice Dept. From Seizing Reporters’ Records, Charlie Savage, Oct. 27, 2022 (print ed.). The rule codifies and expands a policy he issued in 2021, after it came to light that the Trump administration had secretly gone after records of reporters for The Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

The Justice Department on Wednesday formally banned the use of subpoenas, warrants or court orders to seize reporters’ communications records or demand their notes or testimony in an effort to uncover confidential sources in leak investigations, in what amounts to a major policy shift.

The rules institutionalize — and in places expand — a temporary policy that Attorney General Merrick B. Garland put in place in July 2021, after the revelation that the Justice Department, under Attorney General William P. Barr, had secretly pursued email records of reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN.

“These regulations recognize the crucial role that a free and independent press plays in our democracy,” Mr. Garland said in a statement.

“Because freedom of the press requires that members of the news media have the freedom to investigate and report the news, the new regulations are intended to provide enhanced protection to members of the news media from certain law enforcement tools and actions that might unreasonably impair news gathering.”

The broad prohibitions are a major change in how the Justice Department has come to approach leak investigations in the 21st century, when it began a crackdown that spans administrations of both parties and has put pressure on reporting on matters of national security.

The publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger, who was put under a gag order in 2021 that shielded from his own newsroom’s view a legal fight over the email logs of Times journalists, praised the new policy while calling on Congress to pass a law further strengthening such protections.

“We applaud the Justice Department for taking this important step, which will allow journalists to perform the crucial work of informing the public without fear of legal consequences,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “We encourage Congress to enact a federal shield law to help ensure that these reforms are lasting.”

Exceptions to the policy are narrow. Among others, it does not apply to situations in which a reporter is under investigation for something unconnected to news gathering, situations in which a member of the news media is deemed an agent of a foreign power or a member of a foreign terrorist group, or “when necessary to prevent an imminent or concrete risk of death or serious bodily harm.”

The Justice Department developed the regulation in consultation with press freedom advocates like Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Mr. Garland also met with representatives from The Times, The Post, The Associated Press, CBS, CNN, Dow Jones, NBC and The New Yorker.

Those conversations led to several adjustments about potentially critical issues, like how “news gathering” is defined. According to participants, the Justice Department originally intended to define it in a way that was limited to the passive receipt of government secrets. But the final version now covers the act of pursuing information.

The regulation defines “news gathering” as “the process by which a member of the news media collects, pursues, or obtains information or records for purposes of producing content intended for public dissemination,” including “classified information” from confidential sources.

The Justice Department is also said to have removed espionage from a list of criminal activities that are excluded from protected news gathering.

The final regulation does not cover criminal acts “committed in the course of obtaining information or using information.” Those include breaking and entering; theft; unlawfully gaining access to a computer or computer system; unlawful surveillance or wiretapping; bribery; or aiding or abetting or conspiring to engage in such criminal activities.

Emptywheel, Analysis: DOJ Rethinks — But In A Few Areas, Expands — Access To Media Content, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right),  Emptywheel, Oct. 27, 2022. In a story on the new media guidelines DOJ rolled out yesterday, Charlie Savage reveals what representatives of the press think they got in the new guidelines, in addition to a formal codification of broader restrictions on the use of legal process to find real journalists’ sources:

Those conversations led to several adjustments about potentially critical issues, like how “news gathering” is defined. According to participants, the Justice Department originally intended to define it in a way that was limited to the passive receipt of government secrets. But the final version now covers the act of pursuing information.

The language in question appears to cover things like encrypted dropboxes, something that journalists liked to compare (inaptly) to the charge against Julian Assange of attempting to hack a password for Chelsea Manning. Thus far, multiple criminal prosecutions show that dropboxes have not thwarted DOJ from prosecuting those who submitted documents into them.

 

 

President Biden greets digital content creators at the White House on Oct. 25. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

Washington Post, Inside the Dems’ elaborate attempt to woo TikTok influencers, Taylor Lorenz, Oct. 27, 2022. A free trip to D.C., a private chat with Obama and an hour in the Oval Office with Biden: The Democrats are rolling out the red carpet for social media influencers

President Biden spent more than an hour this week at the White House with eight TikTok stars with a combined following of more than 67 million who were brought to Washington in hopes that their posts will turn out votes for Democrats in the Nov. 8 midterms.

In addition to the Oval Office meeting, the TikTok creators held a session with former president Barack Obama, toured the Supreme Court and the Capitol, and met with leaders of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the principal campaign arm for House Democrats.

The trip, which was organized by the DNC, was the most visible effort to date of Democrats attempting to leverage TikTok’s vast audience to influence the midterms and is likely to prove controversial with Republicans, many of whom have been harshly critical of TikTok’s Chinese ownership. Former president Donald Trump at one point ordered TikTok to be shut down in the United States, then tried to force the sale of its U.S. operations. Those efforts failed, however, though Republicans have continued to accuse the app of being a threat.

Since then, TikTok has been downloaded more than 100 million times by users in the United States, and it has surpassed Meta’s Facebook and Instagram to become the nation’s fastest-growing social media app.

“House Democrats are committed to reaching voters where they’re at and reminding them what’s at stake on November 8th,” said Cara Koontz, the DCCC’s digital communications director. “We’re thrilled to have their partnership in this first-of-its-kind effort for the DCCC.”

It remains to be seen how the creators will make use of the visit. Many had previously been largely apolitical, encouraging their fans to vote but not explicitly backing parties or candidates. For several, it was their first time in the nation’s capital and their first interaction with government.

 

 

Washington Post, Ksenia Sobchak, Russian star linked to Putin, fled using Israeli passport, Mary Ilyushina, Oct. 28, 2022 (print ed.). Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian socialite and television anchor with a close family connection to President Vladimir Putin, used her dual Israeli citizenship to flee Russia on Tuesday after a police raid of her home that Russian authorities said was tied to a criminal investigation of two of her business associates.

Sobchak, 40, above, who earned fame as a reality TV star and has been known over the years as a Russian “It Girl” and Russia’s Paris Hilton, is the daughter of St. Petersburg’s first post-Soviet mayor, Anatoly Sobchak.

Anatoly Sobchak, who died in 2000, was Putin’s boss and political mentor. In 1990, Sobchak hired then-KGB agent Putin as a deputy mayor, and the two families remained close throughout the decade.

Ksenia Sobchak now runs the “Ostorozhno Novosti” project, which includes a network of Telegram news channels, a podcast studio, a YouTube channel and Sobchak’s own social media page. She has long straddled a fence between Russia’s political elite and its liberal political opposition, creating some distrust of her from both camps. In 2018, she ran for president against Putin, winning about 2 percent of votes.

Sobchak’s current legal troubles seemed to reflect tension within the well-connected elite as well as the climate of heightened anxiety amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. It also highlighted the urgency many well-to-do Russians feel about obtaining dual citizenship and a second passport.

Sobchak fled to Belarus and then Lithuania, which is a member of the European Union and along with the other Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia, is effectively closed to Russian travelers — even those with previously issued visas permitting them to enter the European Union’s Schengen travel zone. Only dual citizens or Russian nationals with humanitarian visas and residency permits can enter.

But Sobchak, who is partly of Jewish heritage, used her Israeli passport to cross the border, Lithuania’s Interior Ministry confirmed Thursday. A video from a surveillance camera emerged on Telegram channels showing Sobchak entering Lithuania on foot and talking to border officials.

Oct. 26

Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick is overseeing litigation that could require Elon Musk to follow through on his deal to buy Twitter (Photo by Eric Crossan via New York Times).

New York Times, Elon Musk Seems to Answer to No One. Except for a Judge in Delaware, Lauren Hirsch, Oct. 26, 2022. The chief judge of Delaware’s Chancery Court gave Mr. Musk until Friday to acquire Twitter. She is also the judge in at least one other case involving him.

Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick has become a very important person in the rambunctious life of Elon Musk.

The Delaware Chancery Court judge has given Mr. Musk until Friday to close his long-promised, $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter. If he doesn’t, Judge McCormick will preside over a trial in November that could end with Mr. Musk being forced to make good on the deal he made with Twitter in April.

The 43-year-old judge is also expected to preside over another case involving Mr. Musk in November. A Tesla shareholder accused him in a lawsuit of unjustly enriching himself with his compensation package while running the electric vehicle company, which is Mr. Musk’s main source of wealth. The package, which consisted entirely of a stock grant, is now worth around $50 billion based on Tesla’s share price.

Judge McCormick is also overseeing three other shareholder lawsuits against Mr. Musk, though it is not yet clear whether those will go to trial, too.

The woman who suddenly has a great deal of influence over Mr. Musk, right, comes from a much different world than the jet-setting, South African-born billionaire. The daughter of a high school football coach and an English teacher, Judge McCormick was raised in Smyrna, Del., a town with roughly 13,000 people about 14 miles away from Dover, the state capital.

Judge McCormick now oversees the 230-year-old court that is considered the foremost destination for adjudicating disputes over mergers and acquisitions and other corporate disagreements. She has been both quick-witted and blunt in months of hearings for Twitter’s lawsuit. And her decision to grant Mr. Musk a delay to a trial that was expected to begin earlier in October also displayed unusual flexibility — and pragmatism — to legal experts.

Oct. 24

Washington Post, Help Desk: The risks of signing in with Google on other sites and how to reverse it, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Oct. 24, 2022. Should you log in with Facebook or Google on other sites or apps? Short answer: No.

There are too many ways using these buttons can leak personal information or help Big Tech track you. There are some exceptions when it’s useful — but you might be surprised, and a little regretful, if you saw how many random sites have access to your Google or Facebook data. (Below, I’ll show you how to check and revoke access.)

What could go wrong? This month, Facebook warned a million Facebook users their accounts might have been compromised by 400 malicious apps that were designed to trick them into handing over their Facebook log-in information. Criminals were making fake log-in buttons.

National Press Club, Member-Author Book Group talk explores limits for fabrications of real persons portrayed in film, Andrew Kreig, Oct. 23, 2022. Long-time legal journalist and National Press Club member John T. Aquino described the practical limits for film studios in changing historical facts to seek better box office and creative results, during a recent virtual event sponsored by the Club's Member-Author Book Group.

Aquino, an attorney who retired in 2017 as a senior legal analyst for Bloomberg Law, drew from the 2022 second edition of his Truth and Lives on Film: The Legal Problems of Depicting Real Persons and Events in a Fictional Medium. He described how he first became interested in the issue, at age 11, when he noticed a disclaimer in the credits of the 1941 film They Died With Their Boots On, starring Errol Flynn in a fictionalized portrayal of the life of Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, who died at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

“What does that mean?" Aquino recalled asking his father about the film’s historical accuracy disclaimer.

The book represents his answer, elaborated in 17 case histories about those seeking redress for fabrications that could be devastating.

Offering context, Aquino noted that film creators and audiences have recognized since the Silent Era that films condense real-life history for dramatic purposes.

“The issue should be,” he said, “how true is it to the spirit of the events and the characters?”

Further, Aquino explained, creators must avoid legal liability, with libel suits the biggest threat.

A pivotal legal case he described involved Rasputin and the Empress, a 1932 MGM film portraying Tsarist Russian court adviser Grigori Rasputin as sexually attacking a princess with a fictitious name. A princess won libel settlements worth more than $20 million in today’s dollars even though the “victim“ in the film may never have met Rasputin in real life.

Out of that arose the standard practice of disclaimers in the final film credits asserting that the films do not necessarily portray real people, dialog or events.

He described the disclaimers as only one tool for avoiding liability. More important, he said, is standard libel law that requires almost everywhere that a plaintiff be alive to seek damages. Family members have no standing, he said.

Most such libel suits have failed, he said, prompting the aggrieved to pursue such additional grounds for damages as invasion of privacy or misappropriation of images.

Aquino, a Club Silver Owl, said misleading films can corrupt history in important ways even if no legal redress is possible. That occurred, he said, in the Custer film, which falsely portrayed Custer as having noble motives. The film was, however, one of the top-grossing films the year it was released. It also starred Olivia de Havilland.

Aquino, an active member of the D.C. and Maryland bars, also talked a bit about his second book published this year, The Radio Burglar: Thief Turned Cop Killer in 1920s Queens. Launched Sept. 20, it portrays police tracking down a murderous burglar who specialized in stealing valuable radios at that sector’s beginning.

Asked why he authored the tale, Aquino said his aging mother-in-law enjoyed during her twilight years recounting a family link to the expert sleuthing. “It started as a labor of love,” he said of his conversations with her and his 15 years of research, “and it ended as a labor of love.”

The Member-Author Book Group produces events for Club members to promote their recently published books. The group currently meets virtually at noon on the second Tuesday of the month. To inquire about the group, contact Joe Motheral at joegm35@ aol.com.

New York Times, For Trump’s Backers in Congress, ‘Devil Terms’ Help Rally Voters, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Steve Eder, pdated Oct. 23, 2022. In vilifying tweets and speeches, G.O.P. lawmakers who contested the election have far outpaced other Republicans and Democrats in fueling polarization.

As Representative Mary Miller embarked on her first congressional campaign, she described herself in salt-of-the-earth, all-American terms: a mother, grandmother and farmer who embodied the “Midwestern values of faith, family and freedom.”

“Hard work, using God-given talents, and loving each other well,” a voice declared over video clips of Ms. Miller, a 63-year-old Illinois Republican, embracing her family, praying and walking on her farm in an ad in early 2020.

“In the world today,” the ad continued, “we could use a lot more of this.”

But there is another side to Ms. Miller’s wholesome image. Since entering Congress, she has routinely vilified Democrats and liberals, calling them “evil” communists beholden to China who want to “destroy” America and its culture. And President Biden’s plan, she seethed on Twitter this spring, is to “flood our country with terrorists, fentanyl, child traffickers, and MS-13 gang members.”

Washington Post, Book Review: Journalists are failing our fragile democracy, a media insider says, Kathy Kiely, Oct. 23, 2022 (print ed.). This should have been Margaret Sullivan’s victory lap.

It’s hard to think of anyone who’s met and mastered more challenges with more aplomb and journalistic integrity than The Washington Post’s former media columnist: Starting as a summer intern at the tiny Niagara Gazette in the late 1970s (where she had a ringside seat to the environmental disaster at Love Canal), Sullivan, right, rose methodically through the ranks to become the first female editor in chief of her hometown paper, the Buffalo News. She helped diversify the paper’s editorial staff, putting people of color in leadership roles and taking pains to mentor younger women.

Then she headed to the New York Times to assume the deliberately awkward (and since abolished) post of public editor, assigned to question, investigate and police the organization from inside its ranks. Coming from Buffalo, Sullivan didn’t exactly blend right into the Times’ rarefied culture. “Jill is an uptown girl. You’re not,” David Shribman, a journalist who worked at both the Buffalo paper and the Times, said of Jill Abramson, who was the top editor at the Times when Sullivan arrived there. “Over nearly four years in the job, I never had a completely comfortable day as public editor,” Sullivan writes.

Honorably, she departed when she felt the camaraderie of the newsroom threatening her critical perspective. “I was starting to lose the outsider’s mentality,” she says. At The Post, Sullivan was assigned to cover the media at large, but she didn’t hesitate to bite the hand that fed her. At one point, she even turned on one of her teen idols. Sullivan, who says Watergate inspired her to get into journalism, castigated Bob Woodward for waiting for the publication of a book to reveal important details on what President Donald Trump knew about the coronavirus pandemic and when he knew it.

It’s hard to argue with Sullivan’s news judgment: Last year, she publicly scolded leaders of the nation’s leading news organizations for failing to follow up on another scoop that Woodward scored with writing partner Robert Costa — the now-infamous memo by lawyer John Eastman outlining plans to get Trump a second term he did not win. Who’s sorry now? (Sullivan left The Post in August to take up a visiting professorship at Duke University.)

Given all this, you might expect Sullivan’s book, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life, to be a reminiscence of her professional triumphs and a reflection on their larger meaning for the industry. While she’s particularly accomplished in her field, Sullivan is not an isolated phenomenon. The news business of today is much more diverse and publicly self-critical than the old boy’s network she and I had to wheedle our way into back in the day.

So why, having empowered and platformed establishment-challenging change-makers like Sullivan, is the news business in such a state of disarray and disrespect? And how does it get its voice of authority back?

Those are the questions that haunt the pages of Newsroom Confidential. The title suggests a gossipy tell-all, and there’s a heaping dollop of that. (Memo to a certain New York Times sports editor: You might want to look for a bunker, and I don’t mean along a fairway.) But if Sullivan started out intending to write a memoir, she ended up with a manifesto. This is a book about the role of the press in a democracy that’s in grave jeopardy.

Oct. 20

Washington Post, Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui, Gerrit De Vynck and Jeremy B. Merrill, Oct. 20, 2022. Previously unreported details shed new light on Twitter’s motivations for selling the company — and Elon Musk’s plans to transform it.

Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.

Musk, shown above in a file photo, told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000.

Even if Musk’s Twitter deal falls through — and there’s little indication now that it will — big cuts are expected: Twitter’s current management planned to pare the company’s payroll by about $800 million by the end of next year, a number that would mean the departure of nearly a quarter of the workforce, according to corporate documents and interviews with people familiar with the company’s deliberations. The company also planned to make major cuts to its infrastructure, including data centers that keep the site functioning for more than 200 million users that log on each day.

The extent of the cuts, which have not been previously reported, help explain why Twitter officials were eager to sell to Musk: Musk’s $44 billion bid, though hostile, is a golden ticket for the struggling company — potentially helping its leadership avoid painful announcements that would have demoralized the staff and possibly crippled the service’s ability to combat misinformation, hate speech and spam.

The impact of such layoffs would likely be immediately felt by millions of users, said Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI. He said that while he believed Twitter was overstaffed, the cuts Musk proposed were “unimaginable” and would put Twitter’s users at risk of hacks and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography.

“It would be a cascading effect,” he said, “where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves.”

Twitter and Musk are expected to close the purchase by next Friday. Planning for the closing is moving forward in apparent good faith after months of legal battles, say people familiar with the negotiations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. If the deal closes, Musk would immediately become Twitter’s new owner.

 

Anthony Rapp, left, and Kevin Spacey. Photo at left by Brendan McDermid of Reuters; Right, by Yuki Iwamura of the Associated Press.

New York Times, Jury Clears Kevin Spacey of Battery Accusation by Anthony Rapp, Julia Jacobs and Nate Schweber, Oct. 20, 2022. Mr. Rapp had sued Mr. Spacey, accusing him of making a sexual advance in 1986, when he was a 14-year-old actor.

A federal jury in Manhattan found Kevin Spacey not liable for battery on Thursday in a civil case brought by the actor Anthony Rapp, who accused Mr. Spacey of climbing on top of him and making a sexual advance more than 30 years ago when Mr. Rapp was 14.

The 11-person jury in the Federal District Court in Manhattan spent less than 90 minutes deliberating over the evidence against Mr. Spacey, who denied the accusation on the stand. Mr. Rapp, who is best known for his originating role in the musical “Rent,” came forward with the accusation in 2017. At the time, Mr. Spacey was a star of the political drama “House of Cards” and a lauded actor who had hosted the Tony Awards months earlier.

The trial hinged on Mr. Rapp’s account of a night in 1986, when, he said, he attended a party at Mr. Spacey’s New York apartment during a Broadway season in which both of them were acting in plays. Mr. Spacey, who was 26 at the time, denied that such an encounter ever occurred.

The jury found that Mr. Spacey did not touch a sexual or intimate part of Mr. Rapp’s, meaning it could not find him liable under the Child Victims Act, a New York State law that allowed Mr. Rapp to bring his claim. The law included a look-back window during which old claims that had already passed the statute of limitations could be revived.

After the verdict was read, Mr. Spacey stood up with tears in his eyes. He hugged his lawyers briefly and shared a longer hug with his assistant. Mr. Rapp was stoic and straight-faced, as he had been through the entire proceeding.

Richard M. Steigman, one of Mr. Rapp’s lawyers, said, “The jury has spoken.”

Mr. Rapp’s claim was one of the most prominent in the early days of the #MeToo movement, as accusers started to come forward with allegations against high-profile men in the entertainment, political and business worlds. Mr. Spacey quickly experienced career blowback and was ultimately removed from “House of Cards.”

The disclosure by Mr. Rapp, which BuzzFeed News published in October 2017, was followed by more than a dozen other sexual misconduct accusations against Mr. Spacey. He has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault charges in Britain.

Daily Dot, Former CBS, Fox journalist goes full QAnon, says elites dine on ‘blood of children,’ Mikael Thalen, Oct 20, 2022. 'The open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world.’

Former CBS and Fox News journalist Lara Logan, right, unleashed a barrage of bizarre conspiracy theories this week involving everything from the blood of children to Satanic control of the planet.

During an interview on the conservative outlet Newsmax, Logan, who was let go from Fox News earlier this year for comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to a murderous Nazi physician, argued that so-called open borders were the work of Satan while discussing immigration policy in the U.S.

“God believes in sovereignty and national identity and the sanctity of family and all the things that we’ve lived with from the beginning of time,” she said. “And he knows that the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world through all of these people who are his stooges and his servants.”
Advertisement

Logan then took the rant one step further by arguing that members of the World Economic Forum “dined on the blood of children,” a conspiracy theory derived from the QAnon movement that has its roots in antisemitic tropes.

“And they may think that they’re going to become Gods—that’s what they tell us, Yuval Harari and all the rest of them at the World Economic Forum, you know, the ones who want us eating insects, cockroaches, and that while they dine on the blood of children?—those are the people, right? They’re not going to win. They’re not going to win.”

The comments are entirely on brand for Logan, who has championed numerous far-right conspiracy theories in recent years.

As noted by Media Matters, Logan has theorized on everything from Darwinism to the assassination of John F. Kennedy to “the Rothschilds.”

Logan has also pushed debunked election fraud claims and asserted that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was an event manufactured by the government.

 

Going Deep, Commentary: Do US Voters Care About Sex Scandals Anymore? Russ Baker, right, Oct. 20, 2022. The weird, hamfisted attempt by MAGA maniac Lauren Boebert to smear her Democratic opponent with a sex-and-blackmail scandal looks doomed to fail, but is nevertheless a moral bellwether.

It might seem strange that I am writing to you during a trip to France about Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), the crude, controversial gun fanatic and MAGA firebrand who purports to be driven by God to “save” America from decline.

While I was meeting with supporters of meaningful journalism — and getting an earful about how wacky and dangerous America seems to be becoming — a particularly illustrative example of our current cultural madness came to light.

This salacious October Surprise, so far promoted mostly by right-wing media and apparently too toxic for mainstream publications to touch, involves a secret tryst and supposed blackmail scheme, the sum total of which helps Boebert, left, and damages Adam Frisch, her Democratic opponent in what seems to be a toss-up race.

First, a quick summary of the alleged “facts,” according to far-right organ Breitbart in an October 13 “exclusive.”

Todd Gardner, the owner of a storage facility/taxi dispatch center in Aspen, CO, claims that in May 2017, Frisch and an unnamed woman used a storage container there for extramarital intimate encounters.

In a video declaration shot by Boebert’s campaign and used by Breitbart as their exclusive, Gardner claims that he initially sat on the information for more than a year; but when he feared his taxi business would be hurt by a possible partnership between Lyft and local government, he threatened to release the video if Frisch, then on the Aspen City Council, didn’t vote against it.

That would be blackmail, which is illegal. But here’s Gardner, openly admitting he blackmailed Frisch, who Gardner says changed his vote and kept Lyft out of Aspen.

True or not — that doesn’t really matter at the eleventh hour in a tight race — Boebert’s campaign is clearly hoping that the story, which Frisch told The Aspen Times comes off as a “desperate ploy” from a “cornered animal,” will make the difference.

There are many questions the far-right “media” organizations covering the story don’t seem to have asked, suggesting this is all a cheap hatchet job.

Oct. 19

Washington Post, Opinion: What we found when analyzing 1,000 viral TikToks on #Abortion, Yan Wu and David Byler, Oct. 19, 2022. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Americans became more interested in abortion. Google Trends data, TV news trackers and polls confirm that voters are talking about reproductive rights now more than they have in years.

But not all Americans are seeing the same debate. Baby boomers might stumble on the abortion conversation as they scroll Facebook or flip through cable news channels. Generation Z Americans — born between 1997 and 2012 — are more likely to open TikTok and see the back and forth flash across their phones.

So, in an effort to understand what American TikTok users (half of whom are under 30) are seeing, we scraped more than 1,000 viral, high-engagement videos with the #Abortion tag and analyzed them — both by running stats and watching posts.

We found two things, chiefly: pro-abortion-rights posts get more views than antiabortion videos — and the platform is almost perfectly designed to further divide us.

Oct. 18

New York Times, Kanye West to Buy Parler, Joining the Right-Wing Social Media Crowd, Tiffany Hsu and Jenny Gross, Oct. 18, 2022 (print ed.). The platform announced the deal days after Twitter and Instagram restricted the rapper and entrepreneur’s accounts for posting incendiary content.

Kanye West, right, the rapper, fashion designer and firebrand increasingly known for divisive cultural and political commentary that has been called racist, appears set to become the owner of a social media service known for its right-wing audience.

The parent company of Parler, which bills itself as a platform for uncancelable free speech, said on Monday that Mr. West, who now goes by Ye, would acquire the site for an undisclosed sum of money.

In buying Parler, Ye will help “continue the fight against censorship, cancel culture and authoritarianism,” George Farmer, the chief executive of Parler’s parent company, Parlement Technologies, said in a statement. The deal was announced a little over a week after Twitter and Instagram restricted Ye’s accounts in response to antisemitic remarks that he posted.

The announcement adds another shot of name recognition to the crowded cluster of social media alternatives that have emerged in recent years to take on Twitter and Facebook, which critics have long argued unfairly censor conservative voices.

The platform announced the deal days after Twitter and Instagram restricted the rapper and entrepreneur’s accounts for posting incendiary content.

Rolling Stone, FBI Raids Star ABC News Producer’s Home, Tatiana Siegel, Oct. 18, 2022. Emmy-winning producer James Gordon Meek had his home raided by the FBI. His colleagues say they haven’t seen him since.

At a minute before 5 a.m. on April 27, ABC News’ James Gordon Meek fired off a tweet with a single word: “FACTS.”

The network’s national-security investigative producer was responding to former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos’ take that the Ukrainian military — with assistance from the U.S. — was thriving against Russian forces.

Polymeropoulos’ tweet — filled with acronyms indecipherable to the layperson, like “TTPs,” “UW,” and “EW” — was itself a reply to a missive from Washington Post Pentagon reporter Dan Lamothe, who noted the wealth of information the U.S. military had gathered about Russian ops by observing their combat strategy in real time. The interchange illustrated the interplay between the national-security community and those who cover it. And no one straddled both worlds quite like Meek, an Emmy-winning deep-dive journalist who also was a former senior counterterrorism adviser and investigator for the House Homeland Security Committee. To his detractors within ABC, Meek was something of a “military fanboy.”

But his track record of exclusives was undeniable, breaking the news of foiled terrorist plots in New York City and the Army’s coverup of the fratricidal death of Pfc. Dave Sharrett II in Iraq, a bombshell that earned Meek a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. With nine years at ABC under his belt, a buzzy Hulu documentary poised for Emmy attention, and an upcoming book on the military’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 52-year-old bear of a man seemed to be at the height of his powers and the pinnacle of his profession.

Outside his Arlington, Virginia, apartment, a surreal scene was unfolding, and his storied career was about to come crashing down. Meek’s tweet marked the last time he’s posted on the social media platform.

Oct. 16

 

Washington Post, Investigation: Co-founder of Trump’s media company details Truth Social’s bitter infighting, Drew Harwell, Oct. 16, 2022 (print ed.). A whistleblower has provided The Post and the SEC with hundreds of previously unreported company messages, documents, photos and audio recordings that reveal a stunning portrait of the animosity that has built up inside Trump Media since its high-profile debut last year.

Will Wilkerson, then an executive at former president Donald Trump’s start-up Trump Media & Technology Group, was at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., coffee shop with company co-founder Andy Litinsky last October when Trump called Litinsky with a question: Would he give up some of his shares to Trump’s wife, Melania?

Trump Media, the owner of the fledgling social network Truth Social, had just been boosted by a huge merger agreement and a flood of investment that had made the stake worth millions of dollars. Trump had already been given 90 percent of the company’s shares in exchange for the use of his name and some minor involvement, leaving everyone else to split the rest.

Litinsky tried to brush it off, telling Trump “the gift would have meant a huge tax bill he couldn’t pay,” Wilkerson said in an interview. “Trump didn’t care. He said, ‘Do whatever you need to do.’ ”

Five months later, Litinsky, who first met Trump in 2004 as a contestant on the TV show “The Apprentice,” was abruptly removed from the company’s board. Wilkerson said he believes it was payback for his refusal to turn over a small fortune to the former president’s wife. Litinsky thought so, too, according to an email Wilkerson and his attorneys shared with The Washington Post and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In that email, Litinsky complained that Trump was “retaliating against me” by threatening to “ ‘blow up the company’ if his demands are not met.”

Litinsky did not respond to emails and phone messages. It is unknown whether he still retains his shares.
Trump Media & Technology Group co-founder Andy Litinsky said in a March email that he believed former president Donald Trump was “retaliating” against him for not giving some of his company equity to Trump's wife, Melania. Will Wilkerson, as an administrator of the company's email system, retained a copy of the message, which he provided to The Post and the SEC. (Will Wilkerson)

The email — one of hundreds of previously unreported company messages, documents, photos and audio recordings that Wilkerson has provided to the SEC in connection with a whistleblower submission — reveals a stunning portrait of the animosity that has built up inside Trump Media since its high-profile debut last year.

Washington Post, Musk suggests openness to continue funding Starlink access in Ukraine, Tony Romm, Oct. 16, 2022. His company, SpaceX, has been in talks with the Pentagon about future financing.

Elon Musk on Saturday signaled he could continue funding the Starlink satellite service that is providing internet for Ukraine and its military, raising the prospect that he might back down from his earlier threat to stop paying for the emergency network.

Only a day ago, Musk, left, said it was “unreasonable” to propose that his company, SpaceX, would further expand, support and finance the data-intensive system “indefinitely.” His comment sparked broad condemnation, though Musk continued to make the case behind the scenes for the Pentagon to front the costs.

Returning to Twitter on Saturday, Musk provided no update about those talks with the Defense Department — and neither the tech mogul nor the government responded to requests for comment. But Musk, the world’s richest man, newly struck an open if sarcastic note about maintaining Starlink funding anyway.

“The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt free,” he tweeted.

When a Silicon Valley investor later responded by citing the aphorism that “no good deed goes unpunished,” Musk tweeted in reply: “Even so, we should still do good deeds.”

Musk appeasement of Putin and China stokes fears of new Twitter policies

The exchange marked the latest twist in a confusing geopolitical saga that has played out over Twitter, the very company that Musk once again hopes to buy. For Ukraine, the stakes are staggeringly high: The satellite service offered by Starlink is now a primary mode of online communication in the country, a consequence of Russia’s sustained attack on Ukraine’s online infrastructure. A satellite cutoff could cripple Ukraine’s military and hand a major advantage to the Kremlin.

Washington Post, Crypto scam victims seek to hold Coinbase responsible for losses, Jeremy B. Merrill and Steven Zeitchik, Oct. 14, 2022. Over the past year, thousands of people have lost tens, if not hundreds, of millions in cryptocurrency when gangs of sophisticated scammers whisked their money out of their accounts, which are managed by an app from the publicly traded cryptocurrency giant Coinbase.

Now those victims are fighting back. Nearly 100 people are trying to hold Coinbase accountable, saying the company didn’t do enough to protect them. Scam victims says they notified the company, begging it to fix defects in its Coinbase Wallet software that had allowed the victims unknowingly to grant the scammers access to their accounts.

The requests were to no avail, scam victims say.

“They’re trying to be a financial institution without the infrastructure to back it up,” said Eric Rosen, a lawyer at Roche Freedman representing some 96 victims in the arbitration demand, which is akin to a lawsuit, filed against Coinbase.

“There were no procedures in place to stop these frauds,” Rosen said. “Of course, scammers quickly picked up on this, and directed victims to download the Coinbase Wallet.”

Many of the victims lost their life savings. The demand says that the rules requiring banks to reimburse debit-card users for unauthorized transfers also should apply to Coinbase’s customers.

“Coinbase is committed to protecting its customers from scams, fraud, and other crimes and has invested significant resources in protecting users against liquidity mining scams,” company spokeswoman Lisa Johnson said, responding to the arbitration demand. “A customer’s activities on Coinbase Wallet, including managing the wallet’s private security keys and access to the wallet’s contents, are exclusively controlled by the customer, not Coinbase,” Johnson continued, noting that the company offers many products so that consumers “can choose the products that are best for them.”

Washington Post, Iranian celebrities face arrest, travel bans for supporting protests, Miriam Berger, Oct. 16, 2022 (print ed.). A growing list of Iranian celebrities, including artists, filmmakers and athletes have been arrested or put under travel bans for supporting nationwide protests.

Oct. 15

Washington Post, Musk appeasement of Putin and China stokes fears of new Twitter policies, Joseph Menn and Cat Zakrzewski, Oct. 15, 2022 (print ed.). In the past 10 days, he’s suggested that Ukraine give up Crimea and that Taiwan be ruled like Hong Kong. Now he’s threatening Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellite system, critical to Ukraine’s war effort.

Elon Musk’s recent pronouncements on major foreign policy issues are ratcheting up national security concerns about his takeover of Twitter, a global speech platform used by hundreds of millions, 75 percent of them outside the United States.

In the 10 days since Elon Musk agreed again to buy the social media platform, he has proposed solving the war in Ukraine by letting Russia keep territory and won praise from a top Chinese diplomat for suggesting China take control of Taiwan. On Friday, U.S. and Ukrainian officials were sent scrambling as news broke that Musk had asked the Pentagon last month to take over paying for his Starlink satellite communications service in Ukraine.

Musk complained that he could not shoulder the costs and keep sending new terminals to Ukraine, even though many have been subsidized by the United States and other nations. Ukraine quickly noted the critical nature of Musk’s contributions.

Musk’s attempts to shape foreign policy in 280 characters or less have raised new fears about how he will wield the platform’s outsize influence over politicians and global leaders who rely on Twitter if he takes control of the company.

Since autocrats already use the platform to spread lies about opponents and whip up violence and mayhem, Musk’s pursuit of approval from two of the most powerful is especially unnerving.

“It’s a very good illustration as to why it would be a disaster if Musk does come to own Twitter,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. “You could have provocations, whether engineered by Musk himself or by others, that could have global implications.”

Washington Post, Rupert Murdoch considers merger of two halves of his business empire, Sarah Ellison, Oct. 15, 2022. A merger of News Corp and Fox Corp would put Fox News and Fox Sports back under the same corporate roof as publishing titles like the Wall Street Journal.

Rupert Murdoch finalized his divorce from his fourth wife, Jerry Hall, in August. But the two halves of his business empire are exploring a union.

News Corp., which owns publishing titles including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and the London-based Sun tabloid, and Fox Corp., which encompasses Fox News and Fox Sports, said Friday evening they are exploring a potential merger at the behest of Murdoch and his family’s trust.

The two companies said they have each formed a special committee to review the proposal.

The Murdoch Family Trust owns about 40 percent of the voting stakes in both News Corp and Fox Corp — and any combination would amount to something of a corporate reunion.

The two entities shared a governing structure until a split engineered in 2013 in response to a major scandal that rocked some of Murdoch’s London papers. Revelations that their journalists had been hacking into the voice mails of celebrities and other tabloid targets prompted overlapping criminal and civil investigations and government inquiries that found systemic corruption in the British tabloid industry — a potential threat to Murdoch’s empire.

At the time, Murdoch billed the split as a move that would “enable each company and its division to recognize their full potential — and unlock even greater long-term shareholder value.”

But it was accompanied by a measure of Murdoch family drama. Rupert Murdoch’s younger son, James, left his role as CEO of their European and Asian businesses — including the London tabloids. He eventually became CEO of the entertainment company 21st Century Fox. But he ended up clashing over business strategy with his older brother, Lachlan, who had been elevated to executive co-chairman of the company.

Eventually, their father decided to remove the company he had spent his life building from their mutual strife.

In 2019, the Murdochs closed a $71.3 billion sale of most of 21st Century Fox — which also included the FX cable network, Fox Searchlight label and National Geographic properties — to Disney.

Washington Post, Assassin brothers jailed 40 years for car-bomb killing of Malta journalist, Kelly Kasulis Cho, Oct. 15, 2022. Two men were sentenced to 40 years in prison each Friday for the 2017 car-bomb murder of Maltese anti-corruption journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, a brutal killing that rattled Europe and drew international attention to the tiny Mediterranean country’s criminal underworld.

Brothers George Degiorgio, 59, and Alfred Degiorgio, 57 pleaded guilty to the assassination of Caruana Galizia, a muckraker who had investigated drugs, arms traffickers, politicians and judges in a country largely known as a picturesque tourist destination. They previously claimed innocence but had faced the threat of life imprisonment.

Prosecutors alleged that the brothers had been hired to kill Caruana Galizia by one of Malta’s wealthiest people, Yorgen Fenech, according to the Associated Press. Fenech is awaiting trial. There were also questions as to what role, if any, politicians played in her death. Caruana Galizia had linked associates of then-Prime Minister Joseph Muscat with suspicious financial transactions described in the Panama Papers, which detailed the hidden infrastructure of offshore tax havens. (A probe later cleared Muscat and his associates of wrongdoing related to that scandal.)

Oct. 14

 

New York Times, Elon Musk said that SpaceX could not fund internet service in Ukraine “indefinitely,” Cassandra Vinograd, Oct. 14, 2022. Elon Musk, above, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX, said on Friday that his company could not “indefinitely” fund internet service in Ukraine with its Starlink terminals, which have been critical in allowing the Ukrainian military to coordinate on the battlefield, including in recent offensives.

His comments, made on Twitter, came just over a week after he drew a fierce public rebuke from Ukrainian officials for suggesting a peace plan to end the war that included ceding territory to Russia.

More than 12,000 Starlink internet terminals, which were designed to work with satellites orbiting in space to provide online access, have been delivered to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion in late February.

Mr. Musk took to Twitter on Friday after CNN reported that SpaceX had sent a letter to the Pentagon last month asking it to take over the funding of Ukrainian government and military use of Starlink. He did not mention the Pentagon in his Twitter comments, but talked about the difficulties of funding Starlink.

“SpaceX is not asking to recoup past expenses, but also cannot fund the existing system indefinitely *and* send several thousand more terminals that have data usage up to 100X greater than typical households,” Mr. Musk wrote on Twitter.

There was no immediate comment from the Pentagon or Ukraine’s military. SpaceX did not immediately respond a request for comment.

After saying last week that the operation in Ukraine had cost the company $80 million to date, Mr. Musk said on Friday that “burn” for the project was about $20 million a month.

“In addition to terminals, we have to create, launch, maintain & replenish satellites & ground stations,” he wrote on Twitter. “We’ve also had to defend against cyberattacks & jamming, which are getting harder.”

Mr. Musk, who is currently entangled in a legal battle around his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter, regularly shares provocative opinions and jokes online. His own employees have called these “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment.”

Oct. 13

 

Alex Jones, host and founder of the Texas-based Infowars show (file photo).

New York Times, Alex Jones Must Pay Nearly $1 Billion to Sandy Hook Victims’ Families, Elizabeth Williamson, Oct. 13, 2022 (print ed.). Alex Jones and Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, must pay close to $1 billion to the family members of eight victims of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and an F.B.I. agent who responded to the scene of the 2012 massacre, which killed 20 first graders and six educators.

Mr. Jones, who was not in court to hear the jury’s decision, had been found liable for defamation after he spent years falsely describing the shooting as a hoax and accusing the victims’ families of being actors complicit in the plot. As a result, the families were threatened in person and online. He used his Infowars platform to spread these lies.

Here’s what to know:

• The jury’s decision divided the money among 15 plaintiffs: 14 relatives of eight Sandy Hook victims, and William Aldenberg, an F.B.I. agent targeted by conspiracy theorists. The plaintiffs were awarded varying amounts by the jurors, who considered their testimony and other evidence presented in court to gauge the damage done to their reputations, invasion of their privacy and other factors.
• This case presented the greatest financial risk to Mr. Jones, because he was found liable of violating Connecticut’s Unfair Trade Practices Act, by using lies about the shooting to sell products on Infowars. There is no cap on punitive damages under that law.
• Mr. Jones’s assets are a matter of dispute. He has put Infowars’ parent company into bankruptcy, but the families have accused him of doing so to avoid paying the damages.
• Mr. Jones has a third Sandy Hook damages trial pending stemming from a defamation suit he lost to Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, parents of Noah Pozner. An earlier trial, in the suit brought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of Jesse Lewis, ended with Mr. Jones being ordered to pay $4 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages to the Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis.

New York Times, ‘We Told the Truth’: Sandy Hook Families Win $1 Billion From Alex Jones, Elizabeth Williamson, Oct. 13, 2022 (print ed.). The Sandy Hook families leveraged personal stories, social media analysis and the Infowars fabulist’s lack of contrition to secure a major verdict.

The families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims on Wednesday won nearly $1 billion in damages from the Infowars fabulist Alex Jones, a devastating blow against his empire and a message from the jury that his lies and those of his followers have crippling consequences.

Mr. Jones, who for years said the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., was a government hoax, now faces financial ruin. But it is unclear how much money the families will ultimately collect.

The families and their lawyers sat in stunned silence as the court clerk read one by one the sums awarded to each of 15 plaintiffs in the case. After court was adjourned, they hugged one another quietly, weeping.

The largest award went to Robbie Parker, who received $120 million. For years on his Infowars show and website, Mr. Jones singled out Mr. Parker, whose daughter Emilie died at Sandy Hook, as an actor whose televised tribute to Emilie a day after her death was “disgusting.”

Washington Post, Book Review: Journalists are failing our fragile democracy, a media insider says, Kathy Kiely, Oct. 13, 2022. This should have been Margaret Sullivan’s victory lap.

It’s hard to think of anyone who’s met and mastered more challenges with more aplomb and journalistic integrity than The Washington Post’s former media columnist: Starting as a summer intern at the tiny Niagara Gazette in the late 1970s (where she had a ringside seat to the environmental disaster at Love Canal), Sullivan, right, rose methodically through the ranks to become the first female editor in chief of her hometown paper, the Buffalo News. She helped diversify the paper’s editorial staff, putting people of color in leadership roles and taking pains to mentor younger women.

Then she headed to the New York Times to assume the deliberately awkward (and since abolished) post of public editor, assigned to question, investigate and police the organization from inside its ranks. Coming from Buffalo, Sullivan didn’t exactly blend right into the Times’ rarefied culture. “Jill is an uptown girl. You’re not,” David Shribman, a journalist who worked at both the Buffalo paper and the Times, said of Jill Abramson, who was the top editor at the Times when Sullivan arrived there. “Over nearly four years in the job, I never had a completely comfortable day as public editor,” Sullivan writes.

Honorably, she departed when she felt the camaraderie of the newsroom threatening her critical perspective. “I was starting to lose the outsider’s mentality,” she says. At The Post, Sullivan was assigned to cover the media at large, but she didn’t hesitate to bite the hand that fed her. At one point, she even turned on one of her teen idols. Sullivan, who says Watergate inspired her to get into journalism, castigated Bob Woodward for waiting for the publication of a book to reveal important details on what President Donald Trump knew about the coronavirus pandemic and when he knew it.
St. Martin's Press

It’s hard to argue with Sullivan’s news judgment: Last year, she publicly scolded leaders of the nation’s leading news organizations for failing to follow up on another scoop that Woodward scored with writing partner Robert Costa — the now-infamous memo by lawyer John Eastman outlining plans to get Trump a second term he did not win. Who’s sorry now? (Sullivan left The Post in August to take up a visiting professorship at Duke University.)

Given all this, you might expect Sullivan’s book, Newsroom Confidential: Lessons (and Worries) From an Ink-Stained Life, to be a reminiscence of her professional triumphs and a reflection on their larger meaning for the industry. While she’s particularly accomplished in her field, Sullivan is not an isolated phenomenon. The news business of today is much more diverse and publicly self-critical than the old boy’s network she and I had to wheedle our way into back in the day.

So why, having empowered and platformed establishment-challenging change-makers like Sullivan, is the news business in such a state of disarray and disrespect? And how does it get its voice of authority back?

Those are the questions that haunt the pages of Newsroom Confidential. The title suggests a gossipy tell-all, and there’s a heaping dollop of that. (Memo to a certain New York Times sports editor: You might want to look for a bunker, and I don’t mean along a fairway.) But if Sullivan started out intending to write a memoir, she ended up with a manifesto. This is a book about the role of the press in a democracy that’s in grave jeopardy.

Oct. 12

Washington Post, Angela Lansbury, Broadway luminary and ‘Murder, She Wrote’ star, dies at 96, Adam Bernstein, Oct. 12, 2022 (print ed.). She also excelled as the world’s most evil mother in the film ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’

Angela Lansbury, the English-born actress who excelled as the world’s most evil mother in “The Manchurian Candidate,” became a luminary of Broadway musical theater, and starred for 12 years as a warmhearted crime writer and sleuth in the TV series “Murder, She Wrote,” died Oct. 11 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96. She is shown at right in a 1990 photo via CBS News and Time Magazine.

Her family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.

“Murder, She Wrote” — with its opening montage of Ms. Lansbury pecking at a typewriter and facing down danger in a coastal Maine town — was one of the most popular TV shows of the 1980s and 1990s. To tens of millions of viewers, the veteran actress with a trace of a British accent personified Jessica Fletcher, the widow-turned-detective whose genteel manner masked her wits.
Angela Lansbury in 1989 on the set of “Murder, She Wrote.” (Douglas Pizac/AP)

To a younger generation, Ms. Lansbury was best remembered as the voice of Mrs. Potts, the tenderhearted teapot who sings the Oscar-winning title song in the animated Disney feature “Beauty and the Beast” (1991).

Such cherished performances may have suggested that Ms. Lansbury was a specialist in plucky, non-threatening roles. Yet over seven decades in show business, she had two earlier and distinct phases of her career — on-screen and then on Broadway — in which she revealed herself as an artist of immense range and power.

“Hardly anyone can match her career for success, longevity and variety,” said film scholar Jeanine Basinger.

In her teens, Ms. Lansbury earned Oscar nominations for supporting roles in her first two movie appearances: as an impudent and seductive Cockney maid in “Gaslight” (1944) and as a sweetly innocent music-hall singer in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945). In the latter, her high and light voice was used to poignant effect in the ditty “Goodbye, Little Yellow Bird,” forecasting her own doom.

Oct. 11

Washington Post, Analysis: ‘Welcome back to Twitter.’ Musk unfazed by Ye’s antisemitism, Will Oremus and Cristiano Lima, Oct. 11, 2022. Taking down the rapper’s bigoted posts was an easy call for Twitter and Instagram. That could change if Elon Musk and some GOP leaders have their way.

• New York Times, The Exploitative Anti-Blackness of Kanye West, Charles M. Blow

Oct. 10

Washington Post, Twitter, Instagram remove Kanye West’s antisemitic posts, freeze accounts, Bryan Pietsch, Oct. 10, 2022. Twitter confirmed Sunday that it had removed a tweet by Ye, right, the musician and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West, and temporarily prohibited him from further posts on the platform, as the fallout from his recent antisemitic comments on social media continued.

Ye’s account, @kanyewest, was “locked for violating Twitter’s policies,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email Sunday, declining to state which policy he had violated. The account shows that a recent tweet “violated the Twitter Rules.”

Though the tweet is no longer visible on his account, screenshots shared widely on social media show that Ye had said he would go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE,” an apparent reference to Defcon, the U.S. military’s defense readiness system. In the tweet, he used antisemitic tropes and said he could not be antisemitic “because black people are actually Jew also.”

Analysis: What Kanye West and Tucker Carlson reveal about the struggle for power

The action by Twitter comes after Instagram removed a post from Ye’s account and similarly locked his account temporarily.

A spokesperson for Meta, Instagram’s parent company formerly known as Facebook, said in an email that the platform “deleted content from @kanyewest for violating our policies and placed a restriction on the account. We may place restrictions on accounts that repeatedly break our rules, for example, we may temporarily restrict them from posting, commenting, or sending DM’s.” Screenshots of the post show that Ye had posted an apparent conversation with the rapper Diddy, employing antisemitic tropes to allege that he was being influenced by Jewish people.

Washington Post, Nobel in economics goes to Bernanke, two other Americans for research on banks, financial crises, David J. Lynch, Oct. 10, 2022. Former Federal Reserve chair Ben S. Bernanke, above, Douglas W. Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip H. Dybvig of Washington University in St. Louis were awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday for their work on banks and financial crises.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm said research published by the three Americans in 1983 and 1984 provided a new understanding of the role banks play in making the economy work and causing it to plunge into crisis.

“Their discoveries improved how society deals with financial crises,” the committee said, crediting the academics for showing policymakers it is critical to prevent banks from failing.

Bernanke, who led the Fed during the 2008 financial crisis, was recognized for his pathbreaking 1983 analysis of the Great Depression. The committee said his research showed how bank runs had turned an ordinary recession in the 1930s into the worst global economic crisis in history.

Oct. 9

 

Washington Post, Book Review: Trump’s origins in a New York world of con men, mobsters and hustlers, Sean Wilentz, Oct. 9, 2022 (print ed.). In “Confidence Man,” Maggie Haberman puts special emphasis on Trump’s ascent in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Maggie Haberman hails from a New York City very different from Donald Trump’s dominion of glitz and criminality, but she knows that dominion well.

Raised in the household of a traditional shoe-leather New York Times reporter and a well-connected publicist, and now herself ensconced at the digitized Times, Haberman’s earliest assignments involved covering City Hall and its satellite ethical sinkholes for the New York Post and the Daily News. That singular education in New York corruption has stuck with her and sets her apart from her peers reporting on the Trump presidency and its seditious aftermath. It now distinguishes Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America as a uniquely illuminating portrait of our would-be maximum leader.

With a sharp eye for the backstory, Haberman places special emphasis on Trump’s ascent in a late 1970s and 1980s New York demimonde of hustlers, mobsters, political bosses, compliant prosecutors and tabloid scandalmongers. This bygone Manhattan that Tom Wolfe could only satirize in The Bonfire of the Vanities is the fundament to any understanding of what makes Trump tick.

“The dynamics that defined New York City in the 1980s,” Haberman observes, “stayed with Trump for decades; he often seemed frozen there.” Zombielike, he swaggers and struts and cons on the world’s largest stage, much as he did when gossip columnists fawned over him as The Donald; and he will continue his night of the living dead, with menacing success, until someone finally drives a metaphorical stake through his metaphorical heart.

The rote rap on Trump is that he was a bumptious, hyper-ambitious real estate developer from Queens who never earned the respect of the Manhattan society pooh-bahs and who vowed to beat them at their own game — a vow that eventually led him to the Oval Office, astonishing even Trump. That storyline appears in Confidence Man, but Haberman knows it is superficial.

Inside that cauldron of fakery, Trump, no rugged individualist, and padded with his father’s millions, gravitated to a specific milieu of arrivistes whom he equated with supreme power, class and ruthlessness. He held in especially high regard the bully George Steinbrenner, from the outer outer borough of Cleveland, and became a constant presence in the Boss’s Yankee Stadium box. (I’d not known until reading Haberman that Trump, a wimp when it came to sacking underlings, found his tag line for “The Apprentice” by impersonating Steinbrenner barking “You’re fired,” over and over, not least at the Yankees’ oft-discharged manager Billy Martin.)

Off to one side there was the raffish schemer Roger Stone, left, a well-digger’s son from Norwalk, Conn., who got his start as one of the political saboteurs for Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign, and whose Washington lobbying mega-firm (with Paul Manafort as one of his co-partners) came to represent the Trump Organization’s interests. From the outermost borough of Adelaide, Australia, there was the unscrupulous media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who had already turned the liberal tabloid New York Post into a right-wing scandal sheet and who in 1985 completed the acquisition of 20th Century Fox that would eventually give the world Fox News, commanded by another member of the New York gang, Roger Ailes. There was also the high-profile, media-savvy U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani, from Brooklyn like Sharpton, and he and Trump would circle each other until they seriously hooked up some years later.

Trump’s chief mentor, and a consigliere to most of the big shots named above, was the legendary underworld and overworld fixer Roy Cohn (shown with Trump at far right). The pampered son of a kingpin in Bronx Democratic politics, long notorious for his McCarthyite Red Scare grandstanding, Cohn, as Haberman details, connected Trump with Stone as well as with organized crime while giving him master classes in high-stakes con-man strategy and tactics. Whenever Trump today intimidates the press with threats of retaliation, whenever he defends his aggressions by claiming to be the victim, whenever he calls his accusers (especially if they represent the federal government) life-destroying, treasonous “scum,” he is channeling his mentor, Cohn.

Haberman offers plenty of material about how these men did it all with virtual impunity. Of course, there would be the occasional fines and sealed judgments — and Cohn was disbarred weeks before he died of AIDS, abandoned by Trump, who knew the score on being heartless. But as Haberman describes, Trump went to great lengths to square himself with a paragon of the city’s power elite, the longtime Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, including making generous donations to Morgenthau’s pet charity, the New York Police Athletic League, the one charity commitment, Morgenthau would joke warmly, that Trump could be counted on honoring. Not until Cyrus Vance Jr., who had a fine pedigree but was no crusader, succeeded Morgenthau in 2010 did Trump and his properties, after Vance backed off for years, finally face serious investigation by the D.A.’s office — and even then, prosecutors on the case quit in protest when Vance’s successor suddenly seemed to drop it.

Confidence Man likewise enlightens about the massive oversights by the press and the broader world of publishing, especially in New York, not simply in failing to expose the corruption that Haberman catalogues but in creating and then abetting Trump’s celebrity. There were certainly exceptional naysaying reporters, notably Jack Newfield’s protege at the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett, who, at Newfield’s urging, dug deep into Trump’s shady dealings. Barrett’s and the Voice’s condemnations sparked a brief aborted federal investigation, but they weren’t about to shake the inertia at the most influential outlets, topped by the New York Times. Neither did the late lamented Spy magazine’s bull’s-eye satirical shots at the “short-fingered vulgarian” provoke inquiries, although they did provoke Trump to threaten lawsuits and are said to anger him to this day.

Some of the episodes in Haberman’s later chapters on Trump’s presidency have already stirred controversy. Beneath the buzz, though, many of the richest storylines from the Trump White House, as reported in “Confidence Man” and elsewhere, have a distinctly New York ring. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump snapped in 2018, in anger at his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the very conservative former senator from Alabama, who had recused himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whom Trump eventually ousted.

Before he was twice impeached, Trump found his man, yet another New York mouthpiece, William Barr, who as attorney general happily did Trump’s bidding in, among other things, lying about the damning Mueller report on the Russian interference — until Trump lost reelection and Barr, well-schooled in transactional loyalty and with his reputation as a supposed “institutionalist” tarnished, declined recruitment into Trump’s coup and at the last minute jumped from the sinking ship. The manic and often antic crimes of Stone, pardoned and unpardoned, add another layer of continuity, a louche link with the old Cohn-centered netherworld.

Haberman’s contribution in Confidence Man, though, is much larger than its arresting anecdotes. Later generations of historians will puzzle over Trump’s rise to national power.

Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.”

Politico, Twitter blocks — and then restores — Covid-19 vaccination post from Florida's surgeon general, David Kihara, Oct. 9, 2022. Joe Ladapo is an outspoken skeptic of Covid-19 vaccines.

Twitter blocked — and then restored — a post from Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo that was promoting an analysis claiming a high incidence of cardiac-related deaths among men who take the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine.

Ladapo, who posted the tweet Friday, had also recommended men aged 18-39 should not receive the mRNA vaccine. Ladapo is an outspoken skeptic of Covid-19 vaccines who has questioned both the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine despite consensus within the medical community that the vaccines help protect against the virus and can lessen severe symptoms.

“Our current misleading information policies cover: synthetic and manipulated media, COVID-19, and civic integrity,” Twitter stated in its post that blocked Ladapo’s tweet. “If we determine a Tweet contains misleading or disputed information per our policies that could lead to harm, we may add a label to the content to provide context and additional information.”

Ladapo has previously recommended that young children should not receive the Covid-19 vaccine. The Florida Department of Health over the summer did not pre-order vaccines for children aged 5 and under even though 49 other states did in the lead-up to the Food and Drug Administration issuing emergency authorization for young kids to receive the Pfizer and Moderna shots.

Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Mayo Clinic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA have all stressed that the vaccine is safe and urged the public to get vaccinated.

Spokespeople for Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appointed Ladapo to serve as his surgeon general last year, on Sunday criticized Twitter for blocking Ladapo’s post.

“This is an unacceptable and Orwellian move for narrative over fact,” said Bryan Griffin, the governor’s press secretary, in a tweet. In a follow-up tweet later Sunday after Twitter restored the post, he thanked people for bringing attention to it.

DeSantis has consistently rejected Covid-19 rules that mandate showing proof of vaccination, masking students in schools and vaccine requirements for large businesses.

His Department of Health in June threatened the Special Olympics with a $27.5 million fine for requiring thousands of participants to show that they had been vaccinated against Covid before competing in games at an Orlando event. Florida stated that the proof of vaccination requirement violated the state’s law against such a mandate.

Washington Post, Opinion: Herschel Walker and Brett Favre were football gods. It should have ended there, Candace Buckner, Oct. 9, 2022 (print ed.). Herschel Walker was a great running back. Certainly the greatest to play at the University of Georgia and arguably the greatest in the history of college football. If only it would end right there.

Brett Favre,below, was a great quarterback. Certainly the greatest to play at the University of Southern Mississippi and arguably one of the greatest in NFL history. If only it would end right there.

There should be a line. But as sports fans we keep blurring the boundaries between the player and the person.

Superstar athletes amaze us with their otherworldly feats, and as a show of appreciation we then construct altars on which they can spend the rest of their lives feeling loved, admired — and removed from reality.

Once on top, they are all but certain to let us down — because human beings tend to make terrible gods. This hasn’t stopped the sports-obsessed among us from desperately wanting our heroes’ characters to match their athletic skills.

Politico Magazine, New Book Excerpt: How Influential Senate Democrats Shut Down a Bid to Call Witnesses Against Trump, Rachael Bade and Karoun Demirjian, Oct. 7, 2022. A new book shows how Democrats hobbled their own case to convict Trump after Jan. 6 by shooting down a last-minute bid for witnesses.

Oct. 7

 

New York Times, Major Newspaper Company Will Stop Endorsing National and Statewide Candidates, Katie Robertson, Oct. 7, 2022 (print ed.). The change will be announced in an editorial set to run in Alden Global Capital’s more than 200 papers as early as Friday.

Publications owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, the second-largest newspaper publisher in the country, will no longer endorse major political candidates in their opinion pages.

In an editorial that is scheduled to run in papers as early as Friday, the company’s publications will tell readers that they will stop endorsing candidates in presidential, Senate and gubernatorial elections.

A copy of the editorial was obtained by The New York Times. Alden confirmed its contents and timing.

“Unfortunately, as the public discourse has become increasingly acrimonious, common ground has become a no man’s land between the clashing forces of the culture wars,” according to a copy of the planned editorial.

“At the same time, with misinformation and disinformation on the rise, readers are often confused, especially online, about the differences between news stories, opinion pieces and editorials.”

Alden Global Capital owns about 200 newspapers in the United States, including The Chicago Tribune (whose famed former downtown headquarters is shown at right), The New York Daily News and The Denver Post. Only Gannett, which owns USA Today and other papers, operates more.

The editorial is set to run in the newspapers that had traditionally endorsed candidates, not all newspapers in the Alden group, according to a person with knowledge of the plan. Papers can still endorse candidates for local offices.

Newspapers in the United States, including The New York Times, have a long tradition of endorsing candidates. But in recent years, some outlets have questioned the practice or decided to forgo it altogether. The Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia said the 2018 cycle would be its last. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, McClatchy, a large newspaper chain, said its newspapers would not make an endorsement unless they had interviewed both candidates.

Three Alden newspapers — The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune and The Denver Post — will be allowed to continue with their endorsements this season because of how far along in the process they are and because they are viewed as state newspapers of record, the person said. Those newspapers will announce after this election cycle that they will end the practice, according to the person with knowledge of the company’s plan.

The editorial said the newspapers would continue to cover political races but would “no longer endorse in presidential races or the increasingly nationalized contests for governor and senate.”

“We want to make sure our opinion pages advance a healthy and productive public discourse,” it said. “With that in mind, we will focus our efforts on more local contests, such as city councils, school boards, local initiatives, referendums and other such matters, which readers have told us continue to be of great value in their daily lives.”

 

Washington Post, ‘I refuse to comply,’ says Russian journalist, days after escaping house arrest, Jennifer Hassan and Robyn Dixon, Oct. 7, 2022 (print ed.). In her first remarks since fleeing pretrial house arrest earlier this week, Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, shown above in a file photo, said she considers herself “completely innocent” and issued a call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to be isolated from society and put on trial.

“Since our state refuses to comply with its own laws, I refuse to comply with the measure of restraint imposed on me in the form of house arrest, and I release myself from it as of September 30, 2022,” Ovsyannikova posted to Telegram from an undisclosed location Wednesday.

“Respected employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service, put such a bracelet on Putin,” she said in a video, referring to the electronic tracking device she has been forced to wear on her ankle by Russian officials. “It is he who must be isolated from society not me, and he should be tried for the genocide of the people of Ukraine and for the fact that he destroys the male population of Russia en masse.”

 

 

Jeff German sits and works in the Las Vegas Review-Journal offices in 2018 ( Photo by Harrison Keely of the Las Vegas Review-Journal via Getty Images).

Washington Post, A Las Vegas newsroom set out to investigate a colleague’s killing. Now a suspect is behind bars, Sarah Ellison, Oct. 7, 2022.  After Jeff German of the Las Vegas Review-Journal was found dead, his fellow reporters knew they would have to investigate his death before they mourned it. Now a suspect is behind bars.

Washington Post, Opinion: The MAGA GOP has never been about ‘life.’ Only power, Jennifer Rubin, right, Oct. 6, 2022. The cat’s been out of the bag for some time regarding Republicans’ insincere support for “life.”

If “life” were the issue when it comes to abortion, the party would not put reproductive health and lives at risk with forced-birth laws. For that matter, a pro-life politician would not oppose effective gun-safety laws; would not oppose mask edicts or discourage vaccinations for the coronavirus; and would not push to cut Medicaid and hobble the Affordable Care Act. However, never has it been more apparent how utterly unprincipled the party is when it comes to an issue it has used for decades to woo its base.

Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker, who supports forced birth even in cases of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, is credibly accused (with documentary proof) of urging a woman he impregnated to get an abortion and then paying for it, as the Daily Beast first reported. Although Walker has denied the allegation, Republicans have let on that they don’t care anyway. Dana Loesch, a former spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association, made that crystal clear: “I don’t care if Herschel Walker paid to abort endangered baby eagles. I want control of the Senate.”

She’s right, of course. All the GOP cares about is power. It certainly does not care about the character or quality of its candidates, about actual election results, about officials’ oaths or really any other policy matter. This was the party that had no platform in 2020, only unwavering loyalty to its leader.

Washington Post, Jury to decide on damages in trial against Alex Jones over Sandy Hook lies, Joanna Slater, Oct. 7, 2022 (print ed.). A lawyer representing family members of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting said Thursday that Infowars founder Alex Jones was responsible for defamation on a “historic scale” and urged jurors in a Connecticut courtroom to award damages commensurate with the suffering his clients have endured.

Jones created a “lie machine” for profit, said Christopher Mattei, a lawyer representing the relatives of eight of the victims and an FBI agent who responded to the 2012 mass shooting.

The remarks came during the closing arguments of a closely watched proceeding against Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist who spread the false claim that the massacre was fake and the grieving parents were actors, leading to years of harassment and anguish for the families of the victims.

The judge in the case, Barbara Bellis, already entered a judgment against Jones that found him liable by default after he refused to produce crucial evidence in the case.

Politico, Delaware judge delays Twitter-Musk trial, Rebecca Kern, Oct. 7, 2022 (print ed.). Musk’s attorneys said they’re working on getting debt financing. Elon Musk and Twitter now have until the end of the month to finalize the $44 billion deal for the billionaire to purchase the platform, a judge ruled on Thursday.

Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick of the Delaware Court of Chancery said that the two parties have until Oct. 28 to close the deal — a win for Musk — after the Tesla CEO had pushed for a stay in the high-stakes trial. Musk had committed in an earlier Thursday filing that he’d close the deal on or close to Oct. 28

New York Times, Back at the Negotiating Table, Twitter Wants Assurances from Musk, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bernhard Warner, Vivian Giang, Sarah Kessler, Stephen Gandel, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni, Oct. 7, 2022 (print ed.). Elon Musk is back in talks with Twitter. The company wants guarantees that he won’t walk away again.

For now, the case goes on. “The parties have not filed a stipulation to stay this action, nor has any party moved for a stay,” McCormick wrote in a legal filing on Wednesday. “I, therefore, continue to press on toward our trial set to begin on Oct. 17.”

Washington Post, Prominent influencer Bethenny Frankel sues TikTok over ads she says misused her image, Taylor Lorenz, Oct. 7, 2022 (print ed.). The lawsuit highlights another gap in regulation of an online industry that has grown rapidly in recent years.

A prominent online influencer and reality TV star filed a lawsuit Thursday against TikTok, claiming that the platform has failed to crack down on scam ads using her videos to promote counterfeit products.

Bethenny Frankel, who has more than 990,000 followers on TikTok and was featured in the Bravo television series “The Real Housewives of New York,” says she was scrolling through TikTok on Sept. 16 when many of her followers began asking about an ad they’d seen featuring her promoting a cheap knockoff designer cardigan.

But Frankel, as she alleges in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said she never agreed to promote the knockoff cardigan. Instead, she said, a scammer had taken a previous video in which she talked about a different cardigan and edited it to make it look like she was endorsing the knockoff. According to the lawsuit, a summary of which was provided to The Washington Post, Frankel immediately posted a TikTok video alerting her followers to the fake ad and reported the ad through TikTok’s content-flagging system. Within minutes, her video about the incident was removed for bullying.

Oct. 6

 

Coffee County historical marker and the county courthouse in Douglas, GA (Photo by Stephen Conn via Flickr, C BY-NC 2.0).

Going Deep With Russ Baker, Investigative Commentary: What Donald Trump Got Right About Voting Machines, Russ Baker, right, Oct. 6, 2022. The weird drama over the supposed “forensic experts” who messed with election software in a tiny Georgia county distracts from the real problem: Voting machines — and our elections — are indeed vulnerabe.

“Fair elections” was perhaps the animating factor in American politics in 2020. That summer, as we all know, Donald Trump seemingly began to prepare for a November loss by declaring ad nauseam that the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged — but the idea that the integrity of the election was at risk was first floated by Joe Biden, who predicted (accurately) as early as June that Trump would “try to steal” the election by casting doubt on mail-in ballots.

Since then, for most people not attending Trump’s post-presidential rallies, the issue has pretty much disappeared. Among “reasonable” people, it’s taken as axiomatic that our elections are secure. But that’s not true. It’s a crisis for our country, beyond the hundreds of election deniers running for key positions overseeing future elections, and the situation sets us up for future disasters.

Thanks for reading Going Deep with Russ Baker! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We know all about that at WhoWhatWhy. Long before Trump hijacked this legitimate issue for illegitimate purposes with the “Stop the Steal” fantasy, we were one of the first news outlets to sound the alarm over the “chain of custody” of ballots and the vulnerabilities of electronic voting systems.

So-called “hybrid” voting machines, used to both create and mark and then scan and count barcoded paper ballots, can be manipulated in various ways that are difficult to detect. Hand-marked ballots, with the security of the chain of custody preserved and well documented, are probably the only way to ensure an election wasn’t hijacked.

Election integrity is a real concern. But once Trump commandeered the concept, many reasonable people saw any question of voting machine reliability as dangerous territory, the exclusive realm of MAGA and QAnon kooks.

The way legacy media is covering a ballot machine controversy in tiny Coffee County, GA, is not helping.

There, local GOP officials allowed some purported “election experts” — who were in fact Trump loyalists — to access official election computers and poll pads on January 7, 2021, under the cover story that they were looking for evidence that the 2020 election had indeed been stolen.

Exactly what they were up to is still a mystery, but one theory is that whatever they were doing tainted the Coffee County voting machines — and may have provided a blueprint for stealing future elections. For now, that’s just a theory. Georgia’s Republican election officials have repeatedly insisted that despite the curious visits and the so-called “forensic experts” accessing the machines, there was no sign of any tampering or other shenanigans.

Framed that way, Coffee County sounds like a sideshow. Yet it’s been an ongoing national story. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major news organizations have been publishing bits of closed-circuit video footage and other evidence that increasingly show that the local GOP officials and their allies seem to have been evasive, had poor memory, or possibly lied outright about the incident.

Although the Post has played the story prominently and sought to keep its lead over other news outlets on it, something about the way in which the stories focused on the specific local characters and their actions obscures the larger issue — an issue that legacy media may be, understandably, fearful of highlighting.

Recent coverage gives the impression that the only reason the footage is public is a lawsuit. What they neglected to mention: That lawsuit, filed in 2018, was brought about because advocates had identified specific security flaws with internet-connected voting machines, like the ones used in Georgia and four other states.

The following year, observers found internet-connected voting machines, used to upload results from precincts, in 10 states. Ahead of 2020, cybersecurity experts identified 35 voting systems that could be reached — and breached — via the internet, despite insistence to the contrary from Jeanette Manfra, the then-assistant director for cybersecurity for the Department of Homeland Security.

This context was absent from the legacy media’s Coffee County coverage. Who cares that, after the election, a small forensic effort took place to examine the voting system used in a tiny county in Georgia? Neither the Post nor the Times has done a great job of highlighting and focusing public attention, front and center, on what’s at stake in this blurry footage. The Times did raise the point, but only in a final paragraph.

I tried to draw attention to the core problem in a previous newsletter. My point was that, under the guise of investigating possible wrongdoing, the people captured in the video might have been opening the door to actual wrongdoing — i.e., by obtaining the code used in the machines, they could potentially use it to tamper with the whole system.

Now, there’s a tiny bit of acknowledgment of this by state authorities in Georgia. Two weeks ago, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger — the same Brad Raffensperger whom outgoing President Donald Trump leaned on in the infamous January 2021 phone request to “find” him 11,780 votes — announced that even though nobody could point out exactly what might be amiss, Georgia would go ahead and replace the Dominion Voting Systems equipment in Coffee County anyway.

But that seems more like a distraction and damage control than anything else — since the actual problem is that the incursion could potentially allow people to access and influence voting equipment throughout the state. That’s the real issue: The overall voting system is potentially insecure. (Raffensperger claimed otherwise, as does this Department of Homeland Security report — but experts we’ve consulted for years vehemently disagree.)

And even worse, Georgia’s exposure to covert election manipulation could be the bellwether for the rest of the country.

With very tight elections anticipated in consequential US Senate and gubernatorial races in that state — races that have national implications — it’s deeply concerning that more attention is not being paid to the underlying risks.

Those risks are copious and varied: There’s no reliable paper trail to ensure that miscounts don’t happen accidentally or deliberately, and there are plenty of ways for miscounts to happen.

What happened in Georgia is this: The state bought a lot of ballot-marking devices (BMDs) designed to make voting easier for handicapped people but then made them mandatory for all in-person voters, even though there are grave concerns among experts that these machines have flaws that could potentially permit manipulation.

But you could read about the Trumpy weirdos in Coffee County for hours, and never pick up this vital takeaway.

***

The lack of attention paid by the media to the real problems with voting machines may be explained, in part, by the fact that news organizations have painted themselves into a corner. They’ve been telling their audience that there is nothing to Trump’s election manipulation claims — and they’re right: There’s no evidence to support his Stop the Steal circus.

But the stench of Trump’s Big Lie has had a peculiar and paradoxical impact on coverage of election security and integrity. Because, in their aversion to it, the legacy media have avoided granting even a shred of credence to anything Trump, or anyone associated with Stop the Steal, has been saying on this issue.

Unless this problem is given attention and gets fixed, election fraud could become endemic — in 2022, and beyond.

Axios, Dems' swing-state local news ploy, Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley, Oct. 6, 2022. Writers for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states, Axios' Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley have learned.

Why it matters: Behind the patina of independent local news, these sites are pumping out content designed to put a sheen of original reporting on partisan messaging.

It's an increasingly common tactic among political outfits — both Democratic and Republican — looking to give their team a steady stream of positive content that is then used to boost their own electoral communications.

What's happening: A network of at least 51 locally branded news sites has popped up since last year under names like the Milwaukee Metro Times, the Mecklenburg Herald and the Tri-City Record.

The sites are focused on key swing states with elections in 2021 and 2022: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.
Each follows a similar template: aggregated local news content and short write-ups about local sports teams and attractions — interspersed with heavily slanted political news aimed at boosting Democratic midterm candidates and attacking Republican opponents.

The intrigue: "About Us" pages for each of the sites say they're run by a company called Local Report Inc., which was formed in Florida last year.

Their mastheads indicate involvement by another entity: the American Independent, a Washington-based progressive news outfit.
Six American Independent writers have each contributed to most or all of the Local Report sites, regularly writing stories that exclusively appear on the network.

The American Independent was launched by Democratic operative and fundraiser David Brock, who is also known for founding the left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America.

TAI's president, Matt Fuehrmeyer, is a former senior aide at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and to Harry Reid, the late former Senate Democratic leader.

Between the lines: Local Report's stories receive minimal promotion from the sites themselves — they're not boosted through digital ads, and Local Report itself has no online presence beyond its network of TAI-staffed news sites.

What they do offer is a steady stream of friendly — and sometimes misrepresented — news coverage that can be touted by political allies.
Local Report stories have popped up in communications from Stacey Abrams' Georgia gubernatorial campaign, the Democratic Parties of Georgia and Michigan, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Michigan's Democratic secretary of state, and independent political groups such as Color of Change and the Democratic Coalition.

What they're saying: Jessica McCreight, TAI's executive editor, described its relationship with Local Report Inc. as a "co-publishing agreement," but would not say whether her organization has editorial control over the sites' content.

Washington Post, Analysis: Political spam is out of control. Now Gmail is about to make it worse, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Oct. 6, 2022 (print ed.). Campaign emails will soon get to bypass Gmail’s spam filter and go straight into your inbox. Democracy doesn’t have to be this annoying.

Emails from certain federal candidates, parties and political action committees will soon be allowed to bypass the spam filters on Gmail and go straight into your inbox. To banish them, you’ll need to click a new unsubscribe button on each and every sender. (I’ll show you how in the video below.)

Google says it’s a pilot program — so far, not being used by any other email providers — to surface campaign emails that some people might want to see. But this plan is outrageously hostile to the majority of us, who could be forced to dig through a lot more political spam. Who even asked for this? Why, politicians, of course.

Democracy depends on a free flow of information. But in our inboxes and on our phones, democracy is becoming annoying — and dangerous. We the users don’t want to be overwhelmed by unwanted political emails, text messages and robocalls — nor do we want to be targeted with misinformation and misleading fundraising appeals.

Google’s plan to help politicians spam you gives us an opportunity to rethink what’s gone awry about campaigning online.

“The spam finds its way into my inbox, too,” said Commissioner Ellen L. Weintraub (D) of the Federal Election Commission, who helps police America’s campaigns. “The politicians who write the rules have exempted themselves from a lot of the rules that could apply,” she told me.

How do we fight back? Rather than give politicians special end runs to our attention, we need to find ways to make politicians more accountable for how they treat our inboxes and our data — and what they say in direct communications with us.

A plan only a politician could love

Google is offering politicians an end run around one of our last refuges online: the spam filters that protect Gmail’s 1.5 billion users from unwanted junk, scams and malware.

Over the next few weeks, emails from campaigns participating in Google’s trial will start to show up directly in everyone’s Gmail “Primary” tab. (That’s the same spot as actually important information like emails from a potential employer or your aunt.) You’ll see a new gray “Unsubscribe” box at the top the first time you open one of these emails. But the system means you’ll have to look at and tap unsubscribe on each of these emails, whose senders have a habit of multiplying every election season.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that Google also put some rules on participants that might discourage some bad behavior. It’s possible that the worst offenders — like campaigns who buy millions of email addresses and spam them all — won’t even try to join the program because they can’t meet the company’s criteria.

But come on, Google: Spam filters are extremely popular, and for good reason. Roughly half of all the email traffic on the internet is of unwanted messages. No other email sender (not even Google itself) is exempt from the Gmail spam filter. That’s because Google’s new policy isn’t rooted in better product design — it’s rooted in politics.

Republican lawmakers have been hammering the tech giant about alleged political bias in its products and this year seized on a study from North Carolina State University to suggest Gmail’s spam filter is biased against Republican emails, making it harder for them to raise money. Never mind that the authors of the study said their work was being misrepresented.

Google vigorously denies that there’s political bias in its spam filter but is still trying to score points in Washington by promoting its new program as a solution to politicians’ immediate fundraising woes. “This was a big gimme to politicians,” said Weintraub, who was a dissenting vote on the decision that deemed Google’s program legal.

Washington Post, New monument honors service of Black Americans in 12 U.S. wars, Cathy Free, Oct. 6, 2022. ‘This will be a site for healing,’ said Ronal Bassham, a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars. The Buffalo monument is believed to be the first of its kind in the country, honoring the contributions of Black service members in 12 U.S. wars, from the Revolutionary War to the war in Afghanistan.

He reenacted Civil War battles as a Black soldier fighting for freedom. Then he learned about his great-great-grandfather.

There are other memorials and museums that honor Black soldiers, though the Buffalo monument is the only one dedicated to living and deceased veterans from all branches of the U.S. military, said Robin E. Hodges, 60, a U.S. Navy veteran and vice-chairwoman of the monument’s board of directors.

Washington Post, Musk proposes closing deal for Twitter at original price and ending all litigation, Faiz Siddiqui, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rachel Lerman, Oct. 5, 2022 (print ed.). The offer, set to be discussed in court later today, marks the latest twist in a monthslong campaign by Elon Musk to acquire the influential social media platform.

Elon Musk, right, has offered to proceed with a deal to buy Twitter at the price he offered months ago before trying to call it off, according to a legal filing, a stunning development weeks before the two sides were due to face off in a trial.

In a letter that Musk’s side sent to Twitter overnight, he proposed proceeding with the deal at $54.20 a share if the Delaware Chancery Court, which was scheduled to hold the trial on Oct. 17, agrees to “enter an immediate stay” of the case “and adjourn the trial and all other” related proceedings. Twitter enclosed a copy of the letter from Musk’s attorneys in a financial filing Tuesday.

Twitter said in a statement Tuesday that it received the letter and intends to close the transaction at the original share price offered by Musk’s team. The company plans to accept the offer but is waiting for confirmation that the judge can oversee the process, said a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

Because there is great distrust on both sides, Twitter leaders are still questioning whether the letter represents a legal maneuver, the person said.

Elon Musk’s texts reveal what led to Twitter bid, before deal fell apart

Musk’s offer comes at a key moment in the lead-up to the trial, which was due to settle months of legal wrangling between the billionaire and the social media company following Musk’s moves in July to terminate his planned $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

Both sides had been conducting depositions. Musk’s side collected testimony from Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal and whistleblower Peiter Zatko, the company’s former head of security, who alleged extreme deficiencies in Twitter’s security practices and inaccuracies in its filings to security regulators, according to court schedules.

Two people briefed on Zatko’s sworn interviews said they did not produce any new revelations that would have helped Musk’s effort to escape the deal without incurring significant costs. Zatko was also deposed by Twitter.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed in the case Thursday in Austin, where he lives, after the original date was scrapped, the filings showed. His attorney Alex Spiro’s deposition was expected to follow on Sunday in New York.

Legal experts say Musk’s willingness to close the deal suggests that he may have realized he’s in a weaker position than he wanted to be going into trial and his deposition.

“Musk is finally listening to his lawyers,” Anat Alon-Beck, a business law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said in an email. “He would be a fool to not at least try to buy the company now and avoid being deposed.”

Bloomberg News first reported news of the offer. Twitter shares were suspended Tuesday at their highest level in months after the report.

New York Times, Musk’s Twitter Would Be a Wild Ride, Kevin Roose, Oct. 6, 2022 (print ed). Our columnist Kevin Roose makes six predictions about Twitter under Elon Musk’s control.

Buckle up.

Elon Musk, who for months has been strenuously trying to back out of a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion, now appears ready to buy the company after all. In a surprise letter to Twitter on Monday night, Mr. Musk offered to take Twitter private at his originally proposed price — $54.20 per share — marking a possible end to one of the most dramatic legal feuds in Silicon Valley history.

It’s worth noting that the deal could still fall apart — Mr. Musk is famously subject to 11th-hour mood shifts — but the most likely outcome now is that the world’s richest man will in fact become Twitter’s new owner, possibly as soon as this week.

Much is unknown about what Mr. Musk will do with Twitter if he acquires it. The mercurial billionaire has made only the vaguest of public statements about his plans for the company and its products.

But we now know, thanks in part to a bevy of text messages released as part of the protracted legal battle, that it will be nothing like business as usual. And there are at least six predictions I feel confident making, if the deal does in fact close.

He’s going to clean house, starting with firing Twitter’s chief executive, Parag Agrawal.

A juicy set of text messages between Mr. Musk and his friends and business associates emerged last week, as part of the legal battle. In them, Mr. Musk made clear that he was unhappy with Twitter’s current leadership — in particular with Parag Agrawal, the chief executive, who took over last year from Jack Dorsey.

The texts revealed that Mr. Agrawal had initially sought to work constructively with Mr. Musk, and that the two even had a friendly dinner near San Jose, Calif., in March. But the men eventually clashed. Mr. Agrawal, at one point, told Mr. Musk via text message that his habit of tweeting things like “Is Twitter dying?” was “not helping me make Twitter better.”

 

Washington Post, One of Loretta Lynn’s last public appearances captures her iconic legacy, Emily Yahr, Oct. 6, 2022 (print ed). The 2019 CMAs kicked off with 16 female singers on stage, and the message was clear — they wouldn’t be there if not for Loretta Lynn.

It was a profoundly rare sight — 16 female country artists spanning multiple generations, all together onstage at the 2019 Country Music Association Awards, kicking off the genre’s biggest night in the national spotlight with a nine-minute medley of iconic hits. Throughout the performance, there was only one break from the music.

“Ladies and gentleman, this is for a living legend we’re so honored to sing for tonight,” said Sugarland’s Jennifer Nettles, accompanied by singers ranging from Tanya Tucker to Gretchen Wilson to Maren Morris, along with show co-hosts Carrie Underwood, Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire. “Sitting right there, the first woman to win CMA entertainer of the year: Miss Loretta Lynn!”

The audience at the Bridgestone Arena in Nashville roared as Lynn, wearing a sparkling green ensemble, beamed and waved to the crowd from her front-row seat. Though no one knew it yet, this would be one of her last public appearances, and the subtext was clear: Without Lynn — one of the most influential and groundbreaking country artists of all time, who shattered preconceived notions about female singer-songwriters — many of the singers in front of her might have never made it to the stage.

New York Times, Alec Baldwin Reaches Settlement With Family of ‘Rust’ Cinematographer, Graham Bowley and Julia Jacobs, Oct. 6, 2022 (print ed). Halyna Hutchins was killed on set when a gun held by Mr. Baldwin, right, went off. A settlement with producers, including Mr. Baldwin, means production will resume.

New York Times, As Alex Jones Stands Trial, Newtown Would Rather Forget Him, Karen Zraick, Oct. 6, 2022 (print ed). Nearly 10 years after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School — and the conspiracy theories propagated by Mr. Jones — Newtown residents are trying to move past their grief and anger.

Less than 20 miles from the place where a gunman massacred 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the man who has spent much of the decade since the attack spreading lies about what happened that day stood trial on Tuesday.

The closely watched courtroom spectacle playing out just up Interstate 84 has featured wrenching testimony and explosive outbursts. But in Newtown, people are done talking about Alex Jones.

“I think that most of the people in this town would like to forget about him, to forget his name,” said Richard Fattibene, 81, as he sat in the town’s general store having a coffee on Tuesday morning.

Oct. 5

Washington Post, Musk proposes closing deal for Twitter at original price and ending all litigation, Faiz Siddiqui, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Rachel Lerman, Oct. 5, 2022 (print ed.). The offer, set to be discussed in court later today, marks the latest twist in a monthslong campaign by Elon Musk to acquire the influential social media platform.

Elon Musk, right, has offered to proceed with a deal to buy Twitter at the price he offered months ago before trying to call it off, according to a legal filing, a stunning development weeks before the two sides were due to face off in a trial.

In a letter that Musk’s side sent to Twitter overnight, he proposed proceeding with the deal at $54.20 a share if the Delaware Chancery Court, which was scheduled to hold the trial on Oct. 17, agrees to “enter an immediate stay” of the case “and adjourn the trial and all other” related proceedings. Twitter enclosed a copy of the letter from Musk’s attorneys in a financial filing Tuesday.

Twitter said in a statement Tuesday that it received the letter and intends to close the transaction at the original share

price offered by Musk’s team. The company plans to accept the offer but is waiting for confirmation that the judge can oversee the process, said a person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

Because there is great distrust on both sides, Twitter leaders are still questioning whether the letter represents a legal maneuver, the person said.

Elon Musk’s texts reveal what led to Twitter bid, before deal fell apart

Musk’s offer comes at a key moment in the lead-up to the trial, which was due to settle months of legal wrangling between the billionaire and the social media company following Musk’s moves in July to terminate his planned $44 billion purchase of Twitter.

Both sides had been conducting depositions. Musk’s side collected testimony from Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal and whistleblower Peiter Zatko, the company’s former head of security, who alleged extreme deficiencies in Twitter’s security practices and inaccuracies in its filings to security regulators, according to court schedules.

Two people briefed on Zatko’s sworn interviews said they did not produce any new revelations that would have helped Musk’s effort to escape the deal without incurring significant costs. Zatko was also deposed by Twitter.

Musk was scheduled to be deposed in the case Thursday in Austin, where he lives, after the original date was scrapped, the filings showed. His attorney Alex Spiro’s deposition was expected to follow on Sunday in New York.

Legal experts say Musk’s willingness to close the deal suggests that he may have realized he’s in a weaker position than he wanted to be going into trial and his deposition.

“Musk is finally listening to his lawyers,” Anat Alon-Beck, a business law professor at Case Western Reserve University, said in an email. “He would be a fool to not at least try to buy the company now and avoid being deposed.”

Bloomberg News first reported news of the offer. Twitter shares were suspended Tuesday at their highest level in months after the report.

Washington Post, Chipmaker Micron to build $20 billion N.Y. factory amid semiconductor boom, Jeanne Whalen, Oct. 5, 2022 (print ed.). The company eventually could spend up to $100 billion over 20 years.

Tech giant Micron said it will invest $20 billion in a new chip factory in Upstate New York and up to $100 billion over 20 years if it decides to expand — another sign of a domestic semiconductor manufacturing boom.

Micron said it will build the factory in Clay, N.Y., just north of Syracuse, with the first phase of construction to run through the end of the decade. The site will initially employ 3,000 people and could eventually include four factories and 9,000 employees if Micron opts to continue building.

Biden’s visit shows high stakes of $20 billion Ohio chip factory

The news is the latest in a string of U.S. chip-production investments announced in recent months as manufacturers take advantage of $52 billion in federal subsidies and additional tax credits passed in the recent Chips and Science Act.

“To those who doubted that America could dominate the industries of the future, I say this — you should never bet against the American people,” President Biden said in a statement Tuesday.

Micron only weeks ago announced another big factory project — in Boise, Idaho, near its headquarters. Intel, the chip giant based in Santa Clara, Calif., broke ground last month on a $20 billion project to build two factories near Columbus, Ohio. The company is also investing in a $20 billion expansion in Arizona.

Washington Post, VP’s minor car accident revives worries of Secret Service’s history of concealing its mistakes, Carol D. Leonnig, Oct. 5, 2022. Vice President Harris's sport utility vehicle was immobilized in an accident Monday when her Secret Service driver hit a curb. The alert to senior officials initially failed to include key information about what happened.

A motorcade taking Vice President Harris to work was in a one-car accident on a closed roadway in D.C. Monday morning, an incident that concerned both the Secret Service director and the vice president and revived worries about the agency’s history of concealing its mistakes, according to two people familiar with the incident.

The Secret Service agent driving Harris in a sport utility vehicle struck the curb of a downtown tunnel hard enough that the vehicle’s tire needed to be replaced, bringing the motorcade to a standstill near Foggy Bottom at about 10:20 a.m., said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.

Harris had to be transferred to another vehicle in the motorcade so agents could safely spirit her to the White House. The routine nature of the travel and the high level of training required for agents who drive the president and vice president led many in the Secret Service, as well as Harris, to question how such an accident could happen.

Oct. 4

 

Washington Post, Loretta Lynn, who brought strong woman’s voice to country music, dies at 90, Terence McArdle, Oct. 4, 2022. After a hardscrabble start, Ms. Lynn rose from poverty in Kentucky to the top of Billboard’s Nashville charts and brought a strong woman’s voice to country music.

Washington Post, Sheryl Sandberg’s next chapter: Pledging millions to fight abortion bans, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Naomi Nix, Oct. 4, 2022. The longtime Facebook chief officer stepped down last week. Three days later, she announced one of the biggest donations for abortion rights in ACLU history.

Less than three days after she left her position as the No. 2 corporate officer at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg (shown at the World Economic Forum in 2013) is already remaking herself as one of the foremost philanthropists fighting the curtailment of abortion rights across the United States.

On Tuesday, Sandberg and the American Civil Liberties Union announced that Facebook’s former chief operating office was donating $3 million to fight abortion bans — money the ACLU said would be used “to protect reproductive health care in courts, legislatures, and at the ballot box over the next three years.”

The donation, one of the largest supporting abortion rights to the ACLU, marks a new chapter for Sandberg — among the most prominent female business executives in America. During her fourteen-year tenure at Facebook, she shied away from politically controversial moves.

Sandberg has long been a women’s rights advocate, championing her signature brand of corporate feminism in her best-selling book, “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead,” and her Lean In foundation. She is a major donor to Planned Parenthood and was known for promoting women to leadership positions during her 14-year tenure at the social network.

But she was also criticized during the Trump years for political timidity. She did not publicly comment when former president Donald Trump, as a candidate, made disparaging remarks about women, including bragging on tape that he would grope them against their will. She was called out for not publicly supporting or attending the Women’s March, a global gathering of millions of people in protest of Trump’s stance on women, in 2017. Facebook then spent years making extensive efforts to curry favor with the Trump administration, even going so far as to rewrite and interpret its policies to avoid conflict with the president and his followers.`

Washington Post, Opinion: Elon Musk’s texts are a weird window into billionaire boys’ club, Monica Hesse, right, Oct. 4, 2022 (print ed.). One billion dollars for Twitter? Two billion? Whatever you think, man.

On Thursday, a giant cache of Elon Musk’s text messages became public via court documents filed in an ongoing legal dispute over whether the Tesla CEO must make good on his offer to buy Twitter. The texts, which include correspondence with such people as former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Joe Rogan, outline Musk’s shifting thinking on the deal — what he believed the company was worth, and what he would try to do with it.

In one text thread with Musk, left, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison expressed interest in being part of a Twitter take-private deal.

“Roughly what dollar size?” Musk asked him.

Ellison texted back: “A billion...or whatever you recommend.”

I would like to talk about Larry Ellison’s ellipses.

This ellipsis is a casual piece of grammar. It is used as you might use an ellipsis when haggling with a dude on Craigslist about the price of his used NordicTrack and you’re still 15 bucks apart.

“Whatever works for you,” Musk responded. “I’d recommend maybe $2b or more.”

To which Ellison replied a few days later, “Since you think I should come in for at least $2b...I’m in for $2b.”

Another ellipsis. Three dots that stand in for the amount of time and thought that went into Ellison concluding that, based on Musk’s recommendation, he should offer not $1 billion (the price of a few jets), but $2 billion (the gross national product of a small nation).

The text chains of Elon Musk are a rare view into how the world’s wealthiest communicate among themselves. How they think about money and power — which is definitely different from how you and I might think about money and power.

Politico, Trump startup investors: Give us a better deal or we'll walk, Declan Harty, Oct. 4, 2022 (print ed.). Ultimately, if Digital World is able to coax the investors to stay in, the company will still need SEC approval before it can close the Trump Media transaction.

Big investors are starting to eye the exits on the $1.3 billion bid to take former President Donald Trump’s new social media startup public.

The hedge funds, trading firms and other major backers are questioning whether the financial riches that first attracted them to the transaction are still strong enough to hold their interest in a deal fraught with troubles, according to four investors who asked not to be named. Negotiations have been ongoing as some investors seek bigger potential profits in exchange for following through on commitments to put hundreds of millions of dollars into the venture, which planned a public stock exchange listing through a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC.

There are no guarantees investors will get what they are pushing for as little headway has been made ahead of a Monday deadline.

The group of more than three dozen investors who had planned to put $1 billion into the company have begun to waver as bad news keeps piling up around the deal, including a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, a lawsuit by a scorned business partner against the company taking Trump’s venture public and reports that the Trump social network at the heart of the planned operation is struggling to pay its bills. Already, investors who had promised $138 million in capital have pulled out, with the SEC yet to OK the public offering nearly a year after its announcement.

“This deal has taken more left turns than a doorknob,” said Kristi Marvin, a former investment banker who runs data and research company SPACInsider. “Now, it’s just got so much hair on it.”

At stake for Trump and his startup — the company behind conservative social media app Truth Social — is hundreds of millions of dollars, marking the latest blow to the former president’s business empire since he left office. New York in September filed a sweeping lawsuit against Trump and his family for alleged fraud at the Trump Organization. While the conduct of his latest startup and its partners are in the spotlight, the type of corporate vehicle for taking the company public — a SPAC — has also broadly soured in the eyes of investors after a boom over the last few years.

Eleven months ago, Trump Media & Technology Group unveiled plans to merge with a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp. in a SPAC deal. The transaction was supposed to revive the Trump empire, starting with the development of Truth Social.

SPACs are effectively skeleton companies that trade on stock exchanges. With no operations or products, the SPAC uses the funds raised in the company’s initial public offering to go out and acquire a private entity that will take over its listing once the deal closes. For the private company, a SPAC merger offers a faster and easier alternative to the IPO, executives say. The SPAC creators, in return, typically benefit from a rich payday through the massive chunks of stock that they hold.

The SPAC market had already gone through a boom and bust when Digital World and Trump Media’s deal became public last October. Regulatory pressures, a shifting economy and market fatigue had squashed — and continue to weigh down — the SPAC fervor. But investors still piled in.

Digital World’s stock quickly became a favorite among individual investors when the deal went live. Soon, the shares were skyrocketing in movements that closely mirrored the ones seen in meme stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment months earlier. Before the deal was announced, the stock was trading at about $10, which is typical for a SPAC still looking to close a deal. Two days later, Digital World shares jumped to as high as $175.

Major trading and investment firms entered the deal later through a so-called private investment in public equity, or PIPE, bringing the potential treasure chest awaiting Trump Media to $1.3 billion. In exchange, the investors would get a discount on the shares so they could sell at a profit once the takeover was completed.

Washington Post, Biden reinstates arts committee that disbanded under Trump, Kelsey Ables, Oct. 3, 2022 (print ed.). Biden reinstates arts committee that disbanded under Trump.

On Friday, the president signed an executive order reestablishing the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities and proclaimed October 2022 National Arts and Humanities month.

President Biden signed an executive order on Friday reestablishing the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The advisory group had been inactive since August 2017, when all committee members resigned in protest of Trump’s delayed condemnation of hate groups at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.

In the order, Biden highlighted the broad sociopolitical benefits of supporting arts and culture. “The arts, the humanities and museum and library services are essential to the well-being, health, vitality and democracy of our Nation,” the order reads. “They are the soul of America, reflecting our multicultural and democratic experience.” He also emphasized that the arts “compel us to wrestle with our history.”

The order was announced on the eve of National Arts and Humanities month, which Biden designated for October in a separate proclamation that was also released on Friday.

The move to reestablish the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) continues a kind of cultural repair led by the Biden-Harris administration, which has proposed large increases in funding to federal arts agencies, following the Trump administration’s attempts to eliminate that funding and shut down those agencies. The administration has also overturned Trump-era regulations that controlled the type of art that could hang in government buildings and the style of architecture that could be used in new federal construction. The reinstatement comes after two-and-a-half years of a pandemic that has left arts institutions reeling from decreased ticket sales and prolonged closures.

In the order, Biden recognized the arts’ sweeping impact, from bolstering “efforts to tackle the climate crisis” to advancing the “cause of equity and accessibility.” The president also specifically pointed to underserved communities and veterans as potential beneficiaries of his administration’s cultural efforts.

In the Biden White House, art selections come with a personal touch

The reestablished committee is purely advisory and will guide the president as well as the heads of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). It will help advance policy goals, promote philanthropic and private engagement in the arts, enhance the effectiveness of federal support and engage the nation’s artists and cultural leaders.

Washington Post, She was the No. 1 educator in her school. Now in the U.S., ‘one day teaching here is like a month,’ Eli Saslow, Oct. 3, 2022 (print ed.). Amid a historic U.S. teacher shortage, a ‘Most Outstanding Teacher’ from the Philippines tries to help save a struggling school in rural Arizona

Oct. 2

 

 Memorial of UK's Queen Elizabeth on Sept. 19, 2022 (Pool photob by David Ramos via Getty Images).

Washington Post, Opinion: Post Elizabeth: Palace video footage demands are an early red flag, Autumn Brewingon, Oct. 2, 2022. Pageantry and spectacle are part of the British crown’s DNA. But the idea that footage of recent events honoring Queen Elizabeth II is not in the public domain might be the most ancient thing about the monarchy.

British broadcasters gave Buckingham Palace veto power over use of footage from the queen’s funeral, the Guardian newspaper reported last week.

Although the unedited broadcast remains online temporarily — through platforms such as BBC iPlayer — what happens to the material in a few weeks is unclear. “Royal staff sent messages to the BBC, ITV News and Sky News during the event with the timestamps of footage they wished to exclude from future news broadcasts and social media clips,” the Guardian reported. Five video clips removed from circulation included members of the royal family.

Then came a bigger palace demand: that broadcasters “produce a 60-minute compilation of clips they would like to keep from ceremonial events held across the 10 days of mourning for the Queen. The royal household will then consider whether to veto any proposed inclusions,” the Guardian reported Sunday.

“Once the process is complete, the vast majority of other footage from ceremonial events will then be taken out of circulation,” media editor Jim Waterson wrote. “Any news outlets wishing to use unapproved pieces of footage would have to apply to the royal family on a case-by-case basis, even for material that has already been broadcast to tens of millions of people.”

Broadcasting the funeral and procession of the queen’s coffin from London to Windsor was such a massive undertaking that the BBC worked with ITV and Sky News. Some 28 million people in Britain watched the broadcast, along with more than 11 million in the United States.

As Newsweek noted, the location of some televised events are ultimately under royal control, which could have shaped permissions for filming. But the issues here are larger than respectful coverage of a family in mourning and whether footage is replayed of, say, a grandson-in-law of the queen seen checking his watch.

A critical question is who controls the historical record of public events, especially when footage of those events has already been broadcast.

By dictating what video can no longer circulate, the palace might hope to quash unflattering moments such as the new king’s frustration with an inkpot when he signed documents related to his accession. Photos of the stone marking the final resting place of Queen Elizabeth II — seen at the top of this page — circulated this week with explicit instructions that they may be published until Oct. 2, after which point royal permission must be requested.

One of the challenges before the new king is how best to showcase the monarchy’s relevance today. It’s hard to think of a less 21st-century approach than a hereditary monarchy dictating what clips of public proceedings are ever seen again.

 

September

Sept. 29

Politico, Opinion: Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump Are Ready for the Saudi Cash, Jack Shafer, Sept. 29, 2022. The beleaguered LIV Golf tournament finally finds some willing partners.

Where did the LIV Golf tournament go to die? Fox.

If that joke didn’t scan for you, it’s likely you haven’t been following the sporting news, which has teemed all summer with stories about Saudi Arabia’s new professional golf circuit. Even though LIV has bid away some of the PGA Tour’s top stars, it carries a taint for many because it’s backed by the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and because Donald Trump, a big LIV supporter and a course owner, is hosting some of its tournaments.

This guilt by association has made LIV a bit of a public relations disaster, with accusations flying that the tour is a Saudi attempt to “sportswash” their execrable human-rights record with long, green drives and short, dramatic putts. LIV has proved to be such a bad idea that it has yet to win a major TV network contract.

But that’s likely about to change. According to Golfweek, the tour seems close to a deal with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports 1 cable channel, but the deal comes with a catch: Instead of Fox paying LIV to air tournaments, which is the sports entertainment norm, LIV will be paying Fox. (The last sports business that paid to have its events broadcast was the Alliance of American Football, and we know how that ended.) Plus, LIV will have to sell the ad slots, not Fox, and produce the shows.

What possessed the Saudis to start a tour, and why are they paying to air their product when the PGA Tour collects $700 million a year from broadcasters for a similar spectacle? And what’s in it for Murdoch? Why isn’t he worried about blowback from the 9/11 families who protested a LIV tournament at Trump’s Bedminster course as “another atrocity“? And what’s Trump’s deal in all of this? It’s all a matter of politics colliding with commerce.

For the Saudis, crashing professional golf accomplishes two ends. The first, of course, is political. In the short term, they hope, LIV will help dilute the image held by the West of an authoritarian country murdering Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. (The hit was reportedly commissioned by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader.) In the long term, LIV thinking goes, the billions it spends establishing its tour will replace the lucrative PGA as the sport’s face and eventually become a moneymaker. With almost unlimited funds at their disposal, the Saudis believe they can’t be counted out.

Washington Post, AI can now create any image in seconds, bringing wonder and danger, Nitasha Tiku, Sept. 29, 2022 (print ed.). All of these images were created by the artificial intelligence text-to-image generator DALL-E. Named for Salvador Dali and Pixar’s WALL-E, DALL-E creates images based on prompts.

Since the research lab OpenAI debuted the latest version of DALL-E in April, the AI has dazzled the public, attracting digital artists, graphic designers, early adopters, and anyone in search of online distraction. The ability to create original, sometimes accurate, and occasionally inspired images from any spur-of-the-moment phrase, like a conversational Photoshop, has startled even jaded internet users with how quickly AI has progressed.

Five months later, 1.5 million users are generating 2 million images a day. On Wednesday, OpenAI said it will remove its waitlist for DALL-E, giving anyone immediate access.

The introduction of DALL-E has triggered an explosion of text-to-image generators. Google and Meta quickly revealed that they had each been developing similar systems, but said their models weren’t ready for the public. Rival start-ups soon went public, including Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, which created the image that sparked controversy in August when it won an art competition at the Colorado State Fair.

[He used AI to win a fine-arts competition. Was it cheating?]

The technology is now spreading rapidly, faster than AI companies can shape norms around its use and prevent dangerous outcomes. Researchers worry that these systems produce images that can cause a range of harms, such as reinforcing racial and gender stereotypes or plagiarizing artists whose work was siphoned without their consent. Fake photos could be used to enable bullying and harassment — or create disinformation that looks real.

Historically, people trust what they see, said Wael Abd-Almageed, a professor at the University of Southern California’s school of engineering. “Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake,” he said. “We will not be able to believe anything.”

“Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake. We will not be able to believe anything.”— Wael Abd-Almageed

OpenAI has tried to balance its drive to be first and hype its AI developments without accelerating those dangers. To prevent DALL-E from being used to create disinformation, for example, OpenAI prohibits images of celebrities or politicians. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman justifies the decision to release DALL-E to the public as an essential step in developing the technology safely.

The Intercept, Hill TV Censors Segment on Rashida Tlaib’s Description of Israel as “Apartheid Government,” Bars Reporter, Ryan Grim, Sept. 29, 2022. Host Katie Halper recorded a segment defending Tlaib’s accurate portrayal of Israel’s government, but Hill TV’s owners refused to run it.

Sept. 28

Bloomberg.com, Elon Musk Asks Appeals Court to End His ‘Twitter Sitter’ Deal, Bob Van Voris, Sept. 28, 2022. Tesla CEO claims he’s being muzzled by the government.

Elon Musk asked a federal appeals court to throw out the deal he made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission in 2018 requiring a Tesla Inc. lawyer to screen all his company-related tweets, calling it an illegal effort to muzzle him.

Musk, Tesla’s chief executive officer, has claimed without success that the SEC is harassing him and that the agreement violates his free-speech rights. US District Judge Lewis Liman in April refused to release him from the deal and end the requirement for a “Twitter Sitter.” Liman said Musk was “simply bemoaning that he felt like he had to agree to it at the time” and now “wishes that he had not.”

“The pre-approval provision is a classic prior restraint that the Constitution forbids: a government-imposed muzzle on Mr. Musk’s speech before it is made,” Musk’s lawyers said in papers asking the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan to invalidate the agreement, or at least remove the screening requirement. “The effect of the provision is to inhibit and chill Mr. Musk’s lawful speech.”

The world’s richest man has been battling with the SEC over his social media statements since he tweeted in 2018 that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private, sending shares of the electric-car maker surging. The regulator sued claiming Musk and Tesla had misled shareholders. Musk and the company settled with the SEC, with each paying $20 million and agreeing that Musk’s Tesla-related tweets would be reviewed before he posts them.

In his April decision, Liman ruled that Musk waived his 1st Amendment Constitutional Right to free speech, a finding Musk denied in his appeal brief.

“Mr. Musk could not possibly have known the circumstances and consequences of the pre-approval provision because the provision applies to future speech about circumstances no one could anticipate in advance,” his lawyers wrote. But even if he did waive his rights, such a waiver is invalid and unenforceable they said.

Liman also denied Musk’s effort to block an SEC subpoena seeking information on his tweets, ruling that he’s as subject to investigation by the agency as anybody else.

Musk agreed to buy Twitter Inc. for $44 billion in late April, then said he was pulling out of the deal. Twitter claims Musk got cold feet due to buyer’s remorse, not over concerns about the number of spam and robot accounts embedded in the platform’s more than 230 million users.

The case is US Securities and Exchange Commission v. Musk, 22-1291, Second US Circuit Court of Appeals (Manhattan).

Sept. 27

Washington Post, A China-based network of Facebook accounts posed as liberal Americans to post about Republicans, company says, Naomi Nix, Sept. 27, 2022. The accounts posed as liberal Americans on Facebook and Instagram to comment on Republicans, Meta said.

Facebook’s parent company Meta disrupted a China-based network of accounts that was seeking to influence U.S. politics ahead of the 2022 midterms, the company reported Tuesday.

The covert influence operation used accounts on Facebook and Instagram posing as Americans to post opinions about hot-button issues such as abortion, gun control and high-profile politicians such as President Biden and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). The network, which focused on the United States and the Czech Republic, posted from the fall of 2021 through the summer of 2022, the company said. Facebook renamed itself Meta last year.

Ben Nimmo, Meta’s global threat intelligence lead, told reporters that the network was unusual because unlike previous China-based influence operations that focused on promoting narratives about America to the rest of the world, this network was intended to influence U.S. users abut Americans topics months ahead of the 2022 contests.

Sept. 26

New York Times, TikTok Could Be Nearing a U.S. Security Deal, but Hurdles Remain, Lauren Hirsch, David McCabe, Katie Benner and Glenn Thrush, Sept. 26, 2022. A draft agreement with the Biden administration to keep the Chinese-owned app operating in America is under review, four people with knowledge of the discussions said.

The Biden administration and TikTok have drafted a preliminary agreement to resolve national security concerns posed by the Chinese-owned video app but face hurdles over the terms, as the platform negotiates to keep operating in the United States without major changes to its ownership structure, four people with knowledge of the discussions said.

The two sides have hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governance without requiring its owner, the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, to sell it, said three of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential.

The two sides are still wrangling over the potential agreement. The Justice Department is leading the negotiations with TikTok, and its No. 2 official, Lisa Monaco, has concerns that the terms are not tough enough on China, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The Treasury Department, which plays a key role in approving deals involving national security risks, is also skeptical that the potential agreement with TikTok can sufficiently resolve national security issues, two people with knowledge of the matter said. That could force changes to the terms and drag out a final resolution for months.

TikTok, one of the world’s most popular social media apps, has been under a legal cloud in the United States for more than two years because of its Chinese ties. Lawmakers and regulators have repeatedly raised concerns about TikTok’s ability to protect the data of American users from Chinese authorities. President Donald J. Trump tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company in 2020 and threatened to block the app.

Sept. 24

 

Whistleblower Anika Collier Navaroli, a policy official on the team designing Twitter's content moderation rules who spoke exclusively with the Washington Post, said Twitter's complacency toward then-President Donald Trump led to disastrous consequences (Photo by Marlena Sloss for The Washington Post).

Washington Post, Investigation: Jan. 6 Twitter witness: Failure to curb Trump spurred ‘terrifying’ choice, Drew Harwell, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). In an explosive hearing in July, an unidentified former Twitter employee testified to the House Jan. 6 committee that the company had tolerated false and rule-breaking tweets from Donald Trump for years because executives knew their service was his “favorite and most-used … and enjoyed having that sort of power.”

Now, in an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, the whistleblower, Anika Collier Navaroli, reveals the terror she felt about coming forward and how eventually that fear was overcome by her worry that extremism and political disinformation on social media pose an “imminent threat not just to American democracy, but to the societal fabric of our planet.”

“I realize that by being who I am and doing what I’m doing, I’m opening myself and my family to extreme risk,” Navaroli said. “It’s terrifying. This has been one of the most isolating times of my life.”

“I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t believe the truth matters,” she said of her testimony to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.

Twitter banned Trump two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, citing fears he could incite further violence. By that time, he had sent more than 56,000 tweets over 12 years, many of which included lies and baseless accusations about election fraud. One month earlier, he had tweeted, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

 

Disgraced Infowars host Alex Jones is being sued by multiple parents of murdered Sandy Hook children for his lies about their deaths (Pool photo by Briana Sanchez from a trial in Austin, Texas).

New York Times, ‘I’m Done Saying I’m Sorry,’ Alex Jones Tells Sandy Hook Families, Elizabeth Williamson, Sept. 23, 2022. In testimony in a Connecticut trial to assess the damages done by his Sandy Hook lies, the Infowars fabulist lashed out, ending the day in chaos.

Confronted on Thursday with the harm he had done by repeatedly lying on his Infowars radio and online show that Robbie Parker, whose daughter Emilie died in the massacre, was an actor, Mr. Jones erupted in a rant that drew a contempt threat by Judge Barbara Bellis of State Superior Court.

“Is this a struggle session? Are we in China? I’ve already said I’m sorry, and I’m done saying I’m sorry,” Mr. Jones responded, as his lawyer shouted objections.

Mr. Jones was set off by Chris Mattei, a lawyer for the families of the Sandy Hook victims, who pointed to Mr. Parker in the courtroom as he questioned Mr. Jones on the stand. “Robbie Parker’s sitting right here,” Mr. Mattei said. “He’s real, isn’t he? And for years you put a target on his back, didn’t you? Just like you did every single parent and loved one sitting here.”

“No, I didn’t,” Mr. Jones said.

“Why don’t you show a little respect, Mr. Jones?” Mr. Mattei said. “You have families in this courtroom here that lost children, sisters, wives, moms.”

Alex Jones, a far-right conspiracy theorist, is the focus of a long-running legal battle waged by families of victims of a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.

Here is what to know:

• Pushing misinformation. Mr. Jones used his Infowars media company to spread lies about Sandy Hook, claiming that the attack in 2012, in which 20 first graders and six educators were killed, was a hoax. The families of the victims say Mr. Jones’s lies have added to their devastation and his followers have harassed them, threatening their safety.
• Defamation lawsuits. The families of 10 Sandy Hook victims sued Mr. Jones in four separate lawsuits. The cases never made it to a jury; Mr. Jones was found liable by default in all of them because he refused to turn over documents, including financial records, ordered by the courts over four years of litigation.
• Mr. Jones’s line of defense. The Infowars host has claimed that his right to free speech protected him, even though the outcome of the cases was due to the fact that he failed to provide the necessary documents and testify.
• Three new trials. A trial in Austin, Texas this July was the first of three that will determine how much Mr. Jones must pay the families of the Sandy Hook victims. The other two are scheduled for September, but are on hold after Mr. Jones put the Infowars parent company, Free Speech Systems, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, halting all pending litigation.
• Compensatory and punitive damages. On Aug. 4, a jury in the Texas trial awarded the parents of one of the children killed in the mass shooting more than $4 million in compensatory damages, which are based on proven harm, loss or injury. A day later, jurors decided Mr. Jones must pay the parents $45.2 million in punitive damages, which aim to punish especially harmful behavior and tend to be granted at the court’s discretion.

Judge Bellis rebuked Mr. Jones. “This is not a press conference, this is clearly not your show,” she said. “You have to respect the process.”

At the end of the day, after the jury had gone, she warned Mr. Jones as well as his lawyer, Norm Pattis, that she would enforce a zero-tolerance policy on Friday for ignoring her orders about decorum in the courtroom. Mr. Pattis had repeatedly objected as his client shouted.

“You can expect a contempt hearing if anybody steps out of line,” Judge Bellis said. “And Mr. Jones, same thing.”

Mr. Jones for years spread lies on Infowars that the Dec. 14, 2012, shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a government pretext for gun control. Late last year, Mr. Jones lost four separate defamation lawsuits filed by the families of 10 Sandy Hook victims, who had endured years of online torment and threats from conspiracy theorists who believed Mr. Jones’s bogus claims.

New York Times, Misleading and toxic posts about the Nov. 8 midterm vote have flooded social media. Here are three prevalent themes, Cecilia Kang, Sept. 24, 2022 (print ed.). Ballot mules. Poll watch parties. Groomers.

These topics are now among the most dominant divisive and misleading narratives online about November’s midterm elections, according to researchers and data analytics companies. On Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Truth Social and other social media sites, some of these narratives have surged in recent months, often accompanied by angry and threatening rhetoric.

The effects of these inflammatory online discussions are being felt in the real world, election officials and voting rights groups said. Voters have flooded some local election offices with misinformed questions about supposedly rigged voting machines, while some people appear befuddled about what pens to use on ballots and whether mail-in ballots are still legal, they said.

“Our voters are angry and confused,” Lisa Marra, elections director in Cochise County, Ariz., told a House committee last month. “They simply don’t know what to believe.”

The most prevalent of these narratives fall into three main categories: continued falsehoods about rampant election fraud; threats of violence and citizen policing of elections; and divisive posts on health and social policies that have become central to political campaigns. Here’s what to know about them.

False claims of election fraud are commanding conversation online, with former President Donald J. Trump continuing to protest that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Voter fraud is rare, but that falsehood about the 2020 election has become a central campaign issue for dozens of candidates around the country, causing misinformation and toxic content about the issue to spread widely online.

“Stolen election” was mentioned 325,589 times on Twitter from June 19 to July 19, a number that has been fairly steady throughout the year and that was up nearly 900 percent from the same period in 2020, according to Zignal Labs, a media research firm.

On the video-sharing site Rumble, videos with the term “stop the steal” or “stolen election” and other claims of election fraud have been among the most popular. In May, such posts attracted 2.5 million viewers, more than triple the total from a year earlier, according to Similarweb, a digital analytics firm.

New York Times, Celtics Coach Ime Udoka Suspended for 2022-23 Season, Scott Cacciola, Sept. 23, 2022 (print ed.). The team said Udoka violated unspecified team policies. He led Boston to the N.B.A. finals last season, his first as a head coach.

The Boston Celtics on Thursday suspended Coach Ime Udoka for the 2022-23 season for unspecified “violations of team policies,” just months after he led the team to the N.B.A. finals in his first year in the role.

A person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly about it said Udoka had an inappropriate relationship with a female team employee that was considered a violation of the team’s organizational guidelines.

CelticsBlog, Brad Stevens and Wyc Grousbeck address Ime Udoka’s suspension, Andrew Doxy, Sept. 23, 2022. In a tight-lipped but still revealing conference, Celtics leadership spoke on the recent news.

An emotional Brad Stevens and Boston Celtics co-owner and CEO, Wyc Grousbeck, held a press conference today to discuss the news that Ime Udoka will be suspended for the 2022-23 NBA season just days ahead of Media Day and training camp.

Early in the conference, Wyc Grousbeck stated that they wouldn’t dive into details for the sake of privacy for all those involved, but there were still details that could be ascertained through some of the responses that followed as questions were allowed. Before questions came into the equation, Grousbeck revealed that an independent law firm was brought in to thoroughly and impartially investigate the case as soon as the team was made aware in July.

On the suspension front, no other members of the Celtics organization are facing any penalties of any sort. Grousbeck offered that he will be meeting with female staffers to make sure that they feel supported.

At this point, the organization has made its stance clear on support for Joe Mazzulla’s character and growth over the last 13 years. What’s left is for Mazzulla himself to speak to it as he’s asked questions about it on Monday afternoon’s Media Day.

Naturally, this led to questions about Joe Mazzulla’s domestic battery case from 2009. In response, Brad Stevens spoke to confidence in Mazzulla’s character, stating that he thoroughly investigated the matter when Mazzulla was hired to the staff in 2019.

At this point, the organization has made its stance clear on support for Joe Mazzulla’s character and growth over the last 13 years. What’s left is for Mazzulla himself to speak to it as he’s asked questions about it on Monday afternoon’s Media Day.

Sept. 22

New York Times, Opinion: The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie, Carlos Lozada, Sept. 22, 2022. Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.

Recent books like Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission by The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics. The big joke drains language of meaning, divorces action from responsibility and enables all manner of lies. “Getting the joke” means understanding that nothing you say need be true, that nobody expects it to be true — at least nobody in the know. “The truth of this scam, or ‘joke,’ was fully evident inside the club,” Leibovich writes. “We’re all friends here. Everyone knew the secret handshake, spoke the native language, and got the joke.”

Without the big joke, the big lie would not merit its adjective. Its challenge to democracy would be ephemeral, not existential.

The chroniclers of Donald Trump’s election lie typically seek out an origin story, a choose-your-own adventure that always leads to the Capitol steps on Jan. 6, 2021. In his book, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020, Politico’s Jonathan Lemire pinpoints an August 2016 campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, during which Trump first suggested that the contest against Hillary Clinton would be rigged against him. This, Lemire writes, was when “the seeds of the big lie had been planted.”

Carlos Lozada became a New York Times Opinion columnist in September 2022, after 17 years as an editor and book critic at The Washington Post. He is the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era” and the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. @CarlosNYT

Politico, Top Meta exec Clegg to decide whether to reinstate Trump on Facebook, Rebecca Kern, Sept. 22, 2022. Nick Clegg gave no indication which way he plans to decide — but said he will make the decision by Jan. 7, 2023.

Meta’s top policy executive Nick Clegg will be the one to decide whether to reinstate former president Donald Trump’s account in January 2023, he said Thursday.

Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said whether to extend Trump’s two-year suspension is “a decision I oversee and I drive,” at an event held in Washington by Semafor, a news organization.

“It’s not a capricious decision,” he said. “We will look at the signals related to real-world harm to make a decision whether at the two-year point — which is early January next year — whether Trump gets reinstated to the platform.”

Clegg added that he would consult with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s board of directors. He said Zuckerberg is focused on building the virtual Metaverse, while Clegg is responsible for the implementation and enforcement of broad policy issues.

Political significance: Clegg gave no indication which way he plans to decide — but said he will make the decision by Jan. 7, 2023.

“We’ll talk to the experts, we’ll talk to third parties, we will try to assess what we think the implications will be of bringing Trump back onto the platform,” Clegg said.

“I’m very mindful that if you have this significant ability to take decisions which affect the public realm as a private sector company you need to act with great caution and reticence, you shouldn’t throw your weight about,” Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, said. “American democracy is not our democracy — it’s your democracy.”

Not fact-checking political speech: Clegg said Trump could be suspended again if he is allowed back on the platform but then consistently violates the platform’s policies.

But Clegg reiterated Meta’s position that it will not fact-check politicians’ or candidates’ speech on its platforms. He said it’s not Meta’s role to determine what is true and false.

“It’s not about truth and lies,” he said. “Political speech is not an exercise in scientific accuracy. Politicians are there to sketch out a visual of what they want to see — they’re not there to provide statistical precision.”

“We do not want to get in the way of what politicians say about each other or themselves,” he said. “We are not here to interfere — that’s a sort of sacred part of the democratic process.”

 

Mediaite, Iranian President Bails on Interview With CNN’s Christiane Amanpour After She Refuses to Wear Headscarf, Ken Meyer, Sept. 22, 2022. CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour (shown above on CNN's set waiting for a scheduled interview to start on Sept. 22) revealed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi canceled an interview when she refused his demand she wear a headscarf.

Amanpour joined New Day on Thursday to talk about the riots raging across Iran after Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody last week. Amini was arrested by Tehran’s morality police on charges of violating Iranian law requiring women to wear headscarves. While officials say she died as a result of a heart attack, the government’s claim has been met with broad public skepticism, and mass protests have broken out against Iran’s authoritarianism and oppression of women.

Amanpour was slated to have an interview with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi while he was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. While explaining all the preparations that went into the interview, Amanpour said that after 40 minutes of waiting for Raisi to show up, one of his aides asked her to put on a headscarf for the Islamic holy months of Muharram and Safar.

“Here in New York, or anywhere else outside of Iran, I have never been asked by any Iranian president [to wear a headscarf],” Amanpour said. “I have interviewed every single one of them since 1995, either inside or outside Iran, never been asked to wear a headscarf.”

Amanpour said she “politely declined” the request, adding that it became an ultimatum when Raisi’s aide told her the interview wouldn’t happen without the headscarf.

The president bailed from the interview, which Amanpour connected to the anti-hijab protests in Iran.

Politico, LIV Golf may need a mulligan on Capitol Hill, Andrew Desiderio, Sept. 22, 2022. The Saudi government-backed competitor to the PGA Tour has Donald Trump's seal of approval. That doesn't mean every conservative lawmaker is supportive.

Golf legend Greg Norman left the Capitol on Wednesday touting his meeting with Republicans as a smooth drive down the fairway, even though, for many GOP lawmakers, he hit immediately into the rough.

Norman blitzed Capitol Hill this week in a blatant effort to repair the Saudi-bankrolled LIV Golf series’ reputation as it faces withering criticism from human-rights activists, 9/11 families and lawmakers from both parties for its ties to the Saudi royal family. That LIV’s 67-year-old Australian CEO even felt the need to meet with members of Congress underscores the public-relations toll already taken by allegations of improper foreign influence.

Flanked by his lobbyist, former Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), Norman did not deviate from his months-long messaging strategy: his insistence that LIV is all about “growing the game of golf.” That pitch hasn’t stuck, even on the GOP side of the aisle despite former President Donald Trump’s partnership with the new series.

“It was basically propaganda. They’re just pushing their deal, and I don’t care,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who exited the room early as Norman met with the Republican Study Committee, the House GOP’s largest caucus. “Honestly, this shouldn’t be taking up our time. This is a conservative organization, and we ought to be dealing with what we’ve got to deal with in our country, not worried about a bunch of Saudis, a bunch of billionaire oil people. So I’m out.”

The Saudi government’s foray into the golf world stoked controversy not just for its impact on the long-running PGA Tour, but also because it drew allegations of “sportswashing” — the practice of using professional sports to repair one’s reputation. Even before this year’s LIV series officially began, lawmakers from both parties were criticizing it as an effort by Saudi Arabia’s hardline leaders to whitewash their country’s abysmal human-rights record.

A cohort of families who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001, has publicly urged Trump to not host LIV tournaments at his country clubs. They’ve also appealed directly to golfers themselves, asking them not to join LIV.

Speaking with reporters after the GOP meeting, Norman indicated that the feedback he got behind closed doors was all positive. Jonathan Grella, a spokesperson for LIV, dismissed the criticisms and said Norman’s “message about the benefits of competition was very well received, even if a couple members of Congress say otherwise.”

That’s not entirely accurate.

“Don’t come in here and act like you’re doing some great thing while you’re pimping a billion dollars of Saudi Arabian money,” lamented Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who has been outspoken about LIV. “You enriched yourself on the back of the [PGA] Tour. You got rich using the Tour to do so.”

Sept. 18

 

Anti-Trump Womens March on Washington, Jan. 21 2017 (Photo by Jim Fry via Twitter and the Voice of America).

New York Times, Investigation: How Russian Trolls Helped Keep the Women’s March Out of Lock Step, Ellen Barry, Sept. 18, 2022. As American feminists came together in 2017 to protest Donald Trump, Russia’s disinformation machine set about deepening the divides among them.

Linda Sarsour awoke on Jan. 23, 2017, logged onto the internet, and felt sick.

The weekend before, she had stood in Washington at the head of the Women’s March, a mobilization against President Donald J. Trump that surpassed all expectations. Crowds had begun forming before dawn, and by the time she climbed up onto the stage, they extended farther than the eye could see.

More than four million people around the United States had taken part, experts later estimated, placing it among the largest single-day protests in the nation’s history.

But then something shifted, seemingly overnight. What she saw on Twitter that Monday was a torrent of focused grievance that targeted her. In 15 years as an activist, largely advocating for the rights of Muslims, she had faced pushback, but this was of a different magnitude. A question began to form in her mind: Do they really hate me that much?

That morning, there were things going on that Ms. Sarsour could not imagine.

More than 4,000 miles away, organizations linked to the Russian government had assigned teams to the Women’s March. At desks in bland offices in St. Petersburg, using models derived from advertising and public relations, copywriters were testing out social media messages critical of the Women’s March movement, adopting the personas of fictional Americans.

They posted as Black women critical of white feminism, conservative women who felt excluded, and men who mocked participants as hairy-legged whiners. But one message performed better with audiences than any other.

It singled out an element of the Women’s March that might, at first, have seemed like a detail: Among its four co-chairs was Ms. Sarsour, a Palestinian American activist whose hijab marked her as an observant Muslim.

Over the 18 months that followed, Russia’s troll factories and its military intelligence service put a sustained effort into discrediting the movement by circulating damning, often fabricated narratives around Ms. Sarsour, whose activism made her a lightning rod for Mr. Trump’s base and also for some of his most ardent opposition.

One hundred and fifty-two different Russian accounts produced material about her. Public archives of Twitter accounts known to be Russian contain 2,642 tweets about Ms. Sarsour, many of which found large audiences, according to an analysis by Advance Democracy Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts public-interest research and investigations.

New York Times, A Federal Court Clears the Way for a Texas Social Media Law, David McCabe, Sept. 18, 2022 (print ed.). The law, which had been blocked by a lower court, makes it possible to sue large social media platforms for taking down political viewpoints.

A federal appeals court on Friday reversed a lower court’s order blocking a Texas law that stops large social media platforms from removing political posts, a blow for tech companies that say their content moderation decisions are protected by the Constitution.

“Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is known to be conservative, said in the court’s ruling. One member of the three-judge panel dissented from portions of the ruling.

The law makes it possible for individuals or the Texas attorney general’s office to sue social media platforms with more than 50 million monthly users in the United States for taking down political viewpoints. The legislation is the product of conservative anger over posts that were taken down largely because they had violated the social media platforms’ rules.

It comes as platforms like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter face immense political pressure over their decisions to take down content they deem misinformation, or view as hateful or violent. Republicans have generally called for the platforms to leave up more posts, while Democrats have urged them to be more aggressive in removing some content.

Lawmakers in Washington have pushed for changes to a law, known as Section 230, that shields platforms from liability for the content users post, to nudge the companies to either be more forceful or more lenient. But those proposals have gained little traction.

Two tech industry groups, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association, sued to block the law after it was approved last year, saying the social media companies have a First Amendment right to remove posts they consider inappropriate. A different federal court has blocked a similar law in Florida.

The ruling on Friday is the latest turn in the legal wrangling over the law. Last year, a district court blocked the law. The appeals court disagreed with that decision, clearing the way for the law to take effect. But the Supreme Court intervened at the behest of the technology industry groups — blocking the law until the court of appeals issued its fuller ruling. The decision on Friday does not allow the law to take effect; that requires the appeals court to issue instructions to the lower court.

The legal battle is likely not over. Matt Schruers, the president of Computer & Communications Industry Association, said the group was “evaluating options.” NetChoice said it remained “convinced that when the U.S. Supreme Court hears one of our cases, it will uphold the First Amendment rights of websites, platforms and apps.”

Sept. 17

New York Times, Yeshiva University Halts All Student Clubs to Block L.G.B.T.Q. Group, Hurubie Meko, Sept. 17, 2022. Earlier in the week, the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a ruling that required the university to recognize the group to stand for now.

Yeshiva University abruptly announced on Friday that it had placed all undergraduate club activities on hold, the latest maneuver in the legal battle by the Modern Orthodox Jewish institution to keep from recognizing an L.G.B.T.Q. student group.

The move came two days after the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered the university to recognize the student group. In a 5 to 4 vote, the justices said the university would first have to make its arguments in New York State courts before returning to the Supreme Court.

“If applicants seek and receive neither expedited review nor interim relief from the New York courts, they may return to this court,” the Supreme Court order said.

Citing the upcoming Jewish holidays, the university sent out a terse, unsigned email at midafternoon on Friday that said it would “hold off on all undergraduate activities” while it planned its next steps to “follow the road map provided by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Sept. 16

New York Times, For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine, Kalley Huang, Sept. 16, 2022. Young people are turning to TikTok to search for answers. Google has noticed.

When Ja’Kobi Moore decided to apply this year to a private high school in her hometown of New Orleans, she learned that she needed at least one letter of recommendation from a teacher. She had never asked for one, so she sought help.

“Teacher letter of recommendation,” she typed into TikTok’s search bar.

Ms. Moore, 15, scrolled TikTok’s app until she found two videos: one explaining how to ask teachers for a recommendation letter and the other showing a template for one. Both had been made by teachers and were easier to understand than a Google search result or YouTube video, said Ms. Moore, who is planning to talk to her teachers this month.

TikTok is known for its viral dance videos and pop music. But for Generation Z, the video app is increasingly a search engine, too.

New York Times, TikTok’s C.E.O. Navigates the Limits of His Power, Ryan Mac and Chang Che, Sept. 16, 2022. Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, is balancing how to be an autonomous leader while juggling the demands of the app’s Chinese parent company.

TikTok recently tried to tamp down concerns from U.S. lawmakers that it poses a national security threat because it is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance. The viral video app insisted it had an arm’s-length relationship with ByteDance and that its own executive was in charge.

“TikTok is led by its own global C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean based in Singapore,” TikTok wrote in a June letter to U.S. lawmakers.

But in fact, Mr. Chew’s decision-making power over TikTok is limited, according to 12 former TikTok and ByteDance employees and executives.

Decisions about the service — including moves to emphasize livestreaming and shopping on TikTok — are made by Zhang Yiming, ByteDance’s founder, as well as by a top ByteDance strategy executive and the head of TikTok’s research and development team, said the people, who declined to be identified for fear of reprisals. TikTok’s growth and strategy, which are led by ByteDance teams, report not to Mr. Chew but to ByteDance’s office in Beijing, they said.

New York Times, YouTube Opens More Pathways for Creators to Make Money on the Platform, Nico Grant, Sept. 16, 2022 (print ed.). The video platform will let more creators earn payments and place ads in Shorts, its TikTok competitor, according to audio from an internal meeting.

YouTube is expected to announce more opportunities for content creators to earn money on its video service, hoping to guard its role as a home to popular personalities and gain an edge against rival TikTok.

The Google-owned company plans to let more video creators earn money from the platform, lowering the barriers to entry for its partner program, according to audio from a YouTube all-hands meeting on Thursday. YouTube is expected to make the announcement at an event on Tuesday.

It “is the largest expansion we’ve done in several years creating new ways for creators to join the program,” Amjad Hanif, vice president of product management and creator products, said in the staff meeting.

A YouTube spokeswoman declined to comment Thursday evening.

Under YouTube’s old rules, creators made money only if audiences watched at least 4,000 hours of their videos and they had at least 1,000 subscribers.

Sept. 15

New York Times, CNN Overhauls Its Morning Show, John Koblin, Sept. 15, 2022. CNN is about to drastically overhaul its morning hours. The morning slot will be hosted by Don Lemon, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins. The move leaves open Mr. Lemon’s prime-time slot.

The network announced on Thursday that one of the network’s prime-time mainstays, Don Lemon; a midmorning anchor, Poppy Harlow; and a White House correspondent, Kaitlan Collins, would be the new faces of a completely revamped morning show.

The new show represents Chris Licht’s biggest programming move since taking over as CNN’s chairman in May, and it has big implications for the network’s prime-time lineup, too. Mr. Licht is still searching for a host for the 9 p.m. role that Chris Cuomo occupied before he was fired late last year, and he will now need to fill Mr. Lemon’s 10 p.m. hour, too.

The morning show will get a name change and a new format and set, the network said. The current show from 6 to 9 a.m. is “New Day.” CNN executives are hoping to have the new show up and running in late October, ahead of the midterm elections, but no definitive timetable was given other than announcing that it would make its debut this year.

“This demonstrates our commitment to the morning and how important it is to me,” Mr. Licht said in a brief interview. “The show will set the tone of the entire day, and it will set the tone for the news organization.”

Mr. Licht, left, is the second consecutive morning TV impresario to take the reins of CNN, and like his predecessor, Jeff Zucker, morning programming will be his first roll of the dice. Mr. Zucker’s early tenure was marked by the creation of “New Day.”
Daily business updates The latest coverage of business, markets and the economy, sent by email each weekday. Get it sent to your inbox.

Mr. Licht was the original executive producer and co-creator of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and then had a successful turn serving as the executive producer of “CBS This Morning.” (Mr. Licht was most recently the executive producer of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”)

Mr. Licht called the revamped show “a mass appeal play.”

“It’s meant to be an evolved version of the network morning shows,” he said. The current morning anchors, John Berman and Brianna Keilar, will get different roles at the network.

Poynter.org, Traffic to local news websites has plummeted. What happens now? Rick Edmonds, Sept. 15, 2022. With advertising down and newsprint and delivery costs rising, reduced traffic puts pressure on an already ailing industry.

Pageviews and uniques are not the favored digital metrics they used to be, but as they fell roughly 20% earlier this year at local newspaper sites, the decline sent a chill through the industry.

In a year of soft advertising and rising newsprint and delivery costs, reduced traffic creates an unwelcome added challenge. Programmed ad placements are still sold by total impressions, so less traffic translates to less revenue. A traffic decline also reduces the number of prospective customers who can be started on the path to paid digital subscriptions.

Matt Lindsay, whose Mather Economics is a leading consultancy on strategy for building digital revenue, told me the situation is not quite as dire as it may look. “The fact that pageviews are down is not a bad thing,” he emailed, “if the long-term value of their users … is going up. We did some math a while back and the breakeven point was about 4:1 — that is, you can lose four anonymous low-value users if you get one high-value known user.”

Lindsay also did not think that tightening paywalls were the culprit for the plunge. “For most publishers, premium content is less than 25% of all articles and paywall rules are only impacting maybe 11% of users. These factors have some effect … but they are likely not a major reason for lower pageviews. The news cycle is the No. 1 reason.”

Several publishers I spoke with (who asked that their papers not be identified) saw more cause for worry. Fewer soft prospects coming to view an article or two will work over time to slow digital subscription growth, they said. And while programmatic digital advertising is not a huge revenue source for most, if it goes missing, already painful financial pressures increase.

Also, if interest in news post-Trump, post-COVID has waned and news avoidance is on the rise, it is not clear when or whether a news cycle comeback will follow.

Regional papers seem to be seeing the worst of it. Lauryn Warnick of Chartbeat told me that for their client base, which also includes magazines and broadcast sites, pageviews were down about 8.6% so far this year compared to the same period in 2021.

The Press Gazette survey of unique visitors at large national sites in July found a majority of the top 25 down, but typically only 6 to 15%

All this hits as print revenues — both subscriptions and advertising — are falling fast at local newspapers and digital gains continue not to make up the difference. That was evident in Gannett’s bleak second-quarter earnings report six weeks ago and layoff of 400 employees.

Sept. 14

Mediaite, Opinion: Prospective CNN Guests Asked to Answer Probing Questions About Political Ideology, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and More, Caleb Howe, Sept. 14, 2022. Are you a Maoist? Into Monarchism or Nazism? Are you in any weird cults? CNN would like to know, on a strictly “voluntary” basis, if you’re looking to go on air.

It’s all covered in a multi-page form for potential CNN guests, contributors, and so on that gets really personal really fast, Mediaite has learned.

The form, which a CNN insider told Mediaite is strictly voluntary, not only asks a whole lot of questions to pin down who a person is and what they are about, it does so in a multiple-choice format that might really knock your socks off.

For example, Question 7 is simply titled “Political Ideology” and features a drop-down menu. On the “Select One” list of options are things like Laissez-Faire, Libertarianism, Liberalism, and Leninism. Social Conservatism, Populism, and Progressivism are options, too. Not to mention, perhaps more shockingly, Maoism, Marxism, and even Nazism!

A CNN spokesperson tells Mediaite: “The initiative launched over a year ago and is strictly voluntary. CNN is committed to representing a variety of voices and perspectives across our platforms, and this information both helps us identify relevant guests and ensure diversity in our bookings.”

They certainly have some diverse options to select from.

Other drop-down menus cover things like Race/Ethnicity, Disability/Impairment, Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, Religion, Nationality and so on.

The idea is apparently to help bookers ID guests who might be good for a specific topic, so the answers are obviously pegged to the person’s name.

That way if at some point they are looking for someone who is into, say, Monarchism, which is one of the Ideology options, then they know just who to call.

Or, you know, if you need a Nazi in a pinch. Handy, that.

It’s not weird for CNN to keep a database of potential Marxist-Leninist, non-binary, Canadian-born Arkansas residents. I mean honestly that seems pretty efficient.

Still, if you’re a potential CNN guest, considering all that has gone before and all that’s happening there now, it isn’t a stretch to feel a little put off by the self-categorization. Or to wonder whether you’ll be excluded based on your answers. Or lack of answers.

But it’s strictly voluntary, though. It says so right on the thing.

Are you a Maoist? Into Monarchism or Nazism? Are you in any weird cults? CNN would like to know, on a strictly “voluntary” basis, if you’re looking to go on air.

Sept. 13

 

Robert Sarver, the owner of the Phoenix Suns and the Phoenix Mercury, has been suspended for one year after an investigation found that he had mistreated employees (Photo by Ross D. Franklin for the Associated Press).

New York Times, N.B.A. Fines and Suspends Phoenix Suns Owner for Misconduct, Scott Cacciola and Tania Ganguli, Sept. 13, 2022. An investigation found that the owner, Robert Sarver, had used racial slurs and treated female employees inequitably. The N.B.A. fined Sarver $10 million.

The N.B.A. is suspending Robert Sarver, the majority owner of the Phoenix Suns, for one year and fining him $10 million after an investigation determined that he had engaged in misconduct, including using racial slurs, yelling at employees and treating female employees unfairly.

“The statements and conduct described in the findings of the independent investigation are troubling and disappointing,” Adam Silver, the commissioner of the N.B.A., said in a statement.

He added: “Regardless of position, power or intent, we all need to recognize the corrosive and hurtful impact of racially insensitive and demeaning language and behavior. On behalf of the entire N.B.A. I apologize to all of those impacted by the misconduct outlined in the investigators’ report. We must do better.”

Sarver also owns the W.N.B.A.’s Phoenix Mercury.

Sarver said in a statement that he accepted the consequences of the N.B.A.’s decision.

“While I disagree with some of the particulars of the N.B.A.’s report, I would like to apologize for my words and actions that offended our employees,” he said. “I take full responsibility for what I have done. I am sorry for causing this pain, and these errors in judgment are not consistent with my personal philosophy or my values.”

The N.B.A. began the investigation in response to a November 2021 article by ESPN about accusations of mistreatment against Sarver. After the article was published, the league retained the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct an independent investigation.

On Tuesday, the firm and the N.B.A. released a 43-page report that found that Sarver “had engaged in conduct that clearly violated common workplace standards,” which included inappropriate comments about female employees’ appearance and bullying. He also engaged in inappropriate physical conduct toward male employees on four occasions, according to the report.

More than 100 individuals who were interviewed by investigators said they witnessed behavior that “violated applicable standards.” There was a general sense among employees that Sarver felt that workplace rules did not apply to him, according to the report.

Sarver also made crude jokes, cursed at employees and told a pregnant employee that she would be unable to do her job upon becoming a mother, according to the report.

Witnesses recalled Sarver saying that the employee would be busy “breastfeeding” and that a “baby needs their mom, not their father.” The employee cried in response to Sarver’s comments, according to the report. Sarver later asked why women “cry so much.”

Washington Post, Musk has more than 19,000 tweets. What he’s said about Twitter is revealing, Linda Chong, Rachel Lerman and Jeremy B. Merrill, Elon Musk is a Twitter super user. He has tweeted more than 19,000 times since joining the platform 13 years ago. This year, he has tweeted an average of six times a day.

At least 150 of those posts are about Twitter itself, according to a Washington Post analysis.

Musk is now locked in an on-again-off-again struggle with the social media company as he tries to back out of a deal he made in April to acquire it for $44 billion. But some of his tweets make you wonder why he ever wanted it. Like many Twitter users, the richest man in the world has a love-hate relationship with the platform where he posts memes, videos of SpaceX launches and random musings about life, love, colonizing Mars and population collapse.

Unlike most Twitter users, Musk has long noted Twitter’s problems with spam and bots. (He has voiced suspicion that many of his 105 million followers are not actually real people.) Now the billionaire is arguing that he should be allowed to call off the purchase because Twitter has understated its bot problem.

• Washington Post, Twitter shareholders approve Elon Musk’s takeover deal

Washington Post, Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko testifies before Senate on allegations of security vulnerabilities, Cat Zakrzewski, Joseph Menn, Faiz Siddiqui and Cristiano Lima, Sept. 13, 2022. Twitter whistleblower Peiter “Mudge” Zatko appears Tuesday morning before the Senate, as his allegations of widespread security vulnerabilities ignite new political head winds and legal challenges for the social network.

Senate Judiciary Committee lawmakers subpoenaed Zatko to appear after they received copies of his SEC complaint, which alleges the company misled federal regulators and its own board about its weak defenses against hackers, efforts to fight spam and foreign influence operations on its platform. Zatko’s allegations, first reported by The Washington Post and CNN, immediately reverberated on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers promised investigations and wrote letters calling the Federal Trade Commission to open a probe.

Here’s what to know

• Zatko returns to Capitol Hill after spending his career exposing security risks as an acclaimed hacker who has worked at major tech companies and the Pentagon innovation center, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He has said that he felt “ethically bound” to report Twitter to federal regulators.
• Regulators could bring hundreds of millions of dollars of fines against Twitter in response to Zatko’s allegations, The Post has reported. But his allegations of long-running chaos and misleading statements to regulators is also prompting criticism that the FTC is ill-equipped to police privacy abuses in Silicon Valley.
• A judge has ruled that Musk can amend his lawsuit against Twitter to include Zatko’s whistleblower claims, and Musk’s legal team has also subpoenaed Zatko. The moves have put the whistleblower at the center of a multibillion dollar battle over the company’s future ownership.

Washington Post, Daughter says QAnon conspiracy theory fueled father’s deadly rampage, Kim Bellware, Sept. 13, 2022 (print ed.). A Michigan man with purported beliefs in the QAnon conspiracy theory was killed in a police shootout Sunday after he fatally shot his wife and severely injured their daughter at their suburban Detroit home.

The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office identified the man as 53-year-old Igor Lanis of Walled Lake, a small community 30 miles northwest of Detroit. Lanis did not have a history of violence or protective orders against him, officials said, but according to his youngest daughter, who was not home during the attack, Lanis in recent years had grown increasingly in the thrall of the sprawling and baseless conspiracy movement known as QAnon.

Rebecca Lanis, 21, told the Detroit News on Sunday that after Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, her father began consuming “crazy ideas” online, including conspiracy theories about vaccines and Trump.

On Sunday, police received a 911 call just after 4 a.m. from a young woman who said she had just been shot by her father, the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. When officers arrived at the scene and moved toward the home after hearing a gunshot, Lanis came out the front door armed with a pump-action shotgun and began to fire at the officers.

Police fired back, fatally shooting Lanis.

Officers then saw Lanis’s 25-year-old daughter, Rachel, attempting to crawl out of the front door before they dragged her to safety. She was later hospitalized and listed in stable condition. Rachel Lanis, who had placed the initial 911 call, told police her father had shot her and killed her mother.

Sept. 11

 

Washington Post, Jan. 6 rioter pleads guilty to assault on news media, Tom Jackman, Sept. 11, 2022 (print ed.). Shane Jason Woods, above, also admits assault on a police officer, faces 33 to 41 months in prison, prosecutors say.

The first rioter from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to be charged with attacking a member of the news media pleaded guilty Friday to felony counts of assault on law enforcement and assault on a news photographer. Prosecutors estimated that he faces a possible sentence of 33 to 41 months in prison.

 

Jeff German, investigative reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. (Elizabeth Brumley/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

New York Times, A Slain Reporter, a City of Sin and a Politician Charged With Murder, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs and Mike Baker, Sept. 11, 2022. As journalism and Las Vegas changed, Jeff German stayed true to his style: build sources, chase leads and leave nobody safe from accountability. 

As one of four reporters on the investigative team of Las Vegas’s main newspaper, Jeff German wrote stories that reached nearly every sordid corner of Sin City.

Even as old-school reporting jobs dwindled, Mr. German’s watchdog articles and columns pried back the curtain on mobsters, crooked politicians, casino titans and just about anyone who misused wealth or power in the city. In the last few years, he had scrutinized lavish spending by the city’s tourism agency, claims of sexual harassment at the coroner’s office and allegations that the Las Vegas Raiders football organization had violated discrimination and labor laws.

After four decades of surviving reporting on the most unsavory characters in a city with a reputation for mob-linked murders, there was little reason to think that Mr. German, 69, would be in danger when he turned his attention earlier this year to an obscure government office where some employees claimed their boss was a bully. The article didn’t even run on the front page.

But the authorities now say that the boss in that story, Robert Telles, right, went to Mr. German’s home on a quiet cul-de-sac this month and stabbed him to death, months after the exposé that may have cost him re-election was published. Mr. Telles has not yet entered a plea, and his lawyer has not responded to requests for comment.

The killing has rattled and outraged the readers, journalists and sources who had grown to trust Mr. German’s brand of shoe leather reporting in a town where little is to be trusted, from the glittering billboards to the gamblers across poker tables.

Mr. German endured a changing industry, going from typewriters to Twitter, from one struggling newspaper to another. As news organizations across the country lost money, laid off reporters and found it harder to keep up with corruption, Mr. German continued to expose malfeasance at a remarkable pace.

Sept. 10

New York Times, Editorial Board: A Pernicious Threat to Free Expression, Editorial Board, Sept. 10, 2022 (print ed.). Some threats to freedom of expression in America, like online harassment and disinformation, are amorphous or hard to pin down; others are alarmingly overt. Consider these recent examples of censorship in practice: A student newspaper and journalism program in Nebraska shut down for writing about L.G.B.T.Q. issues and pride month. Oklahoma’s top education official seeking to revoke the teaching certificate of an English teacher who shared a QR code that directed students to the Brooklyn Public Library’s online collection of banned books. Lawmakers in Missouri passing a law that makes school librarians vulnerable to prosecution for the content in their collections.

In Florida today it may be illegal for teachers to even talk about whom they love or marry thanks to the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law. Of course, it goes far beyond sex: The Sunshine State’s Republican commissioner of education rejected 28 math textbooks this year for including verboten content.

This year alone, 137 gag order bills, which would restrict the discussions of topics such as race, gender, sexuality and American history in kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education, have been introduced in 36 state legislatures, according to a report released last month by PEN America, a free speech organization. That’s a sharp increase from 2021, when 54 bills were introduced in 22 states. Only seven of those bills became law in 2022, but they are some of the strictest to date, and the sheer number of bills introduced reflects a growing enthusiasm on the right for censorship as a political weapon and instrument of social control.

These new measures are far more punitive than past efforts, with heavy fines or loss of state funding for institutions that dare to offer courses covering the forbidden content. Teachers can be fired and even face criminal charges. Lawsuits have already started to trickle through the courts asking for broad interpretations of the new statutes. For the first time, the PEN report noted, some bills have also targeted nonpublic schools and universities in addition to public schools.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Republican lawmakers around the country were introducing legislation they said would protect free speech on college campuses. Now, they’re using the coercive power of the state to restrict what people can talk about, learn about or discuss in public, and exposing them to lawsuits and other repercussions for doing so. That’s a clear threat to the ideals of a pluralistic political culture, in which challenging ideas are welcomed and discussed.

How and what to teach American students has been contested ground since the earliest days of public education, and the content of that instruction is something about which Americans can respectfully disagree. But the Supreme Court has limited the government’s power to censor school libraries, if not curriculums. “Local school boards may not remove books from school libraries simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion,’” Justice William Brennan wrote in a 1982 decision.

There may not even be wide disagreement over what American students are being taught. Despite the moral panic over teaching about gender and race, American parents overwhelmingly say they are satisfied with the instruction their children receive. A poll from National Public Radio and Ipsos earlier this year found that just 18 percent of parents said their child’s school “taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values,” while 19 percent said the same about race and racism. Only 14 percent felt that way about American history.

And yet, some Republican candidates are using the threat of censorship as a show of strength, evidence of their power to muzzle political opponents. Last year in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, right, won the governorship after a campaign in which he demagogued the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beloved by the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison. Other candidates are looking to make issues around censorship a centerpiece of their pitch to voters in the midterm elections in races from Texas to New Jersey.

Right-wing lawmakers are also looking to restrict what Americans can say about abortion. Model legislation from the National Right to Life Committee, which is circulating in state legislatures, aims to forbid Americans to give “instructions over the telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortions or means to obtain an illegal abortion.” That prohibition would extend to hosting websites that contain such information.

Even when such bills fail, these efforts to censor create a climate of fear. Across the country, libraries in small towns are being threatened with closure and library staff members are being harassed and intimidated. The Times reports that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.” The American Library Association has documented nearly 1,600 books in more than 700 libraries or library systems that have faced attempted censorship.

The Guardian, Commentary: New ‘objective’ CNN appears to be making itself objectively rightwing, Arwa Mahdawi, Sept. 10, 2022. The cable network’s CEO dramatic hiring and firing of on-air talent seems designed to woo the Fox News crowd. CNN’s CEO says the cable network is moving away from ‘alarmist’ programming towards more neutral, objective reporting.

CNN has a very odd definition of ‘objectivity’

CNN wants to be the new Fox News and it’s not even trying to hide it. Earlier this year Chris Licht became the new CEO of the cable network and immediately made it clear that he was going to change the network’s direction. One of Licht’s first moves was to embark on what Axios described as a “Capitol Hill diplomacy tour” and others described as a Republican boot-licking tour. Licht, below left, met with key lawmakers who had become wary of cable news and promised them that CNN was moving away from “alarmist” programming towards more neutral, objective reporting.

What does that mean in practice? Well, it appears to mean firing anyone who is critical of Donald Trump or Republicans. Last month CNN suddenly axed Brian Stelter’s Sunday show in a move many commentators considered politically motivated; Stelter had been an outspoken critic of Trump and was reviled by many on the right. Earlier this month White House correspondent John Harwood was fired shortly after calling Trump “a dishonest demagogue” on the air.

It’s not just who was fired that is alarming – it’s the abrupt manner in which they were fired. As the media analyst Josh Marshall noted “The most striking thing about Licht’s firings to date is how they are choreographed for … right-wing media consumption and designed to generate mass schadenfreude on the right: the bête noires Fox has been harping on for years suddenly marched to the top of the pyramid and hurled to the ground.” Licht says he’s moving away from sensational news, but he appears to be putting on his own little drama for the right.

After purging progressive voices, Licht has just made his first big hire: announcing on Tuesday that John Miller would be joining CNN as the network’s chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst. Miller isn’t exactly an obvious hire if you’re looking to brandish your new “neutrality” credentials. The former New York police department (NYPD) deputy commissioner of intelligence and counter-terrorism is an extremely polarizing figure who made headlines in March when he testified to the New York city council that the NYPD did not, in his opinion, inappropriately spy on Muslims after the September 11 2001 attacks. Which is a weird thing to say because Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting has clearly shown that the NYPD used census data to spy on Muslims following September 11 and the department has settled a number of lawsuits related to the illegal spying.

A number of Muslims and civil rights activists are alarmed about Miller taking on his new role at CNN. “We have no faith that as chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst at CNN, Miller won’t continue to propagandize on behalf of law enforcement and dismiss clear discrimination against Muslims and other marginalized communities,” Muslim Advocates, a group involved in one of the lawsuits against the NYPD, said in a statement.

Licht doesn’t seem to mind that his new hire may alienate Muslims or anyone who cares about illegal police surveillance programs. He doesn’t seem to find it alarming that his new analyst has been accused of lying about the NYPD surveillance of Muslims. He doesn’t seem to find it awkward that even Eric Adams, the current mayor of New York City and a former police officer, said Miller was “wrong” to deny the existence of the program. Instead, the CNN CEO announced, with a seemingly straight face, that Miller “will help deliver on CNN’s commitment to tackle complex issues while presenting audiences with independent, objective news”.

So who is CNN going to hire next in order to demonstrate its objectivity? Trump seems to be angling for a job. On Sunday Trump posted on Truth Social that “if ‘low ratings’ CNN ever went Conservative, they would be an absolute gold mine, and I would help them to do so”. The way CNN is going I wouldn’t be surprised if they make Trump their new election integrity analyst next week.

Sept. 9

.

 Washington Post, Trump’s Truth Social in limbo as merger partner confronts another failed vote, Drew Harwell, Sept. 9, 2022. Digital World did not get 65 percent of its shareholders to support giving the merger another year. But not enough voted by the deadline and it was unclear what the next step would be.

Former president Donald Trump has failed to win another vote — this time, by the shareholders of an investment ally his social network Truth Social had been counting on for cash.

Digital World Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company, said Thursday it had not yet gained enough shareholder votes to extend its deadline for merging with Trump’s start-up — a necessary step to unlock $1.3 billion in raised funds.

The company was scheduled for liquidation Thursday unless its investors approved the extension or the company’s sponsor paid to push back the deadline itself.

But Digital World’s chief, Patrick Orlando, said late Thursday that the company would instead postpone a long-awaited meeting until Oct. 10 without offering further detail, indicating the company was still scrambling to garner enough shareholder support.

New York Times, After a Legal Fight, Oberlin Says It Will Pay $36.59 Million to a Local Bakery, Anemona Hartocollis, Sept. 9, 2022 (print ed.). Gibson’s Bakery said the liberal arts college had falsely accused it of racism after a Black student was caught shoplifting.

Oberlin College, known as a bastion of progressive politics, said on Thursday that it would pay $36.59 million to a local bakery that said it had been defamed and falsely accused of racism after a worker caught a Black student shoplifting.

That 2016 dispute with Gibson’s Bakery resulted in a yearslong legal fight and resonated beyond the small college town in Ohio, turning into a bitter national debate over criminal justice, race, free speech and whether the college had failed to hold students to account.

The decision by the college’s board of trustees, announced Thursday, came nine days after the Ohio Supreme Court had declined to hear the college’s appeal of a lower-court ruling.

“Truth matters,” Lee E. Plakas, the lawyer for the Gibson family, said in an email Thursday. “David, supported by a principled community, can still beat Goliath.”

In a statement, Oberlin said that “this matter has been painful for everyone.” It added, “We hope that the end of the litigation will begin the healing of our entire community.”

The college acknowledged that the size of the judgment, which includes damages and interest, was “significant.” But it said that “with careful financial planning,” including insurance, it could be paid “without impacting our academic and student experience.” Oberlin has a robust endowment of nearly $1 billion.

The case hinged on whether Oberlin officials had defamed the bakery by supporting students who accused it of racial profiling, and the verdict, essentially finding that the officials had done so, may make other colleges and universities think twice about joining student causes, legal experts said.

“Such a large amount is certainly going to make institutions around the country take notice, and to be very careful about the difference between supporting students and being part of a cause,” said Neal Hutchens, a professor of higher education at the University of Kentucky. “It wasn’t so much the students speaking; it’s the institution accepting that statement uncritically. Sometimes you have to take a step back.”

Sept. 8

Washington Post, Bernard Shaw, unflappable founding anchor at CNN, dies at 82, Glenn Rifkin, Sept. 8, 2022. Bernard Shaw, shown giving a speech in 2004, a journalist who left network TV in 1980 for the uncertainty of anchoring at the first 24-hour cable news network — CNN — and whose steady-under-missile-fire coverage from Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War helped elevate the outlet to global prominence, died Sept. 7 at a Washington-area hospital. He was 82.

The cause was pneumonia, his family said in a statement.

With his unflappable demeanor and somber intonation — his heroes were broadcasters Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — Mr. Shaw was credited with bringing professional polish to an experiment initially laughed off as the “Chicken Noodle Network” for challenging the Big Three networks for news dominance.

 

Jeff German, investigative reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. (Elizabeth Brumley/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

New York Times, Politician Arrested in Las Vegas Reporter’s Stabbing Death, Prosecutor Says, Michael Levenson, Sept. 8, 2022 (print ed.). Robert Telles, the Clark County public administrator, was taken into custody in the killing of an investigative reporter, the district attorney said.

A county official in Las Vegas was arrested on a murder charge on Wednesday, hours after the police searched his home in connection with the fatal stabbing of a reporter at The Las Vegas Review-Journal, the district attorney said.

The official, Robert Telles, right, the Clark County public administrator, was taken into custody in the killing of the reporter, Jeff German, according to the Clark County district attorney, Steven B. Wolfson.

Mr. Telles was wheeled out on a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance after the police returned to his home in tactical gear, The Review-Journal reported.

“The suspect in the homicide that occurred on September 2, 2022, has been taken into custody,” the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night, without naming the person. The department said it planned to provide an update on the investigation at a news conference on Thursday morning.

Mr. Telles, a Democrat elected in 2018, lost a June primary after he was the focus of investigative stories by Mr. German, who detailed claims that Mr. Telles had presided over a hostile work environment and had engaged in an “inappropriate relationship” with a staff member. Mr. Telles and the staff member denied the accusations.

Mr. German, 69, was found fatally stabbed outside his home in Las Vegas on Saturday morning. The police believe he was killed after an altercation on Friday.

“The arrest of Robert Telles is at once an enormous relief and an outrage for the Review-Journal newsroom,” Glenn Cook, The Review-Journal’s executive editor, said in a statement on Wednesday night.

“We are relieved Robert Telles is in custody and outraged that a colleague appears to have been killed for reporting on an elected official,” Mr. Cook said. “Journalists can’t do the important work our communities require if they are afraid a presentation of facts could lead to violent retribution.”

He thanked the Las Vegas police for responding to the killing with urgency and hard work.

“Now, hopefully, The Review-Journal, the German family and Jeff’s many friends can begin the process of mourning and honoring a great man and a brave reporter,” Mr. Cook said.

Sept. 7

New York Times, Egypt Files Criminal Charges Against Four Journalists Over One Article, Vivian Yee, Sept. 7, 2022. After a dominant political party tied to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi filed complaints against them, the journalists were charged with publishing fake news, among other counts.

Four journalists from one of Egypt’s last independent news outlets were charged with criminal offenses on Wednesday, in the government’s latest attempt to intimidate and punish the publication for its reporting.

The charges — publishing fake news, misusing social media and insulting members of Parliament — stemmed from an article that the outlet, Mada Masr, published last week on a corruption inquiry and impending leadership shake-up in the political party that dominates Parliament, the Nation’s Future Party. The party is closely associated with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

Under Mr. el-Sisi, who came to power after a military takeover in 2013, Egypt has stamped out even minor forms of dissent and has muzzled the news media, jailing dozens of journalists, using the security services to buy up outlets and blocking uncooperative news sites.

The sites blocked in Egypt include Mada Masr, an online outlet that is published in English and Arabic and that continued to offer hard-hitting reporting on Egypt when most of the rest of the country’s news media fell prey to government repression.

Washington Post, Judge will let Musk add whistleblower claims to case against Twitter, Rachel Lerman and Faiz Siddiqui, Sept. 7, 2022. His attorneys requested to amend his counterclaims after a whistleblower filed a complaint about Twitter’s security practices.

Elon Musk can amend his lawsuit against Twitter to include new whistleblower claims against the social media site, a judge ruled Wednesday, giving the world’s richest person a lifeline in a case that legal experts had described as a long shot.

Musk’s attorneys argued to include allegations by Peiter Zatko, Twitter’s former head of security, that the social media platform hid critical information from them as they pursued a deal to purchase it. They said they should be allowed to incorporate the new allegations and pushed to delay the trial, a request that was denied.

Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick ruled Wednesday that Musk could add the claims from Zatko, who has alleged “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in Twitter’s security practices and that the company hid information about bots and spam.

But McCormick said Musk could seek “only incremental” information from Twitter on the new claims. And delaying the Oct. 17 trial “would risk further harm to Twitter too great to justify,” she added.

New York Times, How China Has Added to Its Influence Over the iPhone, Tripp Mickle, Sept. 7, 2022 (print ed.). Apple is taking small steps toward India. But the production of its latest phone, set for a Wednesday debut, shows how difficult big changes will be.

This fall, Apple will make some of its flagship iPhones outside China for the first time, a small but significant change for a company that has built one of the most sophisticated supply chains in the world with the help of the Chinese authorities. But the development of the iPhone 14, which is expected to be unveiled on Wednesday, shows how complicated it will be for Apple to truly untangle itself from China.

More than ever, Apple’s Chinese employees and suppliers contributed complex work and sophisticated components for the 15th year of its marquee device, including aspects of manufacturing design, speakers and batteries, according to four people familiar with the new operations and analysts. As a result, the iPhone has gone from being a product that is designed in California and made in China to one that is a creation of both countries.

Sept. 6

Washington Post, 4,000 Google cafeteria workers quietly unionized during the pandemic, Gerrit De Vynck and Lauren Kaori Gurley, Sept. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The people who work in Google's famous cafeterias are contract workers, excluded from the tech giant’s high wages and benefits. Over the past few years, 4,000 of them quietly unionized.

Google is famous for its cafeterias, which serve its legions of programmers and product managers everything from vegan poke to gourmet tacos — free.

But the cooks and servers behind those meals are generally contractors who work for other companies, and do not get the generous perks and benefits reserved for Google employees. So over the past few years, thousands of them have unionized, securing higher wages, retirement benefits and free platinum health care coverage.

Unite Here, a 300,000-member union hotel and food service workers, has been steadily working to unionize Silicon Valley cafeteria workers since 2018, experiencing the most success at Google. Employed by the contract companies Compass and Guckenheimer, those unionized now make up about 90 percent of total food services workers at Google, according to the union. Workers have unionized at 23 Google offices nationwide, including in Seattle and San Jose.

Now, the union is tackling new territory: the South. On Wednesday, Google workers in Atlanta employed by a different cafeteria company — Sodexo — presented their manager with a list of demands and said they plan to unionize.

New York Times, In Shift, Israel Says Journalist Was Most Likely Shot by Israeli Soldier, Hiba Yazbek and Patrick Kingsley, Sept. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The Israeli Army concluded that Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American, was probably killed by a soldier. But it won’t open a criminal investigation.

The army’s announcement — the conclusion of a monthslong internal investigation — marked a shift from the original Israeli position, which maintained that Ms. Abu Akleh, a veteran broadcaster for Al Jazeera, had probably been killed by Palestinian fire.

Military officials nevertheless said they were certain that no Israeli soldier had intentionally fired toward a reporter or civilian, and said they would not open a criminal investigation into any Israeli soldier who might have been involved.

“It is not possible to unequivocally determine the source of the gunfire which hit Ms. Abu Akleh,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement. “However, there is a high possibility that Ms. Abu Akleh was accidentally hit by I.D.F. gunfire that was fired toward suspects identified as armed Palestinian gunmen, during an exchange of fire in which life-risking, widespread and indiscriminate shots were fired toward I.D.F. soldiers.”

Sept. 4

Washington Post, Opinion: Trump should fill Christians with rage. How come he doesn’t? Michael Gerson, right, former chief speechwriter for Republican President George W. Bush, Sept. 4, 2022 (print ed.). In many American places on a pleasant Sunday afternoon it is possible, as I recently did, to have coffee in the city at a bohemian cafe draped with rainbow banners, then to drive 30 or 45 minutes into the country to find small towns where Confederate and Trump flags are flown. The United States sometimes feels like two nations, divided by adornments defiantly affirming their political and cultural affinities.

But as a religious person (on my better days), what concerns me are the perverse and dangerous liberties many believers have taken with their own faith. Much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism — an alliance that is a serious, unfolding threat to liberal democracy.

Christ’s revolt against the elites could hardly be more different from the one we see today. Conservative evangelicalism has, in many ways, become the kind of religious tradition against which followers of Jesus were initially called to rebel. And because of the pivotal role of conservative Christians in our politics, this irony is a matter of urgency.

Washington Post, Under pressure, security firm Cloudflare drops Kiwi Farms site where stalkers organize, Joseph Menn and Taylor Lorenz, Sept 4, 2022 (print ed.). Cloudflare’s CEO said he made the decision after his company detected a surge in credible threats of violence originating on the site. Kiwi Farms launched in 2013 and quickly grew into a popular internet forum for online harassment campaigns.

Reversing course under growing public pressure, major tech security company Cloudflare announced Saturday that it will stop protecting the Kiwi Farms website, best known as a place for stalkers to organize hacks, online campaigns and real-world harassment.

Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince, who this past week published a lengthy blog post justifying the company’s services defending websites such as Kiwi Farms, told The Washington Post he changed his mind not because of the pressure but a surge in credible violent threats stemming from the site.

“As Kiwi Farms has felt more threatened, they have reacted by being more threatening,” Prince said. “We think there is an imminent danger, and the pace at which law enforcement is able to respond to those threats we don’t think is fast enough to keep up.”

Prince said contributors to the forum were posting home addresses of those seen as enemies and calling for them to be shot.

After Cloudflare’s move, visitors to Kiwi Farms were greeted by this message: “Due to an imminent and emergency threat to human life, the content of this site is blocked from being accessed through Cloudflare’s infrastructure.”

In a post on Telegram, Kiwi Farm’s founder, Josh Moon, said Cloudflare made its decision “without any discussion” and said he had not been contacted by law enforcement about threats on the site. “It’s early morning hours here,” the post said. “My thoughts will be articulated better in the morning.”

Kiwi Farms launched in 2013 and quickly grew into a popular internet forum for online harassment campaigns. At least three suicides have been tied to harassment stemming from the Kiwi Farms community, and many on the forum consider their goal to drive their targets to suicide. Members of the LGBTQ community and women are frequent targets.

Sept. 3

 

Jane Fonda, shown in the announcement of a 2020 speech at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

New York Times, Jane Fonda Says She Has Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, Matt Stevens, Dani Blum and Alisha Haridasani Gupta, Sept. 3, 2022 (print ed.). The actress said that she had begun chemotherapy and vowed not to “let any of this interfere with my climate activism.”

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German killed outside home, David Wilson, Sept. 3, 2022. Las Vegas Review-Journal investigative reporter Jeff German, one of Nevada’s most accomplished and trusted journalists, was found dead with stab wounds outside his home Saturday morning.

German, whose work in Las Vegas spanned more than three decades, made a career of breaking big stories about everything from organized crime and government malfeasance to political scandals and the Oct. 1 mass shooting.

“The Review-Journal family is devastated to lose Jeff,” Executive Editor Glenn Cook said. “He was the gold standard of the news business. It’s hard to imagine what Las Vegas would be like today without his many years of shining a bright light on dark places.”

Las Vegas police said Sunday morning the homicide investigation is a top priority for the department.

“LVMPD enacted its major case protocol Saturday in the homicide investigation,” the department said. “This brings together a variety of resources to maximize the investigative effort and apply a sense of urgency to the apprehension of the suspect.”

Police found German, 69, with stab wounds outside of his home. Police believe he was in an altercation with another person on Friday in the late morning that led to him being stabbed.

Koren said the stabbing is believed to be an isolated incident and that there is no threat to the public.

German joined the Review-Journal in 2010 after more than two decades at the Las Vegas Sun, where he was a columnist and reporter who covered courts, politics, labor, government and organized crime. Former Sun reporter and author Cathy Scott said Sunday German labored hard to cover the city and its happenings.

Washington Post, ‘Is there a purge?’: John Harwood’s CNN exit viewed as strategy shift, Jeremy Barr, Sept. 3, 2022. The veteran White House correspondent’s parting words were a defense of an outspoken kind of journalism that CNN insiders think has fallen out of favor under a new boss.

CNN parted ways with veteran White House correspondent John Harwood on Friday in what network insiders viewed as the latest evidence of a shift to a less politically charged tone under new leader Chris Licht, right.

Harwood, who could not be reached for comment, appeared on CNN Friday morning, reporting from the grounds of the White House. But at noon, he announced his departure on Twitter. He wrote that he is “proud of the work” he did at CNN and “[looks] forward to figuring out what’s next.”

Harwood, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter, joined the network in January 2020, after working as CNBC’s chief Washington correspondent from 2006 to 2019. According to two people with knowledge of the situation, Harwood still had time remaining on his CNN contract, which suggests that network brass decided to end his tenure prematurely.

Washington Post, As Biden warned about democracy’s collapse, TV networks aired reruns, Paul Farhi, Sept. 3, 2022. While President Biden warned the nation about threats to democracy in a prime-time address on Thursday, ABC was airing a game show, “Press Your Luck.”

As Biden spelled out his objections to former president Donald Trump and “MAGA Republicans,” NBC was broadcasting a rerun of “Law and Order.” CBS skipped the speech to show a rerun of “Young Sheldon.”

The networks’ rejection of Biden’s speech — delivered in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, washed in dramatic red lighting as Marines stood guard — marked an unusual moment in the long relationship between the White House and the nation’s most powerful broadcasters.

Presidents rarely make speeches during prime TV viewing hours, and typically only do so to address a national crisis or matter of exceptional urgency. The networks, in turn, typically carry presidential speeches when the White House requests the time and after previewing the president’s remarks.

Sept. 1

Washington Post, Twitter is finally testing an edit button, Rachel Lerman, Sept. 1, 2022. Users have been asking for the ability to edit tweets for years. The social media company announced Thursday that employees internally were testing the ability to edit a tweet shortly after its posted.

The feature will expand later this month to subscribers of Twitter’s premium service, called Twitter Blue. The feature has limitations — tweets can only be edited for 30 minutes, and they will be labeled with icon to let others know the tweet has been changed.

 

August

Aug. 31

 

Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Exclusive: Trump left Sarasota media company weeks before federal subpoenas were issued, Chris Anderson, Aug. 31, 2022. Donald Trump removed himself from the board of his Sarasota-based social media company, records show, just weeks before the company was issued federal subpoenas by both the Securities and Exchange Commission and a grand jury in Manhattan.

Trump, the chairman of Trump Media and Technology Group, was one of six board members removed on June 8, state business records show.

Among the board members removed were Kashyap Patel, Trump's former point man in the White House; Scott Glabe, a former assistant to Trump who was counsel for the media company; and Donald Trump, Jr.

The SEC served Trump Media and Technology Group with a subpoena on June 27, according to a regulatory filing. Trump's media company owns Truth Social, an app similar to Twitter. Trump was banned by Twitter for inflammatory remarks concerning the insurrection.

Four days later, on July 1, a grand jury in the Southern District of New York handed the company another federal subpoena, an action that typically means a potential criminal investigation is in progress.

The investigations appear to be related to a proposed merger between Trump's media company and a blank-check company called Digital World Acquisitions Corp., according to a recent regulatory filing.

 

Poynter, After weeks of silence, Gannett revealed that it laid off 400 employees and cut 400 open positions, Angela Fu, Aug. 31, 2022. The round of layoffs, which started Aug. 12, followed a dismal second quarter.

Gannett CEO Mike Reed told staff in a companywide Q&A session Wednesday that Gannett laid off 3% of its U.S. workforce, or roughly 400 employees, in August, according to three people who attended the meeting.

The announcement comes more than two weeks after Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain with more than 200 papers, executed a round of layoffs starting Aug. 12. Though employees and reporters had repeatedly asked Gannett for information about the scope of the layoffs, the company declined to provide that information until now.

CFO Doug Horne, who was also present at the meeting, told staff that in addition to the layoffs, Gannett would not fill 400 open positions. Executives said the company slashed its marketing budget and made other non-payroll cost reductions, according to two people at the meeting. Gannett also reduced its executive team from 10 members to seven as part of a restructuring announced in June.

Spokesperson Lark-Marie Anton confirmed these announcements but declined to comment further on the meeting. She did not answer questions about who was affected by the layoffs or whether Gannett has more cuts planned for the near future.

The August layoffs started just a week after the company announced it had lost $54 million on revenues of $749 million during its second quarter. That day, Gannett Media president Maribel Perez Wadsworth told staff that the company would make “necessary but painful reductions to staffing.”

It remains unclear how many of the 400 layoffs were journalists and which newspapers and departments were affected.

Poynter, which has been tracking the layoffs, has found at least 68 impacted newsrooms, including flagship paper USA Today.

Of the more than 100 layoffs Poynter has tracked, the vast majority affected non-union newsrooms and staff. Unionized newsrooms that are currently bargaining contracts with Gannett were likely protected from layoffs by federal labor law.

A number of executive editors were laid off, as well as journalists who worked with multiple newsrooms. Non-editorial staff were also affected, including employees who worked in administrative positions and customer service. Some of the journalists who were laid off were among the last reporters left in their newsrooms.

Gannett executives at the meeting did not provide detailed information about which positions and publications were hit hardest by the layoffs. Iowa Public Radio previously reported that the regional editor in the Plains Region told her staff that she was instructed to protect larger metro papers, leading to cuts at smaller publications.

Asked if Gannett was committed to its small and medium-sized publications, Wadsworth said at Wednesday’s meeting that local journalism has never been more important and that in order to have strong journalism, the company also had to have a strong business, according to two attendees.

In the days leading up to the layoffs, the Gannett caucus of the NewsGuild, which represents 1,500 journalists across more than 50 newsrooms, called on the company to reduce executive compensation instead of cutting jobs. They drew attention to the fact that Reed had been paid $7.7 million in 2021 while Gannett’s median salary was $48,419. Reed had also bought $1.2 million worth of Gannett stock, or 500,000 shares, immediately before the layoffs.

Executives addressed both of these facts at the Wednesday meeting, according to screenshots of the Q&A transcript reviewed by Poynter.

Horne explained that a large portion of executive compensation is tied to the company’s performance and that the company’s board of directors works with an outside consultant to set executive pay based on market data from comparable companies.

Meanwhile, Reed said that he had bought those shares to show that he believed in Gannett’s mission.

“I believe in what we do every day across the country in our communities,” Reed said. “I believe in our strategy, and I believe our strategy is going to get us to the place we’re trying to go. It’s going to evolve our business, and we’re going to have a long-term, sustainable and growing business. And third, and most important, the reason I made that investment is I believe in you all.”

Those assurances may not be enough for employees. More than a dozen Gannett newsrooms have unionized in recent years. The day before the companywide meeting, journalists at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, announced they were unionizing.

Business Insider, Inside the crisis at 'Reveal' and the Center for Investigaive Reporting after a turbelent summer, Steven Perlberg, Aug. 31, 2022. Layoffs, senior executives quitting, a staff no confidence letter leading to the CEO's departure, and a monthly burn rate of $700k+. It's been a summer of turmoil at the Center for Investigative Reporting / @reveal.

Aug. 29

New York Times, A Who’s Who of Silicon Valley Lawyers Up for the Musk-Twitter Trial, Kate Conger, Aug. 29, 2022. Jack Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, got a subpoena. So did Marc Andreessen, a prominent venture capitalist. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, and the investors David Sacks and Joe Lonsdale received them, too.

They were all summoned to share what they know about the rancorous, knock-down, drag-out tech spectacle of the year: the fight between Twitter and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.

Mr. Musk, right, enthusiastically agreed to buy Twitter in April for $44 billion, but has since tried to back out of the blockbuster deal, leading to lawsuits and recriminations. Both sides are set for a showdown in Delaware Chancery Court in October over whether Mr. Musk needs to stick with the acquisition. The torrent of legal demands in the case has forced a who’s who of Silicon Valley to now lawyer up, creating a heyday for top-tier law firms.

So far, lawyers for Twitter and Mr. Musk have issued more than 100 subpoenas in the battle, targeting big-name banks (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley), high-profile investors (Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia), well-known advisers, prominent companies that employ Twitter’s board members (Salesforce, Mastercard) and members of Mr. Musk’s entourage.

In the scorched earth campaign, the lawyers have even subpoenaed each other.

“Every firm in the Valley is salivating like dogs trying to get in on that action,” said Carol Langford, a professor of legal ethics at the University of San Francisco.

Even for a high-stakes corporate lawsuit, the deluge of paperwork is remarkable, legal experts said. The October trial puts the case on a breakneck timeline, compressing legal work that might normally stretch on for years into just three months. With so much money on the line, both sides have demonstrated a willingness to spend on Hail Mary subpoenas, rather than targeting their requests to just a few insiders.

That helps explain the sheer number of tech VIPs involved.

Washington Post, Advice: Legal betting is splashed all over sports today. Here’s what to know before you try it, Matt Bonesteel, Sept. 3, 2022. Sports gambling has erupted in popularity since the Supreme Court struck down a federal ban in 2018, with the American Gaming Association estimating it brought in $53.03 billion in 2021 — a 21.5 percent increase from 2019, the last year with a non-pandemic sports schedule.

While many fans have jumped right in — or were familiar with sports gambling before it was legalized — others may be interested in taking it up as a hobby but might not know where to start.

Aug. 27

 

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The Real Scandal in Donald Trump’s Historic Theft of Classified Records Is Not What You Think, Seth Abramson, left, Aug. 26-27, 2022. As a Trump biographer who’s written more best-sellers on Trump’s presidency than any other author, I’ve a very different view of the current classified-records scandal involving Trump and Mar-a-Lago.

Introduction: Donald Trump orchestrating a premeditated heist of well over 1,000 pages of highly classified taxpayer-owned government records—along with thousands of additional pages of documents that, while not classified, were both sensitive and not his to take—may be the least surprising thing Trump has ever done in his brief political career.

It’s important for Americans to understand not just that what Trump did is actually—for him—unsurprising, but also why it’s unsurprising.

The real story is a historic heist of classified national security-related information that was premeditated, conducted over the course of two years, and constitutes one of the gravest national security breaches in American history. The real story is that we don’t yet know the motive behind the crime. The real story is a historic heist of this sort of course would not have been undertaken for no reason—but had to have had behind it some sort of personal benefit that neither major media nor federal investigators have yet discovered, and which—candidly—there is no evidence as yet either major media or federal investigators are trying to find out.

Because Trump never told anyone about the declassifications—again, humoring for a moment the idea that any such declassifications ever occurred, even in Trump’s head—he was in fact only accomplishing a single goal in executing such a extraordinarily clandestine executive action. To wit, he was empowering himself to secretly show the documents that he had stolen to persons not otherwise entitled to see them, under circumstances in which he had a legal excuse for doing so if he got caught doing so.

There is, to be clear, no other purpose for a declassification that is known only to the President of the United States and not even a single other attorney, adviser, associate, aide, agent, acolyte, or assistant.

But there’s much more to say here, as in fact the act of fully declassifying a document to publicly viewable status—the sort of declassification Trump avoided here—has one other major result: the destruction of the pecuniary value of the data so declassified.

That is, if you take a classified document and make it public, it no longer can be sold for a profit, as everyone everywhere can access it if they have the time and inclination to track it down and view it.

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).

 

New York Times, Truth Social faces financial peril as worry about Trump’s future grows, Drew Harwell, Aug. 27, 2022. Payment disputes and a dwindling audience have fueled doubts about the former president’s Twitter clone.

Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social website is facing financial challenges as its traffic remains puny and the company that is scheduled to acquire it expresses fear that his legal troubles could lead to a decline in his popularity.

Six months after its high-profile launch, the site — a clone of Twitter, which banned Trump after Jan. 6, 2021 — still has no guaranteed source of revenue and a questionable path to growth, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings from Digital World Acquisition, the company planning to take Trump’s start-up, the Trump Media & Technology Group, public.

The company warned this week that its business could be damaged if Trump “becomes less popular or there are further controversies that damage his credibility.” The company has seen its stock price plunge nearly 75 percent since its March peak and reported in a filing last week that it had lost $6.5 million in the first half of the year.

The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate, fueled a burst of Truth Social user activity, and Trump himself (shown in a recent file photo) has increasingly used the site as one of his main online megaphones. “WE GAVE THEM MUCH,” he said, or “truthed,” on Friday in reaction to an FBI affidavit about classified documents kept at his Palm Beach home.

FBI attacker was prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website

There are signs that the company’s financial base has begun to erode. The Trump company stopped paying RightForge, a conservative web-hosting service, in March and now owes it more than $1 million, according to Fox Business, which first reported the dispute.

The company also has struggled with some basics of corporate operation. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month denied its application to trademark “Truth Social,” citing the “likelihood of confusion” to other similarly named companies, including an app, “VERO — True Social,” first released in 2015.

Representatives from Trump’s company and Digital World did not respond to requests for comment.

RightForge has advertised itself as a pillar of the conservative push to build a parallel internet protected from “Big Tech censorship.” Its chief executive Martin Avila declined to comment and said, “We fully stand behind the president and his endeavors.”

But two people familiar with the dispute, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private details, said the lack of payment had fueled anger that Trump could shortchange a champion of his “free speech” mission.

The Trump company and RightForge have been communicating with each other exclusively through attorneys in recent weeks, the people said. Digital World Acquisition’s stock slid Friday about 7 percent.

Trump’s businesses have faced many similar payment battles over the years. In past SEC filings, Digital World has also noted that “a number of companies that were associated with [Trump] have filed for bankruptcy” and that “there can be no assurances that [Trump’s media company] will not also become bankrupt.”

• Huff Post, Donald Trump's Truth Social App Is Failing Fantastically, Report Says, Ron Dicker, March 30, 2022. The former president's effort to keep his MAGA base talking appears to be cratering.

 

Washington Post, Opinion: Project Veritas, Ashley Biden and the First Amendment, Erik Wemple, Aug. 27, 2022. In November 2021, FBI agents conducted an early-morning search at the home of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe (shown above on one of his many appearances on MAGA platforms) as part of an investigation into Ashley Biden’s stolen diary. In the intervening months, O’Keefe and his lawyers have criticized the FBI and the Justice Department for allegedly heavy-handed investigative measures.

The Justice Department on Thursday delivered a response of sorts, and the particulars don’t look favorable to Project Veritas, a group popular among conservatives for its undercover “sting” videos seeking to expose liberal bias in the media, government and tech worlds.

The upshot: If the government’s version of events is true — its claims have not been tested in court — Project Veritas appears to have a shaky case that all of its activities in the diary saga are protected by the First Amendment.

According to Thursday’s announcement, two Florida residents — Aimee Harris and Robert Kurlander -- pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to transport stolen property, which included a diary purportedly kept by Ashley Biden. “Harris and Kurlander stole personal property from an immediate family member of a candidate for national political office,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. According to a court document filed by prosecutors in connection with the plea, Harris and Kurlander engaged in extensive discussions with an “organization” — known to be Project Veritas — to sell the material.

Herewith a quick summary, based on the document: In June 2020, Harris moved into a Florida house where Ashley Biden previously resided and where she’d left several items, including the diary, for safekeeping. After discovering the items, Harris enlisted Kurlander to sell them. An attempt to peddle them to the Trump campaign failed, so they turned to Project Veritas, which, according to the government, paid for the pair to travel to New York. At a Manhattan hotel, Harris and Kurlander “provided” the items, which included the diary, a digital camera and a drive containing Biden family photos. Harris explained how she’d obtained the materials and noted that there were additional items belonging to Ashley Biden at the Florida residence.

The next part is critical: An employee of Project Veritas, according to the government’s filing, then “asked” Harris and Kurlander to return to the residence “so that they could obtain and provide” more of Ashley Biden’s belongings — a step that the government says Project Veritas took in part to authenticate the diary. Harris and Kurlander complied with this alleged request, and Project Veritas paid them a total of $40,000.

In a November 2021 filing regarding the FBI search, Project Veritas provided its own account, insisting it “had no involvement with how those two individuals acquired the diary.” Instead, it said, “All of Project Veritas’s knowledge about how R.K and A.H. came to possess the diary came from R.K. and A.H. themselves.” Furthermore, the document asserts, the duo indicated that the material was “abandoned” at the house and that both of them had “reaffirmed that they had come to possess the diary lawfully.” After failing to authenticate the diary “to the degree they required to satisfy their journalistic ethics,” Project Veritas’s lawyers wrote, Project Veritas declined to publish it, but attempted to return it to Ashley Biden, and ultimately handed it over to local law enforcement in Florida.

There is little detail in that filing about the specifics of group’s communications with Harris and Kurlander, and no suggestion that they directed the pair to gather additional items from Ashley Biden.

The disclosures in Thursday’s plea documents bear on the legal arguments that Project Veritas asserted at the time of the O’Keefe raid. Back then, lawyers for the organization maintained that O’Keefe (shown in a mugshot years ago from an attempt to compromise the phomes of a Democratic senator's office) & Co. were practicing journalism — and the feds were overreaching. “What the DOJ has done in this case … they have blown federal law, they’ve blown the Constitution, they’ve blown due process and civil rights. … So this is a scandal of epic proportions,” attorney Harmeet Dhillon told host Tucker Carlson at the time. “Every journalist who isn’t worried and concerned about this should hang up their journalism card — ditto all First Amendment lawyers as well.”

As it turns out, no — this was not a scandal of epic proportions.

As for the group’s claim that the First Amendment shields its activities, that’s a complicated question. As this blog has noted before, the Supreme Court has extended First Amendment protections to the publication of information that had been obtained illegally — provided that the news outlet didn’t participate in those illegal activities.

Aug. 26

Science, White House requires immediate public access to all U.S.-funded research papers by 2025, Jeffrey Brainard and Jocelyn Kaiser, Aug. 26, 2022. Policy is a blow to journal paywalls, but its impact on publishing is unclear.

A decades-long battle over how best to provide public access to the fruits of research funded by the U.S. government has taken a major turn.

President Joe Biden’s administration announced yesterday that, by the end of 2025, federal agencies must make papers that describe taxpayer-funded work freely available to the public as soon as the final peer-reviewed manuscript is published. Data underlying those publications must also be made freely available “without delay.”

Many details of the new policy, including exactly how the government will fund immediate public access, remain to be decided. But it significantly reshapes and expands existing—and fiercely contested—U.S. access rules that have been in place since 2013. Most notably, the White House has substantially weakened, but not formally eliminated, the ability of journals to keep final versions of federally funded papers behind a subscription paywall for up to 1 year.

Many commercial publishers and nonprofit scientific societies have long fought to maintain that 1-year embargo, saying it is critical to protecting subscription revenues that cover editing and production costs and fund society activities. But critics of paywalls argue that they obstruct the free flow of information, have enabled price gouging by some publishers, and force U.S. taxpayers to “pay twice”—once to fund the research and again to see the results. Since the late 1990s, the critics have lobbied Congress and the White House to require free and immediate “open access” to government-funded research.

The Biden administration has heeded those pleas, although the new policy does not expressly embrace the term open access—it uses the words “public access.” It is “de facto an open-access mandate,” says Stefano Bertuzzi, CEO of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM), which publishes 16 journals. And many open-access advocates are applauding it.

The embargo and related policies “were pure sellouts of the public interest,” tweeted molecular biologist Michael Eisen of the University of California, Berkeley, a prominent critic of U.S. access policies and co-founder of the PLOS journals, which have helped pioneer an open-access business model in which authors pay a fee to make their papers immediately free to all. “The best thing I can say about this new policy is that publishers will hate it.”

Many publishers say they support a transition to immediate public access but criticized the new U.S. policy. “We would have preferred to chart our own course to open access without a government mandate,” Bertuzzi says. Six of ASM’s journals are already fully open access, with the rest to follow by 2027.

The impact of the new requirement could vary depending on which of the more than 20 U.S. funding agencies underwrite the author’s research. Each agency must finalize its policy by the end of 2024 and implement it by the end of 2025.

The new policy reflects the profound changes that have rocked academic publishing since the U.S. public access debate began in earnest more than 25 years ago. Then, subscription-based print journals were the primary means of disseminating research results, and publishers fiercely resisted any policy change that threatened an often highly profitable business model. But pressure from university libraries tired of paying rising subscription fees, and patient groups angry about having to pay to read taxpayer-funded biomedical studies, helped catalyze serious discussion of policy change. At the same time, the rise of the internet fueled publishing experiments, such as open-access journals and the posting of freely accessible “preprints” that have not been peer reviewed.

Aug. 25

 

New York Times, Sean Hannity and Other Fox Stars Face Depositions in Defamation Suit, Jeremy W. Peters Aug. 25, 2022. The depositions are one of the clearest indications yet of how aggressively Dominion is moving forward with its suit against the media company.

Some of the biggest names at Fox News have been questioned, or are scheduled to be questioned in the coming days, by lawyers representing Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation suit against the network, as the election technology company presses ahead with a case that First Amendment scholars say is extraordinary in its scope and significance.

Sean Hannity became the latest Fox star to be called for a deposition by Dominion’s legal team, according to a new filing in Delaware Superior Court. He is scheduled to appear on Wednesday.

Tucker Carlson is set to face questioning on Friday. Lou Dobbs, whose Fox Business show was canceled last year, is scheduled to appear on Tuesday. Others who have been deposed recently include Jeanine Pirro, Steve Doocy and a number of high-level Fox producers, court records show.

 

InfoWars radio host Alex Jones on Trial in Austin, TX in a civil trial (Pool photo by Briana Sanchez).

New York Times, Alex Jones Accused of Hiding Assets From Sandy Hook Families, Elizabeth Williamson, Aug. 25, 2022. The Infowars fabulist has been funneling millions out of his empire while claiming bankruptcy, the Sandy Hook families suing him say.

News Sandy Hook victims’ families asked a federal bankruptcy court on Thursday to order the Infowars conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones to relinquish control over his company, saying he has “systematically transferred millions of dollars” to himself and his relatives while claiming to be broke.

In a filing in the bankruptcy court in Houston, the families of nine Sandy Hook victims said they sought to have a bankruptcy trustee who is already monitoring the case take control of Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Mr. Jones’s misinformation-peddling media outlet. The families are also seeking a court-appointed oversight committee to restrict Mr. Jones’s ability to control Infowars’s finances.

Mr. Jones’s claimed insolvency is at the heart of his efforts to avoid paying for the damage done by his Sandy Hook lies. Earlier this month, a Texas jury ordered him to pay the parents of a child killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting nearly $50 million in compensatory and punitive damages for spreading the falsehood that they helped stage the massacre.

New York Times, George Foreman Is Accused of Sexual Abuse, David W. Chen, Aug. 25, 2022 (print ed.). Two women filed lawsuits in Los Angeles County alleging that Foreman, a former boxing champion, forced them to have sex with him as minors in the 1970s. Foreman denied the accusations. David W. Chen

Two women filed lawsuits Wednesday in California alleging that George Foreman, the former world heavyweight boxing champion, sexually abused them when they were teenagers in California in the 1970s.

According to the lawsuits, the women, using the pseudonyms Gwen H. and Denise S. to protect their identities, initially met Foreman, shown on his Twitter portrait, when they were under 10 years old through their fathers. One man was a boxer and sparring partner of Foreman, while the other was a boxing manager and longtime adviser to Foreman.

Foreman then groomed the girls for several years, according to the complaints, before forcing them to have sex with him in places ranging from a San Francisco hotel to an apartment in Beverly Hills. The two women, who are both in their early 60s, filed the complaints in Los Angeles County Superior Court.

Representatives for Foreman referred inquiries about the lawsuits — in which he is identified only as “DOE 1” — to a statement he released last month, announcing that he was anticipating a lawsuit.

“Over the past six months, two women have been trying to extort millions of dollars each from me and my family. They are falsely claiming that I sexually abused them over 45 years ago in the 1970s. I adamantly and categorically deny these allegations,” Foreman said.

He added: “I will work with my lawyers to fully and truthfully expose my accusers’ scheme and defend myself in court. I don’t pick fights, but I don’t run away from them either.”

The claims were filed under a California law allowing survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file civil lawsuits. The law, which went into effect in January 2020 and expires at the end of 2022, has resulted in thousands of claims accusing coaches, teachers, clergy and others of sexual abuse.

While numerous claims have been settled, only a few have gone to trial. 

New York Times, Djokovic, Still Unvaccinated, Says He Will Miss U.S. Open, Matthew Futterman, Aug. 25, 2022. Novak Djokovic, who has had Covid-19 at least twice, said he could not travel to New York. The U.S. restricts entry for unvaccinated foreigners.

In January, Novak Djokovic, right, went before a panel of judges in Australia, seeking special permission to play tennis in the country while being unvaccinated against Covid-19. After a last-ditch hearing, he was turned away.

Since then, countries like France and Britain have relaxed their travel restrictions, which allowed Djokovic, who has had Covid-19 at least twice but has steadfastly refused to get vaccinated, to compete. Yet on Thursday, Djokovic was forced to withdraw from the U.S. Open. Still not vaccinated, he was not allowed to come to New York.

The United States has lifted many of its restrictions related to the coronavirus and travel, but unvaccinated foreigners are still not allowed to enter the country, leaving one of the top stars in men’s tennis unable to play in one of the most important tournaments of the year.

Aug. 23

New York Times, Twitter’s Former Security Chief Accuses It of ‘Egregious Deficiencies,’ Lauren Hirsch and Kate Conger, Aug. 23, 2022. A whistle-blower’s complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department come at a perilous time for the social network.

Twitter’s former head of security has accused the company of “extreme, egregious deficiencies” in its spam- and hacker-fighting practices, according to a whistle-blower complaint.

The complaints by Peiter Zatko, the former executive, said that the shortcomings in enforcing security, privacy and content moderation policies dated to 2011. Mr. Zatko, a well-known hacker who is known in the security community as Mudge, joined Twitter in late 2020 and was terminated by the company in January.

His complaints were sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission on July 6. They were first reported by The Washington Post and CNN.

Aug. 22 

New York Times, Chief of Israeli Spyware Firm NSO to Step Down as It Revamps, Kalley Huang, Aug. 22, 2022 (print ed.). The chief executive of the Israeli spyware company NSO Group is stepping down as part of a corporate reorganization to focus on business with member countries of NATO, the company said in a statement on Sunday.

The reorganization comes after the United States government blacklisted NSO Group last November over its spyware Pegasus. When announcing the blacklisting, the Biden administration said that NSO Group had acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

The move, which barred American companies from doing any business with the Israeli firm, followed reports by a coalition of news organizations last July that governments used Pegasus to target journalists, dissidents and opposition politicians in countries including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.

“The company is reorganizing to prepare for its next phase of growth,” said Shalev Hulio, NSO Group’s chief executive and one of its three co-founders.

Pegasus can covertly and remotely extract everything from mobile phones — including messages, photos, videos and contacts — without users having to click on a phishing link to provide access. It also can turn a mobile phone into a listening and tracking device.

NSO Group says it sells its spyware to law enforcement and intelligence agencies to help to prevent crime and terrorism.

Yaron Shohat, NSO Group’s chief operating officer, will lead the company and manage its reorganization until a successor is found for Mr. Hulio, the company said.

This is not the first time Mr. Hulio has given up the top job. He stepped down late last year and was replaced by NSO’s co-president, Isaac Benbenisti. But Mr. Benbenisti resigned less than two weeks afterward, following NSO Group’s addition to the American blacklist.

Aug. 21

 

CNN "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter, fired this week by new management at CNN that also cancelled his long-running show on Sundays, speaks at the National Press Club on April 25, 2019 (Justice Integrity Project photo by Andrew Kreig).

Politico, Stelter on CNN: ‘I’m going to be rooting for this place for the rest of my life,’ Olivia Olander, Aug. 21, 2022. “So much of the media ecosystem in 2022 is garbage, but so much of it is spectacular,” Stelter said in his closing remarks to the canceled “Reliable Sources.”

“Reliable Sources” host Brian Stelter said he’ll be “rooting for” CNN for the rest of his life as he signed off his final broadcast Sunday, following the show’s cancellation this week.

“So much of the media ecosystem in 2022 is garbage, but so much of it is spectacular,” he said in his closing remarks. “The hard part is sorting out the treasure from the trash.”

The network announced Thursday that “Reliable Sources” had been canceled after three decades, and that Stelter, who had hosted the show since 2013, will depart the network. The host thanked CNN’s current leadership “for letting us say goodbye,” and also thanked former CNN President Jeff Zucker by name.

“I’m going to be rooting for this place for the rest of my life,” Stelter said at one point.

Stelter and his guests on the final broadcast both reflected on changes in media since the show premiered in 1992, and on how news media might look in the future.

“It’s loony to say the media is the enemy of the people. The media is the people,” Stelter said, addressing developments in media in the last 30 years. “And people are flawed, and opinionated, and hopeful, and believing in accountability.”

Stelter hosted journalist Carl Bernstein on Sunday’s program, as well as media critics Eric Deggans, Jodie Ginsberg and David Zurawik. Journalist Brian Karem, who was the first guest on “Reliable Sources” in 1992, also made an appearance as the last guest.

Washington Post, Perspective: My final column: 2024 and the dangers ahead, Margaret Sullivan, right, Aug. 21, 2022. Before signing off, Margaret Sullivan offers advice to her fellow journalists on how to cover a perilous election.

After a recent announcement that I’ve decided to retire this column and leave The Post, a Vanity Fair reporter asked me by email about the media’s performance in covering threats to democracy. That certainly was a fair question, since it’s been one of my most frequent subjects here.

I’m “encouraged one day, despairing the next,” I told her, adding that the next election cycle is going to be a real test for the reality-based press.

This is my last column for The Washington Post — my plans include teaching at Duke University and publishing a book this fall, both a personal memoir and a tell-all about what I’ve seen in my four decades in journalism. So I’ll explain more about what I meant.

Here’s the good news: The media has come a long, long way in figuring out how to cover the democracy-threatening ways of Donald Trump and his allies, including his stalwart helpers in right-wing media. It is now common to see headlines and stories that plainly refer to some politicians as “election deniers,” and journalists are far less hesitant to use the blunt and clarifying word “lie” to describe Trump’s false statements. That includes, of course, the former president’s near-constant campaign to claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to prevent him from keeping the White House.

And yet, I worry that it’s not nearly enough. I don’t mean to suggest that journalists can address the threats to democracy all by themselves — but they must do more.

The deeper question is whether news organizations can break free of their hidebound practices — the love of political conflict, the addiction to elections as a horse race — to address those concerns effectively.

For the sake of democracy, they must.

So my prescription — and it’s only a start — is less live campaign coverage, more context and thoughtful framing, and more fearless straight talk from news leaders about what’s at stake and why politics coverage looks different. The latter could take many forms: editors’ notes on stories, columns written by news directors and posted prominently on websites, public appearances, and more.

New York Times, A Former Fox News Insider Spills the Beans, Blake Hounshell and Jeremy W. Peters, Aug. 20, 2022 (print ed.). Chris Stirewalt (shown above in testimony this year before the House Jan. 6 committee) was part of a pivotal decision to declare Joe Biden the winner of Arizona in 2020. Now he’s speaking out about a network he says incites “black-helicopter-level paranoia and hatred.”

After a decade at Fox News, Chris Stirewalt was suddenly shown the door in January 2021, becoming a casualty of restructuring — or, at least, that was how Fox described his and other layoffs that swept out longtime journalists who were part of the network’s news division.

Stirewalt, who was part of the team at Fox News that projects election results and who testified before the House Jan. 6 committee this summer, suspects there was a bigger reason behind his firing, which he explains in his new book, Broken News: Why the Media Rage Machine Divides America and How to Fight Back, to be released next week.

“I got canned after very vocal and very online viewers — including the then-president of the United States — became furious when our Decision Desk was the first to project that Joe Biden would win the former G.O.P. stronghold of Arizona in 2020,” Stirewalt writes.

Coming at 11:20 p.m., well before the other networks declared that Biden would win the state, the Fox call was extremely controversial and consequential. It infuriated Donald Trump and threw a wrench into his attempt to falsely declare himself the winner of the 2020 election. He ordered his campaign aides to demand that Fox retract the call, to no avail.

Despite the pressure to reverse its decision, and the ratings crash Fox suffered in the next few weeks after Trump urged people to watch other networks, the network didn’t buckle because the Decision Desk analysts insisted that the data backed up their projections. And they were right.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said, “Chris Stirewalt’s quest for relevance knows no bounds,” and disputed the idea that his departure from the network had anything to do with the Arizona call. She added that Arnon Mishkin, the head of the Decision Desk, would be returning for the November midterm elections.

Aug. 20

 

U.S. House Jan. 6 insurrection investigating committee members Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Jamie Raskie (D-MD) are shown, left to right, in a file photo.

 Washington Post, Lawmakers demand data noting uptick in social media posts ‘calling for civil war,’ Cat Zakrzewski, Aug. 20, 2022. House Oversight Committee leaders called on eight social networks, including Meta, Truth Social and Gab, to turn over details about how they’re responding following the FBI search of former president Donald Trump’s residence.

House Oversight Committee leaders are demanding social media companies take “immediate action” to address a flood of violent online threats against law enforcement, following the FBI’s search of former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.

The lawmakers sent letters Friday to the executives of eight social media companies, including Facebook parent company Meta and the fringe right-wing platform Gab, demanding details about the number of threats against law enforcement. The letters cite a “spike in social media users calling for civil war” and other violence against law enforcement after Trump and some Republican members of Congress lashed out against the FBI.

The letters say these online threats have contributed to attacks against law enforcement, citing the threats that the gunman who tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office earlier this month shared on Trump’s social network, Truth Social.

“We are concerned that reckless statements by the former president and Republican Members of Congress have unleashed a flood of violent threats on social media that have already led to at least one death and pose a danger to law enforcement officers across the United States,” said the letters written by House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and House national security subcommittee Chairman Stephen F. Lynch (D-Mass.). “We urge you to take immediate action to address any threats of violence against law enforcement that appear on your company’s platforms.”

FBI attacker was prolific contributor to Trump’s Truth Social website

The letters request information about how the companies respond to threats of violence, including how many threats against law enforcement were removed and how many were reported to authorities. The lawmakers also ask for plans to ensure platforms aren’t used to incite further violence against law enforcement, and for documents about any advertising that appeared alongside violent comments.

Lawmakers also sent letters to executives from Twitter, TikTok, Truth Social, Rumble, Gettr and Telegram, canvassing mainstream social networks, as well as alternative social networks favored by Trump’s supporters.

Law enforcement leaders have been sounding the alarm about threats to federal agents for a week, as top GOP leaders have accused the FBI, without evidence, of carrying out a politicized attack on Trump. The politicians have tapped into long-running hostility among Trump and his followers toward arms of the federal government, which some call the “Deep State.” The FBI and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint bulletin last week warning about an “increase in violent threats posted on social media against federal officials and facilities.”

Aug. 19

New York Post, Daily News union rips owner over work conditions, staff ‘quitting in droves,’ Alexandra Steigrad, Aug. 19, 2022 (print ed.). The New York Daily News union slammed the vulture hedge fund that owns the 102-year-old newspaper for unsustainable work conditions that have left the remaining staff “hanging by a thread.”

The union, which represents most of the skeleton staff left at the paper, called out Alden Global Capital for causing burned-out workers to “quit in droves,” in a series of tweets Thursday.

“Twelve journalists have resigned from the Daily News over the last three months. That’s about 20% if our newsroom. Staffers are quitting in droves. Our owners — Alden Global Capital — don’t seem to care. New York City should care,” the union tweeted.

The paper is down to “two staff reporters to chase crimes on the street” and the few editors remaining are struggling to put out daily editions, the union said.

“Our sports department has been gutted. We lost our longtime back page editor. Our Metro editor left,” the union wrote. “We were already hanging on by a thread after Alden issued buyouts last year. Now we can barely put out the paper.”

A source close to the situation estimated that staff headcount is in the mid-40-range. Just a year ago, the News had a staff of around 70 despite an exodus of top editors and reporters following Alden’s purchase of the paper from Tribune Publishing.

Andrew Julien, the Alden-installed executive editor, pushed back against the union’s gripes.

“While a number of staffers have recently moved on to outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, ESPN and Fox Sports, we have already filled a number of those openings and are actively recruiting for the others,” Julien told The Post. “Any comments suggesting otherwise from unions trying to negotiate on social media should be taken with a grain of salt.”

In its Twitter rant, the union said readers have noticed the poor quality of the newspaper, sending in letters “begging” them to “not just restore coverage” but “expand” the paper to “better serve New Yorkers.”

The union included screenshots from readers, criticizing the high $3 cover price for the much-thinner newspaper, as well as articles that are filled with typos.

One angry reader wrote: “Each day, there are so many typos because you don’t proofread what your reporters write. The News should have a contest among its readers as to who can find the most typos each day.”

A Daily News insider told The Post that the crux of the problem is that Alden’s “expectations are ridiculous.”

Those demands include “filling the paper with no staff, making reporters take on numerous beats that used to be separate, and relying on freelancers and super young cheap reporters,” the source said.

At one point, one editor was laying out the entire paper seven days a week, the insider added.

“It’s not sustainable and there’s no future for anyone there,” the source said.

The Post reached out to the union for comment.

The paper’s daily print circulation has plummeted to 55,653 — an 18% decline from 2021 — according to the Alliance for Audited Media. At its peak, the tabloid sold 2.4 million papers a day.

Alden acquired the paper — along with Tribune’s other famed titles like the Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, Hartford Courant and Chicago Tribune — in a deal worth $633 million in 2021. The hedge fund owns about 200 newspapers around the country and is infamous for slashing staff and selling off assets like real estate and printing presses.

It has followed a similar playbook at the Daily News, the nation’s first tabloid which was once home to legendary columnists like Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.

Shortly after taking control, Alden replaced editor in chief Robert York with Julien, the editor and publisher of its sibling publication, the Hartford Courant. Sources told The Post at the time that the changes were cost-saving measures to boost profitability.

The tabloid, which bills itself as New York’s Hometown Newspaper, doesn’t even have a home for its staff after the company gave up its lease in lower Manhattan during the pandemic. It has no plans to find a new space, sources said.

Earlier this year, Alden outsourced the Daily News’ printing operations to the North Jersey Media Group, which prints the Bergen Record, the Herald News of Passaic County and the Daily Record of Morris County.

Washington Post, Perspective: Deshaun Watson is the star the NFL deserves: A cynical, empty narcissist, Sally Jenkins, right, Aug. 19, 2022 (print ed.). The NFL has a terminal contempt for little people. It specializes in the abuse of the powerless with impunity, and Deshaun Watson’s light suspension and mock penitence, which he couldn’t sustain for even a full sentence, was just another take-us-for-fools offense. Never has the syndrome been more apparent than in Watson’s head-clutching double talk following the announcement he will sit out 11 games and pay a $5 million fine. His non-apology was so sourly cynical and canned, such a combination of bad faith and bad breath, that it made you long for a Listerine rinse.

He’s sorry. No, he isn’t. He has learned. No, he hasn’t. He takes responsibility. No, he doesn’t. Watson’s utterly insincere written apology after allegedly exposing himself and perving on female massage therapists included everything but a dab at the eyes as he promised to work to become “the best version of myself on and off the field.” Blech. Then he held a news conference and contradicted all of it with a casualness that made it clear it was just hygiene theater.

“I’ve always stood on my innocence and always said I’ve never assaulted anyone or disrespected anyone,” Watson said. “…I’m going to continue to stand on my innocence.”

The Atlantic, Commentary: How to Kill a Newspaper, Andrew Travers (the former editor of The Aspen Times), Aug. 18-19, 2022. How a Soviet-born developer and a West Virginia billionaire destroyed a 141-year-old Colorado newspaper.

Here in Aspen, the air is thin, the snow is perfect, and money is everywhere. This is a singular American town in many respects. Among them is this: Aspen had, until very recently, two legitimate daily newspapers, The Aspen Times and the Aspen Daily News. At a moment when local newspapers face manifold threats to their existence and more and more American cities become news deserts, Aspen was the opposite: a news geyser.

I joined The Aspen Times as an editor in 2014, after a seven-year tenure at the Aspen Daily News. The Times has published since 1881, when Aspen was a silver-mining boomtown, through its postwar rebirth as a ski resort, and now as the home of ideas festivals, wine festivals, $50 entrees, and an awe-inspiring collection of private jets, many owned by billionaires deeply concerned about climate change. The paper, which was based for much of its history in a purple-painted building between a drugstore and the Hotel Jerome, developed a reputation for shoe-leather reporting and accountability journalism.

On Thanksgiving 2021, the start of ski season, the Times editorial team numbered 13, including four reporters who had been covering our town since at least the 1990s. We were treated well by our parent company, Swift Communications. Our paper was profitable, owing largely to real-estate advertising. We seemed to be a safe harbor for small-town journalists.

We were wrong.

My story is populated by blue bloods and thin-skinned billionaires, including the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a litigious Soviet-born developer, and the wealthy cousin of a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Aspen is strange, but this is a story that could actually take place anywhere. It’s about what happens to the public interest when billionaires collide, and when newsrooms are bullied into suppressing coverage by people with great mountains of money and battalions of lawyers. And it speaks to a deepening crisis for the free press, which has been comprehensively betrayed in Aspen.

Aug. 18

Ars Technica, Commentary: Loathsome anti-vax group run by RFK Jr gets Meta permaban — finally, Ashley Belanger, Aug. 18, 2022. [On Aug. 17],  the anti-vaccine group the Children’s Health Defense celebrated the spread of poliovirus in New York, mocking health officials spreading awareness that polio is vaccine-preventable.

Today [Aug. 18], CHD reports that the group was also permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram yesterday. A screenshot of Meta’s notification in its press release says that the ban is due to CHD’s practice of spreading "misinformation that could cause physical harm."

A Meta spokesperson tells Ars that Meta “removed the Instagram and Facebook accounts in question for repeatedly violating our COVID-19 policies.”

CHD says the ban came “without warning,” cutting the anti-vax group off from hundreds of thousands of followers on both social media platforms. Denying allegations that the group spreads misinformation, CHD suggested instead the ban is connected to CHD’s lawsuit against Meta that questions the validity of how Facebook and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention label health misinformation. The group's legal counsel in that lawsuit, Roger Teich, suggested that the ban was improper.

“Censorship is not only unconstitutional, it’s un-American,” Teich said in the press release.

CHD founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr .— who, as AP reported, likens getting vaccines to "drinking Kool-Aid" — seemed to suggest that Meta was retaliating against CHD on behalf of the CDC: “Facebook is acting here as a surrogate for the federal government’s crusade to silence all criticism of draconian government policies,” Kennedy (shown in a file photo by Gage Skidmore at right) said in the press release.

Meta’s move comes after years of tension with CHD over its content. Back in 2019, researchers identified CHD as the single leading source of anti-vax ads on Facebook. It has taken the entire pandemic to get to the point of banning the account.

Meta's not the only social media platform that has pushed back on CHD's misinformation. Last year, YouTube banned CHD, among other anti-vax accounts, for claiming the COVID-19 vaccine was ineffective. In 2021, Meta also made headlines when Instagram banned Kennedy’s account “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines."

Although CHD said it had no warning, Vice reported that CHD shared in an email newsletter that this week’s permanent ban followed a temporary 30-day ban: “​​Despite not posting content on Facebook for the past 21 days due to an existing 30-day ban, and constantly self-censoring our content in an attempt to avoid continual shadow-banning and censorship, both pages were abruptly de-platformed. Removing CHD accounts is evidence of a clearly orchestrated attempt to stop the impact we have during a time of heightened criticism of our public health institutions.”

Meta tells Ars that before any ban, Meta uses “a strike system to count violations” so it can hold accountable “those who continue violating” any Meta policies. Accounts are restricted or disabled “based on the number and nature of the strikes it accrues.”

 

CNN "Reliable Sources" host Brian Stelter, fired this week by new management at CNN that also cancelled his long-running show on Sundays, speaks at the National Press Club on April 25, 2019 (Justice Integrity Project photo by Andrew Kreig).

New York Times, Brian Stelter Leaving CNN After Cancellation of ‘Reliable Sources,’ Benjamin Mullin, Aug. 18, 2022. Chris Licht, the new chairman of CNN, has told employees that he is retooling the network’s programming.

Brian Stelter, the top media reporter at CNN, is leaving the network after executives decided to cancel his Sunday show, “Reliable Sources,” in one of the first big programming moves under new leadership at the company.

The final edition of the show will be on Sunday, a spokesman for CNN said on Thursday.

The cancellation of “Reliable Sources” — a show that has aired for about three decades — is a striking change by Chris Licht, the new chairman of CNN, who took over this spring after the sudden resignation of Jeff Zucker. Mr. Zucker left after failing to disclose a romantic relationship with another top CNN executive.

Under Mr. Licht, right, CNN has eschewed the “breaking news” banners that once heralded stories large and small, and political news shows have tried to book more conservative voices. He has given few other public clues about any possible broader changes at the cable network.

But leaders of CNN’s new corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, have suggested that they want the network’s programming to have more straight news reporting and fewer opinionated takes from hosts. David Zaslav, the company’s chief executive, has said that he wants a network for both Republicans and Democrats. John Malone, an influential Warner Bros. Discovery shareholder, said that he wanted the network to “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with” in an interview with CNBC last year.

That new focus seemed to put Mr. Stelter, who has been critical of former President Donald J. Trump and his treatment of the press, in possible jeopardy. On average, during that time slot, more people watched Mr. Stelter’s show in recent years than they did MSNBC, but fewer people watched it than Fox News, according to data from Nielsen.

In an email to The New York Times, Mr. Malone said that he had “nothing to do with” the cancellation of Mr. Stelter’s show. Mr. Malone said he wants “the ‘news’ portion of CNN to be more centrist, but I am not in control or directly involved.”

The decision to cancel the show is part of CNN’s “refreshed Sunday lineup,” the company spokesman said on Thursday. The lineup will include a number of new programs, such as “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” an interview program featuring the veteran Sunday show interlocutor.

More changes are expected. Mr. Licht, a veteran producer who helped conceive MSNBC’s popular “Morning Joe” round table, told employees in a town-hall meeting that he intends to be involved in the network’s morning programming. He has also said that he is planning to retool some of the evening programming, including at 9 p.m., where the departure of Chris Cuomo has left a critical gap in prime time.

The company praised Mr. Stelter for his work at the network. “We appreciate his contributions to the network and wish him well as he embarks on new endeavors,” the CNN spokesman said.

The Atlantic, Commentary: How to Kill a Newspaper, Andrew Travers (the former editor of The Aspen Times), Aug. 18, 2022. How a Soviet-born developer and a West Virginia billionaire destroyed a 141-year-old Colorado newspaper.

Here in Aspen, the air is thin, the snow is perfect, and money is everywhere. This is a singular American town in many respects. Among them is this: Aspen had, until very recently, two legitimate daily newspapers, The Aspen Times and the Aspen Daily News. At a moment when local newspapers face manifold threats to their existence and more and more American cities become news deserts, Aspen was the opposite: a news geyser.

I joined The Aspen Times as an editor in 2014, after a seven-year tenure at the Aspen Daily News. The Times has published since 1881, when Aspen was a silver-mining boomtown, through its postwar rebirth as a ski resort, and now as the home of ideas festivals, wine festivals, $50 entrees, and an awe-inspiring collection of private jets, many owned by billionaires deeply concerned about climate change. The paper, which was based for much of its history in a purple-painted building between a drugstore and the Hotel Jerome, developed a reputation for shoe-leather reporting and accountability journalism.

On Thanksgiving 2021, the start of ski season, the Times editorial team numbered 13, including four reporters who had been covering our town since at least the 1990s. We were treated well by our parent company, Swift Communications. Our paper was profitable, owing largely to real-estate advertising. We seemed to be a safe harbor for small-town journalists.

We were wrong.

My story is populated by blue bloods and thin-skinned billionaires, including the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a litigious Soviet-born developer, and the wealthy cousin of a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Aspen is strange, but this is a story that could actually take place anywhere. It’s about what happens to the public interest when billionaires collide, and when newsrooms are bullied into suppressing coverage by people with great mountains of money and battalions of lawyers. And it speaks to a deepening crisis for the free press, which has been comprehensively betrayed in Aspen.

New York Times, Watson Suspended for 11 Games and Fined $5 Million in Sexual Misconduct Case, Jenny Vrentas and Ken Belson, Aug. 18, 2022. The N.F.L. initially sought a yearlong suspension of Deshaun Watson, the Cleveland Browns quarterback, who was accused of misconduct by over two dozen women.

Deshaun Watson, the Cleveland Browns quarterback, agreed to be suspended for 11 games and pay a record $5 million fine after the N.F.L. appealed what many thought was a lenient six-game suspension for accusations by more than two dozen women of sexual misconduct in massage appointments.

The league announced Thursday that Watson must undergo evaluation by behavioral experts, followed by a treatment program. The fine, as well as an additional $1 million each from the league and the Browns, will be donated to groups that work to prevent sexual assault.

The agreed upon penalties, among the most severe in league history, come as the N.F.L. has faced heightened scrutiny over its treatment of women and after backlash to the initial suspension handed down by an arbitrator earlier this month, which some said wasn’t harsh enough to deter others and did not address the scope of accusations against Watson.

• New York Times, Big Ten Signs Record TV Deal for College Conference, Alan Blinder and Kevin Draper, Aug. 18, 2022. The agreement, worth more than $1 billion a year, is split between Fox, NBC and CBS, and is the richest annual deal for any college sports league.

 Washington Post, Anne Frank adaptation, 40 more books pulled from Texas school district, María Luisa Paúl, Aug. 18, 2022. Book challenges are nothing new, but they’ve feverishly ramped up over the past year, as a growing movement on the right embraces them as a political talking point.

An April report from PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, found 1,586 books were banned in 86 school districts from July 2021 to March 2022, affecting over 2 million students. Texas — where a legislator distributed a watch list of 850 books last year — ranked above the 25 other states that have bans, with 713 book bans, according to the report.

Washington Post, Syria denies holding U.S. journalist Austin Tice, who was abducted there a decade ago, Sarah Dadouch, Aug. 18, 2022 (print ed.). Syria denied on Wednesday that it is holding missing U.S. journalist Austin Tice, who was abducted in Syria a decade ago at the height of the civil war that has torn apart the country.

In a statement, the Foreign Ministry addressed President Biden’s claim last week that Tice is being held by the Syrian government, calling it “invalid accusations against the Syrian government of kidnapping or arresting U.S. citizens, among them Austin Tice, a service member in the U.S. Army.” It added that Tice and others had entered illegally.

“Syria emphasizes that any official dialogue or communication with the U.S. government side will only be public and based on the rule of respecting the sovereignty and independence and unity of the Syrian Arab Republic’s land,” the statement said.

It also placed the fault squarely on the U.S. government, saying it had broken the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations when it “not only turned a blind eye but encouraged tens of U.S. citizens to travel to Syria and enter its lands illegally and without permission from its government, through nonofficial border crossings or by sneaking into areas that are controlled by terrorist armed groups.”
Freelance journalist Austin Tice. (Fort Worth Star-Telegram/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)

Tice, left, was abducted in Damascus on Aug. 14, 2012, just days after his 31st birthday. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps and later became a journalist covering Syria, including for The Washington Post.

“We know with certainty that he has been held by the Syrian regime,” Biden said in a statement on Aug. 10. “We have repeatedly asked the government of Syria to work with us so that we can bring Austin home.”

In early May, Biden met with Tice’s parents, Marc and Debra, and promised to work on securing his release.

“The Tice family deserves answers, and more importantly, they deserve to be swiftly reunited with Austin,” Biden said. “We stand with Austin’s many loved ones, and we will not rest until we bring Austin home. Ten years is far, far too long. So is every additional day.”

Tice was last seen in a video posted on YouTube soon after his disappearance showing him blindfolded and being led through rugged terrain by armed men in white robes.

Tice served as a Marine in Iraq and Afghanistan and then graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He attended the law school there until 2012, when he decided to cover Syria as a freelance journalist.

Journalists covering the conflict without invitation from the Syrian government had to enter the country illegally through Turkey or other neighboring countries. Tice won a Polk Award for his reporting on the war for McClatchy newspapers.

In August 2020, Kash Patel, the U.S. counterterrorism chief, and Roger D. Carstens, the presidential envoy for hostage affairs, traveled to Damascus in the first contacts between the two governments in 10 years. They brought up Tice, but Syrian media said officials refused to discuss the case until the United States agreed to discuss its withdrawal from the country.

Aug. 17

Washington Post, Vance, DeSantis rally puts ‘highly unusual’ restrictions on press, Jeremy Barr, Aug. 17, 2022 (print ed.). Journalists must agree to give access to their footage to the event organizer, pro-Trump GOP youth group Turning Point Action, and explain how they intend to use it

Journalists hoping to cover a Republican rally featuring Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, right, and Senate candidate J.D. Vance in Ohio will have to agree to give organizers access to any footage they take, and could face questions about what it will be used for.

That is among the controversial restrictions placed on journalists as a condition of receiving a press pass to cover Friday’s event, which is being organized by Turning Point Action, a conservative nonprofit led by activist Charlie Kirk.

The press policy also restricts journalists to specific events and parts of the venue, and bars them from recording speakers who do not wish to be filmed. Turning Point Action has warned that violators could be kicked out of the event.

“These are highly unusual conditions,” according to Monica Nieporte, the president and executive director of the Ohio News Media Association, which represents outlets across the state.

In particular, Nieporte called out organizers’ demand for access to journalists’ footage — something that many newsrooms would consider an attempt to meddle with coverage. “We do not agree that the Unite & Win Rally has any standing to be asking for blanket access to the content that is created by journalists in exchange for permission to cover their event,” she told The Washington Post. “The journalists work for their media outlet and not for the Vance campaign. Their content is owned by their employer.”

She said her group has not been asked by member organizations to fight the restrictions, but she warned: “We strongly discourage our members from agreeing to any conditions which could lead to their content being censored or altered by a third party not affiliated with their media outlet.”

Kirstin McCudden, vice president of editorial for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Turning Point Action’s demand that journalists explain and provide access to their footage “runs contrary to the role of the media as objective watchdogs” — though she said it’s becoming more common as a way to shield politicians from the press.

“Unfortunately, it’s the public electorate that loses when journalists can’t freely cover candidates,” McCudden added.

Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point Action, said the press pass preconditions “protect the organization from being taken advantage of by organizations or companies — usually non-traditional press — that don’t intend to report on the event at all, but rather want to monetize raw footage/pics. These policies also maintain guest and speaker privacy in green rooms, backstage, etc., and protect our underage attendees.”

“That said,” he added, “we frequently [waive] certain clauses for legitimate press outlets that are covering the event in good faith, as we’ve offered to do with Washington Post reporters for the very events in question.”

The restrictions were met with outrage on social media from some journalists who cover Ohio and national news.

 

 

Former president Donald Trump's golf bag and towel are seen during the pro-am of the LIV Golf tournament at his club in Bedminster, N.J. (Photo by Seth Wenig for the Associated Press).

Politico, Saudi golf venture LIV quietly enlisted the help of a global PR titan, Hailey Fuchs and Daniel Lippman, Aug. 17, 2022 (print ed.). An Edelman subsidiary wrapped up a contract with the highly-criticized venture earlier this year. The project was never filed with the Justice Department.

The arrangement illustrates the degree to which LIV Golf has been able to lean on establishment institutions and professionals even amid a controversial rollout of a tour that has roiled professional golf and captured lawmakers’ attention in Washington.

As the Saudi-backed LIV Golf tournament prepared for its launch this year, it quietly contracted the public relations giant Edelman for help.

The relationship, which ended in March, was never filed with the Department of Justice under foreign lobbying rules.

Another reason it never surfaced was because it was done through subsidiaries. United Entertainment Group, a marketing agency under Daniel J. Edelman Holdings, was contracted by golf marketing firm Performance54 to help launch LIV Golf.

The arrangement illustrates the degree to which LIV Golf has been able to lean on establishment institutions and professionals even amid a controversial rollout of a tour that has roiled professional golf and captured lawmakers’ attention in Washington. Ari Fleischer, who was press secretary in the Bush White House, has done public relations work for LIV, and former President Donald Trump has offered his own endorsement of the tour — by holding an event at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club in late July. Trump National Doral will also host the tour in October.

In recent months, the tour has created a schism in the golf world, as a number of major PGA players have decamped for LIV Golf, enticed by hefty prize money and other perks. It also has faced a barrage of allegations of “sportwashing,” or using sports to boost one’s reputation, amid a wave of criticism over its human rights record. In July, months after the Edelman work ended, the National Press Club explicitly called on public relations firms to reject Saudi “blood money” and abstain from accepting a contract with LIV Golf.

Edelman, one of the country’s largest PR firms, has worked in the past for the PGA Tour, which declined to comment for this story.

According to Department of Justice records, Edelman did not register as an agent for LIV Golf under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which requires certain disclosures for those entities and individuals doing public relations for a foreign principal. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has called for the DOJ to investigate LIV Golf and potential FARA violations around the tour.

In a statement, Kate Meissner, an Edelman spokesperson, said the firm does not currently have a relationship with LIV Golf. However, she confirmed that United Entertainment Group was enlisted by Performance54 for a project last year that has since concluded. Meissner maintained that the project did not fall under FARA requirements.

When asked about the project’s details, she said the firm has “confidentiality commitments with all of our clients and are unable to share specific information.”

Earlier this year, Edelman signed a contract with the Saudi Ministry of Culture, for which the company proposed a PR campaign replete with celebrities and influencers — including actress Priyanka Chopra and DJ Steve Aoki — to sell a positive image of Saudi Arabia. Edelman is also registered to represent the Saudi Data Artificial Intelligence Agency.

In an interview, Bill McCarren, executive director of the National Press Club, emphasized that Edelman did not need the Saudi business and reiterated his group’s call for all PR firms to abstain from working with LIV Golf.

“It suggests that the life and health of journalists is not a major concern for the PR firm,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious that this is an intentional activity to, designed to rehabilitate the Saudi reputation after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi.”

U.S. Intelligence confirmed that top Saudi officials, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were responsible for the 2018 murder and dismemberment of Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist.

Edelman is not the only major public relations firm that has worked for a Saudi golf client.

Hill+Knowlton Strategies, which is registered to represent the Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information, worked as part of the tournament press team for the February 2022 Saudi International tournament, which is not a LIV event. In an email obtained by POLITICO, a Hill+Knowlton employee offered support for travel and accommodation for a reporter to attend.

In recent weeks, controversy around the LIV golf series increased after a number of family members of 9/11 victims urged Trump to cancel the scheduled tournament at his New Jersey golf club. They noted Trump had previously cast blame on Saudi Arabia for the terrorist attacks and that it was “incomprehensible to us that a former president of the United States would cast our loved ones aside for personal financial gain.”
Saudi golf venture LIV quietly enlisted the help of a global PR titan.

New York Times, 10 Years After Disappearing in Syria, Freedom Is Elusive for U.S. Journalist, Raja Abdulrahim, Aug. 17, 2022 (print ed.). There are signs that efforts to free Austin Tice, below at left, who disappeared in Syria in 2012 and who the U.S. believes is being held by the Syrian government, are reviving. But his family says the U.S. needs to do more.

Ten years after the American journalist Austin Tice disappeared in Syria as the country descended into a brutal civil war, and was believed to have been held captive by the government of President Bashar al-Assad since, his release still remains elusive.

While one of his employers says that efforts to secure his freedom are picking up steam, his family remains unconvinced that the Biden administration is doing enough to push the Syrian government, partly due to the diplomatic complications stemming from the lack of formal relations between the United States and Syria.

McClatchy, the U.S. newspaper company for which the journalist had been freelancing, among others, said this week that a multinational effort to free Mr. Tice is showing signs of revival and that there had been direct contacts between the U.S. and Syrian governments.

A spokeswoman for McClatchy said Monday that the progress was the culmination of intense activity by the Biden administration and the journalism industry leading up to the 10th anniversary of Mr. Tice’s disappearance. But the company’s chief executive, Tony Hunter, has also said recently that there had not been much movement on the issue since May.

“For McClatchy, this anniversary was an opportunity to shine a light on Austin’s decade-long plight,” said the spokeswoman, Susan Firey. “And, in tandem, to shine a light on the decade-long inaction of three administrations.”

Last week Debra and Marc Tice, the parents of Mr. Tice, who disappeared in August 2012 outside Damascus, wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post in which they noted the family weddings, graduations and other family get-togethers their son had missed in 10 years of captivity, and urged President Biden to step up diplomatic efforts to free him.

The United States has “engaged extensively” to get Mr. Tice back to the United States, including by directly contacting Syrian officials and working through third parties, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case. However, the official said the Syrian government has not yet agreed to discuss Mr. Tice’s case.

Last week, President Biden said in a statement that his administration has repeatedly asked Syria’s government to work with them to bring Mr. Tice home.

“On the tenth anniversary of his abduction, I am calling on Syria to end this and help us bring him home,” President Biden said in the statement, adding that the United States was certain that the journalist was being held by the Syrian government.

 

Sacheen Littlefeather, shown at the 1973 Academy Awards (Globe photos via Zuma Press).

Washington Post, Academy apologizes to Native American woman who declined Brando’s Oscar, Julian Mark, Aug. 17, 2022 (print ed.). Sacheen Littlefeather declined the best actor award on Marlon Brando’s behalf in 1973 and gave a speech about the mistreatment of Native people.

The year was 1973. The venue: the Oscars. Marlon Brando had just been named best actor for his portrayal of Vito Corleone in “The Godfather.” But he did not walk onstage to accept the award.

Instead, a 26-year-old woman wearing moccasins and a Native American buckskin dress strode up the steps. After waving away the golden Oscar statuette, she introduced herself as Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache, and said Brando was refusing the award.

“And the reasons for this being, are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry,” she said to a mixture of applause and boos from the audience, adding that the poor treatment extended to television, as well as a tense standoff at Wounded Knee in South Dakota.

She distinctly recalled seeing mouths agape while looking out at the mostly White audience. John Wayne was ready to rush the stage but was held back by security staffers, she said in a recent interview, published in A.Frame. And at Brando’s home after the ceremony, Littlefeather claimed she was shot at.

Aug. 15

 

Frank Gannett (1876-1957), right, founded the newspaper chain that bears his name. Photo (cc) 2009 by History Rewound.

Media Nation, Gannett lays off journalists, closes papers and keeps the numbers to itself, Dan Kennedy, Aug. 15, 2022. What more can be said about the latest round of Gannett layoffs? This one was telegraphed well in advance, and I wrote about what was coming three times (here, here and here) before the hammer finally came down on Friday.

We don’t know the extent of the damage; The Associated Press reported that the “company declined to provide details about the number of people losing their jobs.”

The number 400 has been bandied about, but is that 400 journalists or 400 total employees? In any case, that number has not been verified. We do know that the cuts were broad and deep, from Worcester County, where, according to Grafton Common, the chain’s weekly papers were decimated, all the way up to the flagship paper, USA Today.

Los Angeles Times reporter Jeong Park has provided one way of looking at what happened. Gannett owns about 250 newspapers and other properties, and, before Friday, it employed about 4,000 reporters, editors and photographers. Our three national papers together also employ about 4,000 journalists — The New York Times (1,700), The Washington Post (1,000) and The Wall Street Journal (1,300). And, unlike Gannett, they’re all growing.

Gannett’s losses in the most recent quarter were so vast that it seems likely management will come back for another bite at the apple in a few months. After all, they’ve been on a rampage in Eastern Massachusetts, closing a number of weeklies in 2021 and 19 earlier this year (the company also merged nine papers into four). They’ve pretty much given up on local coverage, too.

Meanwhile, the company’s top executives pay themselves millions of dollars, and even the part-time board members are getting north of $200,000. And it’s been reported that CEO Michael Reed bought another 500,000 shares of Gannett stock last Tuesday, paying $1.22 million.

This feels like the end game, but it probably isn’t. There are always more papers to close, more people to lay off and more websites to strip of any real journalistic content. My heart goes out to the folks who lost their jobs on Friday. I hope they all land on their feet — and I also hope that many of them will look into the possibility of starting independent news projects in the communities they used to cover. The need and the opportunity are there.

Barrett Media, Ronan Farrow: Local News ‘Dying Rather Than Adapting,’ Jonah E. Bromwich and Jan Ransom, Aug. 15, 2022. “It was clear even then — this is the better part of a decade ago now — that there was a real shortfall in that kind of local reporting.”

Ronan Farrow joined The Dan LeBatard Show with Stugotz for an interview released Monday morning, and noted the downfall of local news outlets while discussing his upcoming HBO documentary Endangered.

“When I started out, and I was in network news and in cable news, I really prioritized putting local reporters on and picking up stories that local investigative reporters had done.

“In general, it was clear even then — this is the better part of a decade ago now — that there was a real shortfall in that kind of local reporting. And that is what creates accountability. It’s an institution — journalism, that is — that’s enshrined in the constitution for a reason. Right? It’s specifically protected because it does provide a check on power and corruption. And you see the consequences of an absence of trust in the facts and an absence of good journalism in national politics and you see it locally.”

Farrow pointed out one of the subjects featured in his documentary is Miami Herald photojournalist Carl Juste, and often worried about whether he would still have a job or not, which is something Farrow pointed out many in the media feel.

“There are experiments that seem to be working in how you make national journalism sustainable. There’s contribution based models. There’s things like ProPublica, there’s what The Guardian is doing, there’s subscription based models that are starting to work. The New Yorker has a successful subscription based model. But, fundamentally, local news outlets are just dying rather than adapting is what the numbers show us. Too often.”

According to HBO, the documentary chronicles “a year in the life of four journalists as world leaders denigrate the press, distrust of the media is on the rise, and journalists are facing situations more typically encountered in war zones”.

Aug. 14

New York Times, On TikTok, Election Misinformation Thrives Ahead of Midterms, Tiffany Hsu, Aug. 14, 2022. The fast-growing platform’s poor track record during recent voting abroad does not bode well for elections in the U.S., researchers said.

In Germany, TikTok accounts impersonated prominent political figures during the country’s last national election. In Colombia, misleading TikTok posts falsely attributed a quotation from one candidate to a cartoon villain and allowed a woman to masquerade as another candidate’s daughter. In the Philippines, TikTok videos amplified sugarcoated myths about the country’s former dictator and helped his son prevail in the country’s presidential race.

Now, similar problems have arrived in the United States.

Ahead of the midterm elections this fall, TikTok is shaping up to be a primary incubator of baseless and misleading information, in many ways as problematic as Facebook and Twitter, say researchers who track online falsehoods. The same qualities that allow TikTok to fuel viral dance fads — the platform’s enormous reach, the short length of its videos, its powerful but poorly understood recommendation algorithm — can also make inaccurate claims difficult to contain.

Baseless conspiracy theories about certain voter fraud in November are widely viewed on TikTok, which globally has more than a billion active users each month. Users cannot search the #StopTheSteal hashtag, but #StopTheSteallll had accumulated nearly a million views until TikTok disabled the hashtag after being contacted by The New York Times. Some videos urged viewers to vote in November while citing debunked rumors raised during the congressional hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. TikTok posts have garnered thousands of views by claiming, without evidence, that predictions of a surge in Covid-19 infections this fall are an attempt to discourage in-person voting.

New York Times, How Frustration Over TikTok Has Mounted in Washington, David McCabeAug. 14, 2022. National security concerns over the Chinese-owned viral video app remain unresolved. Lawmakers and regulators are increasingly pushing for action.

Early last year, Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, and Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, met to discuss China and industrial policy. During their conversation, Mr. Rubio raised his worries about Beijing’s influence over TikTok, the Chinese-owned viral video app.

Under former President Donald J. Trump, TikTok had been embroiled in questions over whether it could compromise U.S. national security by sharing information about Americans with China. The issue, which was never resolved, was inherited by the Biden administration. Mr. Sullivan “shared our concerns,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview.

Their discussion was one of many that lawmakers have quietly had with government officials about TikTok since President Biden took office. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said he had also been in “active conversations” with the administration about the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. And regulators and other government officials have been weighing what to do about it after scrutinizing other Chinese firms.

Washington Post, Opinion: How ‘pink slime’ journalism exploits our faith in local news, Ryan Zickgraf (Ryan Zickgraf is a journalist in Mobile, Ala.), Aug. 14, 2022 (print ed.). The 17th-century word “courant,” which once meant “newspaper,” is obsolete, according to Merriam-Webster, except in the rare case of the title of a periodical. Papers with that moniker in their masthead got grandfathered in because they were founded hundreds of years ago. Hearing something called “courant” today, I imagine a time-tested media institution anchored in a specific city or region, such as Connecticut’s Hartford Courant, which is a decade older than the United States government.

At first glance, the Mobile Courant, the site covering my home city of Mobile, Ala., has all the trappings of a traditional community news portal like Hartford’s. It’s got the old-timey-sounding name and familiar sections dedicated to local government, business, real estate and sports.

But that’s a smokescreen. The Mobile Courant not only lacks real-life reporters and editors, but the articles are regurgitated news releases. Clicking on the Politics section directs the reader to word-for-word releases straight from the desk of Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville: “Tuberville Meets with President Biden’s Supreme Court Nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson,” for example, or “Tuberville Veterans Bill Passes U.S. Senate.” Below this, you’ll find a steady stream of Federal Election Commission notifications about individual donations to various Republican politicians, the dull text seemingly optimized for search engines rather than human consumption.

That Democrats don’t seem to exist in the Courant’s world is a feature, not a bug. The Courant is merely one of dozens of networked sites mass-produced by the digital news company Metric Media since 2019. It’s part of a growing right-wing propaganda project cosplaying as a network of nonpartisan local newspapers.

The answer to the media industry’s woes? Publicly owned newspapers.

Ten years ago, I coined the term “pink-slime journalism” to describe the sneaky way companies like Metric Media exploit Americans’ lingering trust in local newspapers to peddle an inferior product. The term is a reference to the controversial paste-like meat byproduct that was, according to reports at the time, supposedly being added to ground beef on supermarket shelves without a label. If the yellow journalism of the 19th century can be defined by the sensationalistic “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality, pink slime is the opposite. It wants to quietly smuggle low-quality pastel goo from a machine into your regular media diet.

Faith in journalism in the age of “fake news” and algorithm-driven misinformation keeps dropping, but polls show that local news is still relatively well-regarded. According to a 2019 Knight Foundation survey, local outlets are more trusted than national organizations by a wide margin — 45 to 31 percent. It’s probably because local news focuses on issues that tend to be nonpartisan: weather, sports, obituaries, local elections. And the staff members are your neighbors and members of your community.

But maybe not for long. As local outlets have disappeared, many have been replaced by algorithmically managed pink-slime outlets that use the good will earned by news institutions of yore to help push political agendas from outside those communities. I know how the sausage is made, because I worked in the proverbial slaughterhouse of Metric Media’s predecessor in the early 2010s. Journatic was a start-up company that borrowed the buzzword-heavy language of Silicon Valley to obfuscate the fact that it wasn’t reinventing newspapers — it was merely disrupting the high cost of labor in the name of saving the industry from bankruptcy.

Poorly paid freelancers replaced staff reporters who had made living wages at newspapers like the Chicago Tribune. Part of my job was to write local news stories for the Houston Chronicle — even though I lived in Chicago — and select fake American-sounding bylines for stories written in virtual sweatshops in the Philippines. A Filipino writer named Junbe, for instance, might be renamed Jimmy Finkel, thanks to a built-in drop-down menu, and Gisele Bautista could instantly become Jenni Cox. These “reporters” earned pennies per story, and much of the content was plagiarized. “It would pay off to have you both write and edit these stories only if you could write the stories in about 90 seconds,” my remote supervisor told me.

The ugly future of corporate media

In June 2012, I collaborated with public-radio reporter Sarah Koenig on an episode of “This American Life” to blow the whistle on Journatic’s shady tactics. The fallout was instant: The Chicago Tribune and others suspended Journatic or ended their contracts. But Journatic’s canny chief executive, Brian Timpone, didn’t fold; he went underground — rebranding the company multiple times in the process.

A few years ago, Timpone switched gears after hooking up with conservative pundit Dan Proft through the Illinois Policy Institute, a right-wing think tank that then had financial ties to Bruce Rauner, Illinois’ recent ex-governor. The pair began building a mini media empire that intentionally put a conservative slant on backyard journalism — the Sinclair Broadcast Group of local newspapers. (Timpone and Proft did not respond to requests for comment sent by email.)

That mission is accomplished if you look at the sheer numbers. Metric Media boasts that it publishes “over 5 million news articles every month” and claims to be “the largest producer of local news in the United States.” A 2020 New York Times investigation pegged 1,300 news sites with Timpone’s fingerprints on them — far outnumbering those of Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain. But because it’s pink-slime journalism, it’s not all under one banner. Many have been laundered through a web of networks with vague names such as LGIS News Service, the Business Journals and Newsinator.

Quantity trumps quality. Nothing written by pink-slime journalism sites will win a Pultizer Prize, but sometimes one of its thousands of articles about a right-wing talking point manages to go viral. That’s certainly true of articles about “critical race theory” and public schools’ alleged “wokeness.”

Most notoriously, an article from a Chicago-based pink-slime site published in May went viral on social media, especially in right-wing circles, because it claimed that suburban school administrators were implementing race-based grading. The article prompted school officials in Oak Park, Ill., to release a statement calling the report “not true,” but days after the story was proved false, right-wing outlets such as One America News were still reporting it as fact.

The Oak Park case is unusual in that it broke through nationally, but it’s not an exceptional incident. A study published by the Popular Information Substack found that 28 pink-slime sites in Virginia published 4,657 articles about critical race theory in schools between January and November 2021 — many of which contained unverified or false information — just in time for the election of Republican Glenn Youngkin, who rode a wave of anti-CRT sentiment to win the governor’s race. It’s difficult to say whether these stories are helping drive the trend or merely mirroring it, but it’s clear that they speak to a partisan political pattern that has little to do with what’s happening on the ground in this or that local community.

Every week, two more newspapers close — and ‘news deserts’ grow larger

As it happens, pink slime’s obsession with liberal ideology in public schools aligns with one of Timpone’s pet peeves. In 2017, he loudly took his kids out of an affluent suburban Chicago public school because of an initiative to hire more non-White teachers. “This is a small group of left-wing activists that want to push their social engineering on the rest of the community,” he said. “They’re sending teachers to indoctrination camps led by race-hustling consultants.”

The response from Democrats has been lackluster. Andrew Yang was the only Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 to make local news subsidies a plank of his campaign, and he’s no longer a Democrat. During that same election cycle, ACRONYM, the left-of-center media nonprofit behind Shadow Inc. — a tech start-up that flubbed the results of the 2020 Iowa caucuses with a glitchy app (and has since rebranded as Bluelink) — funneled $1.4 million into Courier Newsroom, a media company running eight pro-Democratic news websites in key swing states that appear to be respectable local papers with folksy names like Arizona’s Copper Courier and the Keystone in Pennsylvania. Articles such as “Sinema, Kelly, Join Bipartisan Group of Senators on Historic Gun Reform Proposal” and “Phoenix Lawyer Known for Defending Election Integrity, Invest in Ed, Nominated to 9th Circuit” — both written by an undergrad at Arizona State — read like glorified ads for Democrats.

Congress has been in no hurry to help; the Local Journalism Sustainability Act was first introduced in the House nearly two years ago and has languished since then — despite some bipartisan support for what is now a problem that potentially threatens both parties. The bill offers tax credits designed to fund local newspapers and small news nonprofits at a time when pink slime is increasingly the public’s main course instead of an additive.

Here in the Mobile area, where I live, we have zero daily print newspapers for a population of more than 430,000 people. I don’t believe I’m the only one starving for the real thing.

Aug. 10

Mediaite, After Uproar, Washington Post Edits Headline Pointing Out Garland ‘Vowed to Depoliticize Justice’ Before Trump Raid, Zachary Leeman, Aug. 10, 2022. The Washington Post changed a headline on a story covering the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago property after the framing caused backlash on social media.

The original headline for the story read: “Garland vowed to depoliticize Justice. Then the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago.” The Tuesday piece, by Perry Stein, argued Attorney General Merrick Garland has found himself in a “political firestorm” amid the Trump raid and accusations of political bias, bias Garland was clear he would not tolerate when taking office.

Garland, left, promised there would “not be one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans, one rule for friends and another for foes, one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, one rule for the rich and another for the poor, or different rules depending upon one’s race or ethnicity” after be sworn in to his office.

On Wednesday, the Post tweeted a “clarification” to the previous headline.

“Clarification: A previous tweet of this story had a headline that has changed after publishing. We’ve deleted the tweet,” the outlet tweeted. The new headline to the piece reads: “FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago lands Merrick Garland in a political firestorm.”

The Post changed the headline after the original blunt one caused uproar from mostly liberal pundits and commentators.

“Dear dumbass WaPo headline writer who posted this before your Editors changed it. The fact that the target of a search warrant is a former elected official doesn’t mean that DOJ has been ‘politicized.’ They’ve charged former elected officials every month since DOJ’s inception,” commentator Ron Filipkowski tweeted in reaction.

Vanity Fair, “Call It a Self-Imposed Term Limit”: Why Media Critic Margaret Sullivan Is Exiting The Washington Post, Charlotte Klein,
Aug. 10, 2022. After a decade writing columns puncturing — and praising — the press, the ex–New York Times public editor and departing Post columnist will be teaching at Duke and pursuing book projects, including a fictional series about a laid-off local journalist solving crimes.

Margaret Sullivan, right, one of the foremost chroniclers of the media, made headlines of her own on Wednesday after it was announced that she’d be leaving The Washington Post at the end of this month. “Call it a self-imposed term limit!” Sullivan told me over email Wednesday, shortly after the news broke that she’d be retiring her must-read media column after six and a half years. Sullivan has provided incisive analysis and criticism of the industry—and consistently sounded the alarm on the decline of local news—over the course of roughly 500 columns, which, to her, was enough. “I do feel that the media column had run its course,” she said.

Sullivan, a former chief editor of The Buffalo News, came to the Post after a widely respected, four-year tenure as the public editor of The New York Times (which entirely eliminated the in-house critic role less than a year after Sullivan’s successor took over).

How does she feel she’s impacted the industry in her decade writing on it? “I’m not sure it’s possible to make much of an impact. I’ve tried to choose column topics, both at the Post and the Times, that not only interest me but have sort of public-interest value. At its best, journalism is crucial to the way our democracy and our society function—not only in its watchdog role but in fairly and accurately digging out and chronicling what’s going on, especially in government coverage,” Sullivan said.

“So I have pointed out the all-too-ingrained practices that obstruct that common good: the horse race politics coverage; the way we too often treat unequal things as if they were equal, often from a defensive position; the too-frequent anonymity given to sources with highly politicized motives.” She added that she’s “tried to celebrate good work when I see it, which is often. ‘Catch them doing something right’ is the idea there.”

Washington Post, Biden says U.S. knows that Syria is holding Austin Tice, again calls for journalist’s release, Matt Viser, Aug. 10, 2022. President Biden on Wednesday demanded that the Syrian government release freelance journalist and Washington Post contributor Austin Tice, saying that the United States knows “with certainty” that he is being held by their government 10 years after he was abducted.

“We know with certainty that he has been held by the Syrian regime,” Biden said in a statement. “We have repeatedly asked the government of Syria to work with us so that we can bring Austin home.”

This week marks a decade since Tice, right, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps and was also a journalist who had been working and covering the conflict in Syria, was abducted in Damascus on Aug. 14, 2012, days after his 31st birthday. He is one of the longest held American hostages.

Transcript: American Hostage with Debra & Marc Tice, Parents of Austin Tice

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has not acknowledged that his government detained Tice, and other top Syrian officials have denied having custody or any information about him. But Biden made clear in his statement that the United States believes the Syrian government has Tice, and the ability to release him.

National Press Club, Statement on the arrest of José Rubén Zamora, Bill McCarren, Aug. 10, 2022. Following is a statement by Jen Judson, President of the National Press Club and Gil Klein, President of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, on the arrest of José Rubén Zamora, president of the Guatemalan newspaper elPeriódico, on July 29 in Guatemala City.

"The Guatemalan government must immediately release José Rubén Zamora and drop all charges against him. We view these charges, which include money laundering and extortion, as spurious and part of a broader campaign by the government of President Alejandro Giammattei and Attorney General Consuelo Porras to weaponize the judiciary system against those who would expose and root out corruption in the country. Those targeted individuals include independent, crusading journalists like José Rubén Zamora, whose newspaper elPeriódico has reported on wrongdoing inside the Giammattei government.

"We further note with concern Zamora's announcement shortly after his arrest that he would begin a hunger strike in protest of his detention. If Zamora's health deteriorates and his life is put at risk because of this, the international blame and censure that will fall upon the Giammattei government will surely be severe and immense. Over his long and distinguished career, Zamora has been the recipient of multiple international journalism awards including from the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Center for Journalists, and Columbia University.

"Additionally, the National Press Club and its Journalism Institute are worried about the overall deterioration of the press freedom climate in Guatemala. For example Guatemalan authorities in May charged three journalists at elPeriódico, including Zamora, under an anti-female violence law for the alleged psychological crime of reporting on a female government official's links to corruption. And criminal charges brought on seemingly bogus grounds have prompted other Guatemalan journalists, such as Juan Luis Font, to flee the country. We view these developments as part of a broader and deeply concerning pattern in Central America of certain autocratic governments -- resistant to public calls for reform and accountability -- increasingly sharing the same playbook of weaponizing judicial tools of the state to intimidate and silence journalists. If this culture of judicial oppression of the press as well as of civil society and nongovernmental organizations continues to spread, we fear the destabilizing impacts will spread far outside the region."

About The National Press Club: Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. The Club has 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization and is a leading voice for press freedom in the United States and around the world.

Law&Crime, Ohio Supreme Court Allows Oberlin College to Hold Off on Paying $36 Million Defamation Verdict — for Now, Elura Nanos, Aug. 10, 2022. Thanks to the Ohio Supreme Court, Oberlin College does not need to pay up on a $36 million judgment for wrongfully encouraging the boycott of a local bakery just yet. The court issued a stay on Tuesday, meaning that the ultra-progressive college can hold off on paying the massive damages amount until after all appeals are completed.

Conservatives have called the case an example of “cancel culture” at work. The underlying litigation arose just after the 2016 election, when three African-American Oberlin students were arrested for attempting to steal bottles of wine from a local bakery. Oberlin’s Student Senate immediately declared the incident a case of racial profiling, and passed a resolution ceasing all support for the bakery. Oberlin’s administration also got on board with the boycott of Gibson’s Bakery, and a dean of students even handed out flyers which cited Gibson’s history of racial profiling.

In reality, the three students who were arrested had not only tried to shoplift, but had also engaged in physical altercations with Gibson’s staff.

Gibson’s sued Oberlin for defamation, and the jury returned a verdict of $11.2 million — which was later increased threefold plus attorneys fees due to a secondary jury finding that Oberlin had acted with malice.

Oberlin asked the Ohio Supreme Court in June to stay the judgment while its appeal proceeded “out of an abundance of caution.” Gibson’s argued in court that it may be forced to close if Oberlin does not immediately make payment. The court ruled on Tuesday to grant the stay, but offered no written opinion or specific reasoning.

The court’s decision, however, appears to have broken down along political lines. Justices Sharon Kennedy, Patrick Fischer and Pat DeWine were listed as having dissented from the ruling. All three ran as Republicans and are up for reelection this year, and Kennedy is running for Ohio chief justice. If Kennedy prevails, she would replace Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor, a Republican, who cannot seek reelection due to age limits.

O’Connor was one of the justices not listed as a dissenter on the decision to stay the Oberlin verdict. The other members of the court, all of whom voted in favor of the stay are Justices Melody Stewart, Michael Donnelly and Jennifer Brunner, who ran as Democrats. Brunner is also running for chief justice. (See here for more on how justices have been and will be elected in Ohio.)

Aug. 9

 

InfoWars radio host Alex Jones on Trial in Austin, TX in a civil trial (Pool photo by Briana Sanchez).

New York Times, Alex Jones’s Text Messages Turned Over to House Jan. 6 Committee, Luke Broadwater and Elizabeth Williamson, Aug. 9, 2022 (print ed.). The files do not appear to include texts from the time most of interest to the panel: the day of Jan. 6, 2021, and the weeks building up to the attack.

A lawyer for plaintiffs who are suing the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones on Monday turned over more than two years’ worth of text messages from Mr. Jones’s phone to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, including messages that show Mr. Jones was in touch with allies of former President Donald J. Trump.

But the files do not appear to include text messages from the time most of interest to the committee: the day of Jan. 6, 2021, and the weeks building up to the attack, according to people familiar with the document production.

Though the phone data was retrieved in mid-2021, the most recent message is from mid-2020, according to Mark Bankston, who represents Sandy Hook parents suing Mr. Jones for defamation for lies he spread about the 2012 school shooting. That time period is before Mr. Jones became involved in plans to amass a pro-Trump crowd in Washington to march on the Capitol as Mr. Trump fought to remain in office despite his defeat at the polls.

Aug. 8

Washington Post, David McCullough, master chronicler of American history, dies at 89, Glenn Rifkin, Aug. 8, 2022. The two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize was a master storyteller who brought to life the grand sweep of time and place.

David McCullough was a young researcher at the U.S. Information Agency when he walked into the Library of Congress in 1961 and chanced upon a photography exhibit depicting the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pa., the deadliest in American history.

“I was overwhelmed by the violence revealed in them, the destruction,” Mr. McCullough, who was from the same area of western Pennsylvania, later told the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat. More than 2,200 people died, and a thriving coal-and-steel town was submerged in muddy debris because wealthy industrialists had neglected a dam.

The passage of time had reduced the tragedy to a historical footnote, Mr. McCullough discovered, with little if any serious scholarly study devoted to it. Undaunted by his own inexperience — “I imagined myself being a writer, but never a writer of history,” he said — he set out to write a book about the Johnstown flood.

For years, he dedicated his spare time to his research, interviewing the few remaining survivors to capture their memories of sudden terror, desperate acts of self-preservation and the awful duty, in the aftermath, of identifying the dead.

“The Johnstown Flood,” published in 1968, became a bestseller, rekindled national interest in the disaster and instantly established its author as a historian with an exceptional gift for animating history.

 

Former University of Alabama great and NFL coach Ray Perkins as a coach with his Alabama players in 1983 (Associated Press file photo).

New York Times, They Made History at Alabama. But Football Stardom Had a Price, Alan Blinder, Aug. 8, 2022 (print ed.). At least four fixtures of Alabama’s great teams of the 1960s had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., at their deaths. Researchers expect it in other players, too. Near the end, his brain deteriorated after almost a lifetime around football, Ray Perkins was still captivated by the sport.

Perkins, who played and coached at Alabama and led the N.F.L.’s Giants and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, asked once for his whistle. Twice, he clutched his aged briefcase and announced that he had a meeting. Years out of coaching, he sometimes looked through his playbooks anyway.

Then, in the months before his death in 2020 at 79, the Perkins family edged toward letting scientists study his brain once he was gone. The eventual findings were bracingly familiar to experts and players and their families: chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a neurological disorder linked to blows to the head and sometimes seen in men who played elite football.

“In my heart, I knew he had it,” Lisa Perkins, Perkins’s widow, said in an interview with The New York Times, the family’s first public disclosure of the medical history of a man who played at Alabama under Coach Bear Bryant and later succeeded him.

More than a half-century after one of Alabama’s football renaissances began, the cost is edging into view. Pathologists have confirmed in recent years that at least four fixtures of Alabama’s fearsome, Bryant-led teams of the 1960s, including at least one from each of Alabama’s three national-champion squads that decade, developed C.T.E.

The 1965 team, which capped its title run with a victory over Nebraska in the Orange Bowl, had at least three men known to have died with C.T.E., and at least two others whose families would come to think they had developed the disease.

New York Times, In Lawsuits, Ex-Employees Offer Harsh Portrait of Project Veritas, Colin Moynihan and Jonah E. Bromwich, Aug. 8, 2022. One former employee described the conservative group as having a “highly sexualized” atmosphere where drinking and drug use were commonplace.

The conservative group Project Veritas has for years sought to embarrass political opponents and members of media organizations by surreptitiously recording them and publicizing their private communications.

But two lawsuits filed in federal court late Sunday by the organization’s former employees purported to expose its own inner workings, portraying a “highly sexualized” work culture where daytime drinking and drug use were common and the group benefited from employees who worked additional hours without pay.

Both lawsuits, filed in Manhattan, describe the dedication of a young staff of operatives who have attracted the support of powerful political allies and donors. One suit describes a corporate apartment the organization kept as having been used like a “frat house” for drinking, sex and parties.

That lawsuit also discloses the names of more than a dozen of the organization’s employees and the identities of field operatives, information that the group has taken significant care to shield.

The suits — which were triggered in part by a conflict with an ex-employee, Antonietta Zappier, over the terms of her departure from the organization — come as the group is under investigation by federal prosecutors, who have suggested they have evidence the organization was complicit in stealing a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, a daughter of President Biden; Project Veritas has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge that the diary was stolen.

Both lawsuits were filed by Arthur Z. Schwartz, a former general counsel for Acorn, a community organizing group that dissolved after an undercover sting operation carried out in part by Mr. O’Keefe.

In a statement, Mr. O’Keefe referred to Ms. Zappier as a “disgruntled” former employee and called her claims “a range of made-up falsehoods.”

“Zappier was fired months ago for unprofessional and inappropriate behavior in the workplace,” the statement said, adding that she had threatened to physically harm one of Project Veritas’s neighbors and insulted people who had reached out to the organization to tell their stories.

It also said that Mr. Schwartz was attempting to leverage her claims “to hurt Project Veritas,” adding: “His one and only objective in representing Zappier is to get payback for Veritas’s investigation into Acorn over 10 years ago.”

Mr. Schwartz objected to the characterization of Ms. Zappier, noting that she had received positive evaluations at work, had never been admonished for negative behavior and was trusted by Mr. O’Keefe.

Ms. Zappier’s lawsuit comes two months after Project Veritas filed a lawsuit against her and her husband, Vincent Zappier. In its suit, the group accused her of breaching the terms of a separation agreement, and her husband of harassing its employees. Some of the specific claims about Ms. Zappier included in Mr. O’Keefe’s statement were not in the organization’s lawsuit against the couple.

Although Project Veritas describes its employees as journalists, its operations typically diverge from standard journalistic practice, with the organization’s operatives masking their real identities or creating phony ones.

Project Veritas has an ongoing defamation suit against The Times, and the publication of articles based on the organization’s legal memos is the subject of litigation.

New York Times, Olivia Newton-John, Pop Singer and ‘Grease’ Star, Dies at 73, Jim Farber, Aug. 8, 2022. She began her career as an innocent purveyor of middle-of-the-road pop but later adopted a bad-girl persona.

Olivia Newton-John, right, who sang some of the biggest hits of the 1970s and ’80s while recasting her image as the virginal girl next door into a spandex-clad vixen — a transformation reflected in miniature by her starring role in “Grease,” one of the most popular movie musicals of its era — died on Monday at her ranch in Southern California. She was 73.

The death was announced by her husband, John Easterling. She had lived with a breast cancer diagnosis since 1992 and in 2017 announced that the cancer had returned and spread.

New York Times, In Lawsuits, Ex-Employees Offer Harsh Portrait of Project Veritas, Colin Moynihan and Jonah E. Bromwich, Aug. 8, 2022. One former employee described the conservative group as having a “highly sexualized” atmosphere where drinking and drug use were commonplace.

The conservative group Project Veritas has for years sought to embarrass political opponents and members of media organizations by surreptitiously recording them and publicizing their private communications.

But two lawsuits filed in federal court late Sunday by the organization’s former employees purported to expose its own inner workings, portraying a “highly sexualized” work culture where daytime drinking and drug use were common and the group benefited from employees who worked additional hours without pay.

Both lawsuits, filed in Manhattan, describe the dedication of a young staff of operatives who have attracted the support of powerful political allies and donors. One suit describes a corporate apartment the organization kept as having been used like a “frat house” for drinking, sex and parties.

That lawsuit also discloses the names of more than a dozen of the organization’s employees and the identities of field operatives, information that the group has taken significant care to shield.

The suits — which were triggered in part by a conflict with an ex-employee, Antonietta Zappier, over the terms of her departure from the organization — come as the group is under investigation by federal prosecutors, who have suggested they have evidence the organization was complicit in stealing a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, a daughter of President Biden; Project Veritas has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge that the diary was stolen.

Both lawsuits were filed by Arthur Z. Schwartz, a former general counsel for Acorn, a community organizing group that dissolved after an undercover sting operation carried out in part by Mr. O’Keefe.

In a statement, Mr. O’Keefe referred to Ms. Zappier as a “disgruntled” former employee and called her claims “a range of made-up falsehoods.”

“Zappier was fired months ago for unprofessional and inappropriate behavior in the workplace,” the statement said, adding that she had threatened to physically harm one of Project Veritas’s neighbors and insulted people who had reached out to the organization to tell their stories.

It also said that Mr. Schwartz was attempting to leverage her claims “to hurt Project Veritas,” adding: “His one and only objective in representing Zappier is to get payback for Veritas’s investigation into Acorn over 10 years ago.”

Mr. Schwartz objected to the characterization of Ms. Zappier, noting that she had received positive evaluations at work, had never been admonished for negative behavior and was trusted by Mr. O’Keefe.

Ms. Zappier’s lawsuit comes two months after Project Veritas filed a lawsuit against her and her husband, Vincent Zappier. In its suit, the group accused her of breaching the terms of a separation agreement, and her husband of harassing its employees. Some of the specific claims about Ms. Zappier included in Mr. O’Keefe’s statement were not in the organization’s lawsuit against the couple.

Although Project Veritas describes its employees as journalists, its operations typically diverge from standard journalistic practice, with the organization’s operatives masking their real identities or creating phony ones.

Project Veritas has an ongoing defamation suit against The Times, and the publication of articles based on the organization’s legal memos is the subject of litigation.

Aug. 5

Washington Post, Senate GOP escalates its attack on Google over email spam, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Aug. 5, 2022 (print ed.). As the party’s online fundraising dips, a new draft letter demands that the tech giant give campaigns a mulligan when they run afoul of Gmail’s spam filter.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of the Republican caucus, is preparing to escalate its attack on Google over the company’s email spam filter, which it blames for recent fundraising disappointments, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

A draft letter on NRSC letterhead, and addressed to Google, claims that “Google and its algorithms have handed a distinct advantage to Democrat fundraising efforts, resulting in Republicans raising millions of dollars less than they should be able to.” And a Wednesday afternoon email from an NRSC official to chiefs of staff and legislative directors for Republican senators asks them to have their bosses sign the letter before leaving for their August recess.

The email states that Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) is spearheading the effort. In a May meeting, Grassley told Google representatives that Gmail should operate like a post office and suggested that sending emails to spam was equivalent to a post office refusing to deliver the mail, according to three people in the room who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

The GOP went to war against Google over spam — and may win

The basis for the GOP’s allegations, which Google denies, is a March study published by researchers at North Carolina State University finding that Gmail sent 77 percent of right-wing candidate emails to spam in 2020, compared with 10 percent of left-wing candidate emails.

Google took issue with the study, saying it relied on a small sample size and old data while not accounting for which candidates had used recommended tools when sending bulk emails. People familiar with the company’s thinking said Google is being scapegoated by Republican consultants seeking to shift the blame for poor fundraising caused by lists that have grown stale and recipients who have tired of incessant appeals, especially those coming from entities that have rented or purchased email addresses. The GOP’s online fundraising has fallen off in recent months, declining by about 11 percent in the second quarter of the year, compared with the first, according to federal filings from WinRed, the main donation-processing portal for Republicans.

Still, the study fueled a months-long pressure campaign waged by the GOP against the technology giant. The campaign involved private meetings with Google chief executive Sundar Pichai; public censure of the company by party leaders on Twitter; and draft legislation introduced in both chambers of Congress that would limit Google’s ability to apply spam filtering.

The impact of the pressure became apparent last month, when Google asked the Federal Election Commission to green-light a pilot program that would exempt campaign emails from automated spam detection. That change could reshape the experience of Gmail users. The amount of political fundraising conducted over email and text has exploded in recent years, adding to the deluge of promotional messages swamping Americans every day. The program could further intensify the inundation.

A draft advisory opinion published Tuesday by FEC lawyers said the proposed program would not violate federal campaign finance law. The draft opinion will be considered by the body’s six commissioners, who are divided evenly by party, at a meeting Aug. 11. Four votes are needed to approve an opinion.

The NRSC letter calls the proposed pilot program “unacceptable.”

“It comes too late and it’s too risky for campaigns,” the letter argues. “In the first place, it’s not clear that the FEC will approve it before the election.”

The letter also alleges that the proposal “requires campaigns to provide Google with a great deal of sensitive proprietary information.”

It’s unclear what sort of information Senate Republicans have in mind. Google’s request to the FEC makes no mention of a need for sensitive information. Rather, the proposed program would include only campaigns and committees registered with the FEC because the company can verify their identity using the email address provided to the regulator.

In place of the pilot program, the letter demands that Google simply give “any 2022 campaign the option to reset their email domain, restoring their email reputation and allowing emails to go to Gmail inboxes.”

A domain’s reputation is among the factors that weigh in Gmail’s spam filters, which rely on artificial intelligence. “These filters look at a variety of signals, including characteristics of the IP address, domains/subdomains, whether bulk senders are authenticated, and user input,” Google states.

At least once in recent months, Google reset those signals for an individual campaign once it fixed authentication errors and adhered to best practices. That happened in late May for a domain associated with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) after his team fixed an authentication problem, according to emails reviewed by The Post.

Aug. 4

 

Poynter, Gannett reports disastrous financial results; layoffs are coming, Rick Edmonds, Aug. 4, 2022. Digital subscriptions are up, but, as expenses rise, other revenue streams are in a freefall.

Gannett recorded a dismal second quarter financially, the company reported Thursday – important revenues sources down, costs up and a loss of $54 million on revenues of $749 million.

Strong cost reduction moves are on the way. Media division head Maribel Perez Wadsworth, in a note to staff, warned of impending layoffs. “In the coming days,” she wrote, “we will … be making necessary but painful reductions to staffing, eliminating some open positions and roles that will impact valued colleagues.”

Gannett stock, already down roughly 45% for the year, fell another 28.5% in midmorning trading, indicating Wall Street had not expected such bad results.

Besides the operating cutbacks, Reed said, the company expects to accelerate the sale of real estate assets for the rest of the year and apply the proceeds to paying down debt.

Gannett is one of few regional newspaper companies (the others are Lee and the Dallas Morning News) that remain public and thus required to report financial results.

The company publishes USA Today and more than 200 regional dailies. Ironically those papers have just had some big successes, as Reed noted: The Austin American-Statesman publishing video of law enforcement delays in the Uvalde shooting and its Columbus and Indianapolis outlets documenting the case of a 10-year-old rape victim who needed to go out of state for an abortion.

Washington Post, Alex Jones must pay $4.1 million to Sandy Hook parents, jury rules, Brittany Shammas, Kim Bellware and Timothy Bella, Aug. 4, 2022. Infowars founder Alex Jones must pay $4.1 million in compensatory damages to the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook mass shooting, an Austin jury announced Thursday, after the right-wing conspiracy theorist’s false claims that the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history was a “giant hoax” created a “living hell” for the family.

The decision means that Jones, America’s foremost purveyor of outlandish conspiracy theories, could pay far less than the $150 million sought by Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis, for Jones’s remarks nearly a decade ago after the massacre in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26 people, 20 of them young children.

Jones, 48, was previously found by judges in Connecticut and Texas to be liable for damages in lawsuits stemming from his false claims that the 2012 shooting was a “false flag” operation carried out by “crisis actors.” Since then, Jones has been banned from major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify, and the parent company for his Infowars website filed for bankruptcy during the trial.

Despite Jones finally conceding this week in court that the shooting was not a hoax but “100 percent real,” District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County, Tex., noted the considerable damage caused by the Infowars founder’s remarks — and how his comments led to years of abuse for Sandy Hook parents.

The jury’s decision, which did not include punitive damages, comes just one day after it was revealed in court that the legal team representing Jones inadvertently sent the contents of his cellphone to a lawyer representing the parents. The apparent blunder led attorney Mark Bankston to accuse Jones of lying under oath when he testified that he did not have any text messages related to the Sandy Hook massacre.

During the jury’s deliberations, Jones’s lawyers requested a mistrial and demanded that Bankston delete the phone data they had handed over, which the judge denied.

Sandy Hook lawyers say Alex Jones’s attorneys accidentally gave them his phone contents

Once described by Roger Stone as maybe “the single most important voice in the alternative conservative media,” Jones has seen his false claims and rants launched into the mainstream national dialogue in recent years, embraced by the likes of then-President Donald Trump and Joe Rogan, the popular podcast host.

Business Insider via Yahoo News, Twitter paid to join a political group fighting against abortion as criticism from Republican lawmakers heats up, Grace Kay, Aug. 4, 2022. Twitter reportedly paid $25,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association.

The group is raising funds to combat "Democrats' pro-abortion agenda."

A Twitter spokesperson said the funds were paid membership dues and the money won't go to any political candidates.

Twitter paid to join an organization that was requesting funds for an anti-abortion campaign, according to a recent report from Popular Information.

The online newsletter reported that Twitter paid $25,000 to the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) on June 17. The payment was revealed in a filing with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

A Twitter spokesperson acknowledged the payment but told Insider that Twitter does not make political campaign donations. The company shut down its Political Action Committee (PAC) in 2020 and has not made political donations since, they said.

"We're committed to working with policymakers and civil society – from across the political spectrum – to ensure we are able to serve the public conversation," the spokesperson said. "This year, for the first time, we joined and paid membership dues to both the Democratic Attorneys General Association (DAGA) and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) – simultaneously. Prior to this year, we were not members of either organization. To be clear, our membership dues for both organizations are not and will not be distributed to political candidates."

Political Information was unable to confirm the DAGA payment as the IRS information is only available through June 30 and Twitter informed the organization that it was made in July.

A RAGA spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication.

RAGA is raising money to support candidates that are against abortion. According to a fundraising email from the group on June 24, "every donation [to the RAGA fund] will help the Republican Attorneys General combat the Democrats' pro-abortion agenda and stand tall for life."

In June, members of the conservative organization responded to news of a 10-year-old rape victim who traveled out of state to get an abortion by publicly attacking the medical provider that assisted the 10-year-old in the media.

Twitter's payment comes after the social media site has faced repeated criticism from the Republican Party on anything from bots on the site to the platform's handling of its ban on former President Donald Trump.

Aug. 3

Mediaite, Here Are the 5 Wildest Moments From Alex Jones’s Sandy Hook Defamation Trial, Alex Griffing Aug. 3, 2022. The defamation trial of far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones sparked headlines across the media this week as the courtroom drama offered one wild moment after another.

The week began with a judge allowing the trial to move forward on Monday morning despite the company associated with Jones’ conspiracy-based show InfoWars declaring bankruptcy. The move has been seen by critics as a ploy to avoid paying the $150 million claim that the parents of a child murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre are seeking against Jones.

Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of murdered six-year-old Jesse Lewis, are suing Jones over the threats and harassment they faced after Jones repeatedly told his audience the massacre was a hoax and their child was an actor.

On Tuesday, Jesse’s mother, Scarlett Lewis confronted Jones in court and spoke to him directly:

I wanted to tell you to your face because I wanted you to know that I am a mother first and foremost. And I know that you are a father and my son existed,” Lewis said, speaking directly to Jones as he shook his head.

Lewis cut straight to the heart of the matter and argued on behalf of the immense damage Jones is doing to society by constantly spreading lies about current events.

“You’re still on your show today trying to say that I’m, implying that I’m an actress, that I am ‘deep state,’ you have this week,” she continued, adding:

And I don’t understand. Truth, truth is so vital to our world. Truth is what we base our reality on, and we have to agree on that to have a civil society. Sandy Hook is a hard truth. Hard truth.

“This happened almost ten years ago. We’ve had over 350 school shootings since then. We have to keep our kids safe. Jesse was real. I am a real mom,” she concluded.

The trial only got more bizarre as Jones himself took the stand. At one point the judge had to scold the conspiracy theorist for repeatedly lying on the stand and warned him against further lying in the courtroom.

“You’re already under oath to tell the truth,” Judge Maya Guerra Gamble told Jones on Tuesday. “You’ve already violated that oath twice today. In just those two examples. It seems absurd to instruct you again that you must tell the truth while you testify. Yet here I am.”

“You must tell the truth while you testify,” Gamble said. “This is not your show.”

Jones remained defiant despite the threat of perjury and retorted, “Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true.”

In another wild moment, the lawyer for Lewis and Heslin questioned Jones on the stand and revealed that Jones’ lawyers inadvertently sent them the entire contents of his phone.

“Mr. Jones, did you know that 12 days ago, 12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me an entire digital copy of your entire cell phone with every text message you’ve sent for the past two years,” attorney Mark Bankston asked.

“And when informed, they did not take any steps to identify it as privileged or protected in any way. And as of two days ago, it fell free and clear into my possession. And that is how I know you lied to me when you said you didn’t have text messages about Sandy Hook,” Bankston continued, noting he caught Jones perjuring himself.

“Mr. Jones, in discovery you were asked, do you have Sandy Hook text messages on your phone? And you said no. Correct. You said that under oath,” Banston continued.

“You know, perjury. I just want to make sure, you know, before we go any further, you know what it is?” he added before continuing to question Jones in the extraordinary moment.

New York Times, Commentary: Vin Scully Was Los Angeles, Scott Miller, Aug. 3, 2022. Scully’s Dodgers’ career began in 1950, and it continued until the end of the 2016 season, when he handed over the reins to Joe Davis. In a town synonymous with fleeting fame, Scully was the one thing that always seemed to endure. His voice, “like a gentle hand,” still resonates.

He was Venice Beach, Pink’s hot-dog stand and the Hollywood Bowl all rolled into one. He was Los Angeles, the sound of summer, the poet laureate of the Dodgers — Brooklyn and Los Angeles — for 67 seasons.

We knew Vin Scully wasn’t going to last forever. It only seemed as if he might. Even in retirement, years after his final broadcast in 2016, his presence remained both ubiquitous and ethereal, like the ocean and the air.

“There are two words to describe Vin: Babe Ruth,” said Charley Steiner, the Dodgers’ radio play-by-play man since 2005 after moving west from the Yankees’ booth (2002-2004). “The best who ever did it. Babe Ruth will always be defined as baseball. Vin will always be remembered as the voice of baseball.”

The wild ride that was Tuesday’s major league trading deadline suddenly and sharply gave way to a heaviness in the still of that night, when the Dodgers announced that Scully had died at 94. Baseball’s cycle of life, distilled into one day: new starts and sad endings. Scully had been in declining health in recent months, and those who knew him well had been bracing for the phone call. But when it came, it still was a gut punch.

“It doesn’t make it easier, because we lost a friend,” said Rick Monday, the former outfielder and longtime Dodgers broadcaster. “Whether we actually met Vin Scully or not, he was our friend.”

Like the best of friends, he was full of wonder, joy, humility and surprises.

“When I was in college, I wrote for The Times, so you probably saw my byline,” Scully said eagerly to begin an interview with The New York Times earlier this summer for a story about Gil Hodges, as if his days at Fordham University were just around a recent corner. “It says, ‘Special Correspondent to The Times.’ I was under an assumed name. Anyway, I just wanted you to know my literary background.”

Another time, late at night after an interleague game at Angel Stadium early in the 2013 season, some news media members were awaiting a press-box elevator to head home for the evening when Scully joined them for the ride down. He was wearing a brace on his left hand and wrist, the result of a bout with tendinitis.

Aug. 2

Washington Post, Perspective: Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret, Geoffrey A. Fowler, Aug. 2, 2022. Our analysis of 14 popular consumer devices found most could stop working in 3 to 4 years because of irreplaceable batteries. Here’s how we get the tech industry to design products that last longer — and do less damage to the environment.

Is that just how technology works? No, that's just how tech companies make more money from you.

Nearly half of the companies I contacted — including Sony, Dyson, Logitech, Google-owned Fitbit, Amazon, Therabody and Samsung-owned JBL — refused to answer or just ignored my specific questions.

None of this should be a secret.

The important thing to consider, experts say, is that every person and every case of covid is unique. There is no hard-and-fast rule for how sick a person will get or how long a person remains infectious. The guidelines offer a general framework, but patients should take into account their different circumstances, priorities and resources to assess risk.

Aug. 1

 

Fox News host Tucker Carlson shares quality time with former President Trump at the LIV Golf event over the weekend in Bedminster, NJ.

Mediaite, NYT Reporter Says Tucker Carlson Trashes Trump in Private: He ‘Thinks Very Little’ of His Audience, Kipp Jones, Aug. 1, 2022. Jeremy Peters of the New York Times claimed Monday night to have the inside track on how Fox News host Tucker Carlson truly feels about former President Donald Trump.

He shared some of those insights from his reporting with Newsmax TV host Eric Bolling. Peters’ book Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted was released in February.

According to the reporter and author, Carlson personally holds Trump in contempt, but is more than happy to align himself with him publicly to siphon support and viewers.

On The Balance Monday, Bolling noted Carlson was at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club over the weekend, where the pair was photographed together.

“I saw a lot of pictures floating around the internet of Trump and Tucker Carlson kind of yucking it up a little bit in the Trump box,” Bolling said.

Bolling asked Peters why he feels Carlson would be seen with Trump, despite Peters’ assessment that cable’s top-rated host is not a fan.

Peters was blunt in his response:

I think you know as well as I do that Tucker, in private, what he says about Trump is very different than what he says about Trump in public, and it benefits him to be seen having photos taken with Trump at the golf course and everything. I would not be surprised at all to see Tucker, I quoted him in my book, he said, “I am voting for Kanye West.”

This is in 2020 so… he didn’t vote for Trump as far as we know. I mean, I don’t know, I wasn’t there with him in the in the ballot box, but we know that Tucker Carlson is one of these people who benefits from having the Trump audience on his side, but thinks very little of the people who make up that audience.

Bolling stated he believes Carlson might have presidential ambitions, and if he ran, he would need Trump’s voters to get him there.

He turned the segment over to Peters for a final thought.

“I think there are a lot of people, Eric, who snicker behind Trump’s back, who say that they support him publicly and they like his ideas, and they like him,” Peters said. “But privately, it’s a different story, and that to me is the ultimate fallacy of the conservative media.”

 

July

July 31

New York Times, Will the Biggest Publisher in the United States Get Even Bigger? Alexandra Alter, Elizabeth A. Harris and David McCabe, July 31, 2022. The Biden administration is suing to block Penguin Random House from buying Simon & Schuster. A federal court will decide if the sale can proceed.

When the largest publisher in the country, Penguin Random House, struck a deal in the fall of 2020 to acquire its rival Simon & Schuster, publishing executives and antitrust experts predicted that the merger would draw intense scrutiny from government regulators.

The merger would dramatically alter the literary landscape, shrinking the number of major publishing houses — known in the industry as the Big Five — to four. (Or, as one industry analyst put it, it could create the Big One and the other three.)

Such a shift could ripple through the industry, potentially impacting smaller publishers, authors, and ultimately, the books that reach readers, said in an email the novelist Stephen King, who was called by the government to testify in the trial.

“The more the big publishers consolidate, the harder it is for indie publishers to survive,” King said. “And that is where the good writers are currently starting out and learning their chops.”

Last fall, the Biden administration sued to block the $2.18 billion sale as part of its new and more aggressive stance against corporate consolidation. The trial will start on Monday, with oral arguments at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, where Judge Florence Pan will preside.

 

Washington Post, Alex Jones’s media company files for bankruptcy during Sandy Hook trial, Timothy Bella, July 31, 2022 (print ed.). The parent company for Alex Jones’s Infowars website filed for bankruptcy, his attorney announced Friday, as parents of victims in the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School are seeking $150 million in defamation damages against the right-wing conspiracy theorist who falsely claimed the massacre was a “giant hoax.”

As the first week of the civil trial in Austin concluded, Jones’s attorney, F. Andino Reynal, told the courtroom that his client’s media company, Free Speech Systems, had filed for bankruptcy but that it would not interfere with the defamation lawsuit.

While details surrounding the bankruptcy for Infowars’ parent company were not immediately available, Reynal said the filing was made so that Jones’s company could “put this part of the odyssey behind us so that we have some numbers” for potential defamation damages, according to the Associated Press.

It’s the second time in recent months that a bankruptcy filing related to Jones (shown above in a file photo on air) has come up during litigation from Sandy Hook families brought against the conspiracy theorist. Infowars and two other of Jones’s business entities filed for bankruptcy protection in April. The spring filing for bankruptcy protection delayed the start of the trial in Texas, where Infowars is headquartered.

Reynal did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Saturday. Mark Bankston, an attorney for the Texas families suing Jones, slammed the Infowars personality for having his media company file for bankruptcy during the defamation damages trial.

“The world is currently watching the final chapter of Mr. Jones’ pathetic exit from the American stage, and true to form, he will try to grab some cash on his way out,” Bankston said in a statement to The Washington Post. “We don’t intend to allow it.”

Christopher Mattei, an attorney representing some of the Sandy Hook families in Connecticut, echoed Bankston and criticized the timing of the bankruptcy filing.

“Just two days before jury selection is due to begin in Connecticut, Mr. Jones has once again fled like a coward to bankruptcy court in a transparent attempt to delay facing the families that he has spent years hurting,” Mattei said in a statement to The Post. “These families have an endless well of patience and remain determined to hold Mr. Jones accountable in a Connecticut court.”

The bankruptcy filing represents the latest financial blow to Jones after he said the deadliest elementary school shooting in U.S. history — in which 26 people were killed in Newtown, Conn., 20 of them young children — was a “false flag” operation carried out by “crisis actors.” Although Jones has since acknowledged that the shooting took place and blamed his false claims on “a form of psychosis,” he has been banned from major platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Spotify for violating their hate-speech policies.

Judges in Connecticut and Texas have found Jones liable for damages in lawsuits stemming from his false claims. In default judgments against Jones and Infowars last October, District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of Travis County, Tex., ruled that Jones did not comply with court orders to give information in a pair of 2018 lawsuits brought against him by the families of two children killed in the 2012 massacre. Jones repeatedly did not hand over documents and evidence to the court supporting his damaging and erroneous claims.

Jones has been previously ordered to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees to families who have sued him. Nine families have sued him over the years.

During jury selection this week, Reynal told the Austin courtroom that the founder of Infowars “has medical issues” that could keep him from showing up during parts of the trial, even though he “has no obligation to be here.” While Reynal did not specify what “medical issues” could prevent the 48-year-old from attending the trial in person, Jones has previously blamed stress and cardiovascular effects from his coronavirus infection for missing depositions in the Connecticut trial last year. Jones has also faced daily fines of $25,000 from a Connecticut judge for failing to show up for court-ordered depositions in March.

“I started getting sick after I got covid last year … like everybody else. It attacked the cardiovascular system, okay?” Jones said in an audio message posted in March. “I’m 48, and I’m under a lot of stress.”

Jurors in Austin are determining how much in compensatory and punitive damages Jones must pay the victims’ families, who are pushing for $150 million. While Jones has claimed in court filings that he has a net worth of negative $20 million, attorneys for the Sandy Hook families have pointed to records showing that Jones’s Infowars store made more than $165 million between 2015 and 2018.

The first week of the trial featured fireworks in and out of the courtroom. The trial is expected to conclude next week.

July 30

 

Washington Post, The Murdochs and Trump aligned for mutual benefit. That may be changing, Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr, July 30, 2022. In the frenzied coverage of the Jan. 6 House committee hearings, Fox News has been the outlier. While every other major network carried the first public testimony live in prime time in June, Fox relegated the feed to its little-watched business channel.

The network has aired midday hearings live, but Trump-boosting opinion hosts have tended to downplay revelations. When former White House aide Cassidy Hutchison gave bombshell testimony a month ago, Laura Ingraham called it “bad acting.”

But the owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, right, has been watching the hearings with a less dismissive eye. And there are signs that the proceedings have helped convince him that the former president is losing his political expediency.

Speculation over the 91-year-old media executive’s thinking crescendoed after the first set of hearings concluded this month and two of his papers published nearly simultaneous editorials. “Trump’s silence on Jan. 6 is damning,” the New York Post declared. “Character is revealed in a crisis,” the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board concluded. “Mr. Trump utterly failed his.”

Murdoch’s support for Donald Trump has been crucial to his political career and at times to his efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss. But as Trump inches closer to a third presidential run under the glare of criminal, civil and governmental investigations, multiple associates of Murdoch told The Washington Post that it appears he has lost his enthusiasm for Trump.

But Murdoch, who controls a vast swath of the political media world, has spent decades learning to ride the waves of U.S. politics and hedge his bets on candidates. Fox has tried to pull away from the 45th president before, only to return in the face of Trump’s fury.

New York Times, Fox News, Once Home to Trump, Now Often Ignores Him, Jeremy W. Peters, July 29, 2022. Former President Trump hasn’t been interviewed on the network in more than 100 days, and other Republicans often get the attention he once did.

The network, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch and boosted Mr. Trump’s ascension from real estate developer and reality television star to the White House, is now often bypassing him in favor of showcasing other Republicans.

In the former president’s view, according to two people who have spoken to him recently, Fox’s ignoring him is an affront far worse than running stories and commentary that he has complained are “too negative.” The network is effectively displacing him from his favorite spot: the center of the news cycle.

On July 22, as Mr. Trump was rallying supporters in Arizona and teasing the possibility of running for president in 2024, saying “We may have to do it again,” Fox News chose not to show the event — the same approach it has taken for nearly all of his rallies this year.

Instead, the network aired Laura Ingraham’s interview with a possible rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida. It was the first of two prime-time interviews Fox aired with Mr. DeSantis in the span of five days; he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show shortly after talking to Ms. Ingraham.

When Mr. Trump spoke to a gathering of conservatives in Washington this week, Fox did not air the speech live. It instead showed a few clips after he was done speaking. That same day, it did broadcast live — for 17 minutes — a speech by former Vice President Mike Pence.

Mr. Trump has complained recently to aides that even Sean Hannity, his friend of 20 years, doesn’t seem to be paying him much attention anymore, one person who spoke to him recalled.

July 29

 

New York Times, F.T.C. Chair Upends Antitrust Standards With Meta Lawsuit, Celia Kang, July 29, 2022 (print ed.). Lina Khan (shown above) may set off a shift in how Washington regulates competition by filing cases in tech areas before they mature. She faces an uphill climb.

Early in her tenure as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan declared that she would rein in the power of the largest technology companies in a dramatically new way.

“We’re trying to be forward looking, anticipating problems and taking fast action,’’ Ms. Khan said in an interview last month. She promised to focus on “next-generation technologies,” and not just on areas where tech behemoths were already well established.

This week, Ms. Khan took her first step toward stopping the tech monopolies of the future when she sued to block a small acquisition by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, of the virtual-reality fitness start-up Within. The deal was significant for Meta’s development of the so-called metaverse, which is a nascent technology and far from mainstream.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The new East-West Cold War is a war of dueling lists; it should be more than that, Wayne Madsen, left, July 27-28, 2022. Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have created enemies’ lists of countries with which they have reserved the right to target in cyber-propaganda operations via social media platforms, cyber-sabotage, election interference, and debasement of political and cultural institutions.

Russia’s “enemies list” is formally known as the “Unfriendly Countries List.” Created in May 2021 in the wake of sanctions imposed on Russia for espionage and other hostile activities, the list originally included only two nations. They were the United States, which continued to suffer political destabilization in the wake of Russia-backed Donald Trump’s attempt to stage a coup d’état to remain in power following his 2020 electoral loss, and the Czech Republic, which accused Russian GRU military intelligence’s Unit 29155 of blowing up ammunition depots in the town of Vrbetice, near the late Ivana Trump’s hometown of Zlin, in 2014.

Some of Moscow’s propaganda mouthpieces in the West have earned them the distinction of being placed by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation on a Ukrainian list of propagandists for Russia.

They include former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard; U.S. Sen. Rand Paul; polemicist Glenn Greenwald; U.S. military analyst Edward Luttwak; retired U.S. Army Colonel and January 6 coup plotter Douglas Macgregor; Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the widow of Lyndon LaRouche and the head of what remains of his movement; U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs; former CIA analyst Ray McGovern; former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter; and American “shock and awe” military doctrine developer and onetime DC Madam client Harlan Ullman.

July 28

Washington Post, DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw makes sure reporters feel the burn, Paul Farhi, July 28, 2022 (print ed.). July 27, 2022. Known for her aggressive Twitter comments and brusque treatment of the media, the Florida governor’s press secretary has used taunts to solidify a tough image.

The derisive tone was typical of Pushaw, 31, a state employee who earns $120,000 a year. In the 14 months since joining DeSantis’s staff, she has transformed the typically buttoned-down role of gubernatorial press secretary into something like a running public brawl — with Twitter as her blunt-force weapon. Her usual targets: Democrats, the news media and anyone else she deems insufficiently supportive of DeSantis’s agenda and her own conservative politics.

None of Pushaw’s public dust-ups seems to have ruffled her boss, DeSantis, who is widely considered a leading contender to challenge former president Donald Trump for the 2024 GOP nomination. On occasion, he has defended Pushaw, who has loyally promoted his agenda, which has included a string of legislative victories on culture-war issues, such as passage of the gender-discussion bill and a ban on teaching critical race theory.

 

New York Times, OAN, a Dependable Promoter of Donald Trump, Faces a ‘Death Blow,’ Jeremy W. Peters and Benjamin Mullin, July 28, 2022 (print ed.).  After Verizon drops One America News at the end of this week, the cable network will have lost its presence in some 20 million homes this year

The future of One America News, which established itself as a powerful voice in conservative media by promoting some of the most outlandish falsehoods about the 2020 election, is in serious doubt as major carriers drop it from their lineups and defamation lawsuits threaten to drain its finances.

By the end of this week, the cable network will have lost its presence in some 20 million homes this year. The most recent blow came from Verizon, which will stop carrying OAN on its Fios television service starting Saturday. That will starve the network of a major stream of revenue: the fees it collects from Verizon, which counts roughly 3.5 million cable subscribers. In April, OAN was dropped by AT&T’s DirecTV, which has about 15 million subscribers.

OAN’s remaining audience will be small. The network will soon be available only to a few hundred thousand people who subscribe to smaller cable providers, such as Frontier and GCI Liberty, said Scott Robson, a senior research analyst at S&P Global Market Intelligence. OAN also sells its programming directly to users through its OAN Live and KlowdTV streaming platforms, but those products most likely provide a fraction of the revenue generated by traditional TV providers.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: The new East-West Cold War is a war of dueling lists; it should be more than that, Wayne Madsen, left, July 27-28, 2022. Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have created enemies’ lists of countries with which they have reserved the right to target in cyber-propaganda operations via social media platforms, cyber-sabotage, election interference, and debasement of political and cultural institutions.

Russia’s “enemies list” is formally known as the “Unfriendly Countries List.” Created in May 2021 in the wake of sanctions imposed on Russia for espionage and other hostile activities, the list originally included only two nations. They were the United States, which continued to suffer political destabilization in the wake of Russia-backed Donald Trump’s attempt to stage a coup d’état to remain in power following his 2020 electoral loss, and the Czech Republic, which accused Russian GRU military intelligence’s Unit 29155 of blowing up ammunition depots in the town of Vrbetice, near the late Ivana Trump’s hometown of Zlin, in 2014.

Some of Moscow’s propaganda mouthpieces in the West have earned them the distinction of being placed by the Ukrainian Center for Countering Disinformation on a Ukrainian list of propagandists for Russia.

They include former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard; U.S. Sen. Rand Paul; polemicist Glenn Greenwald; U.S. military analyst Edward Luttwak; retired U.S. Army Colonel and January 6 coup plotter Douglas Macgregor; Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the widow of Lyndon LaRouche and the head of what remains of his movement; U.S. economist Jeffrey Sachs; former CIA analyst Ray McGovern; former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter; and American “shock and awe” military doctrine developer and onetime DC Madam client Harlan Ullman.

July 27

Law&Crime, Former Covington Catholic Student Nick Sandmann Loses Defamation Lawsuits Against CBS, ABC, NYT, and Others, Aaron Keller, July 27, 2022. A federal judge in Kentucky ruled that Sandmann's lawsuits against five media companies could not survive summary judgment.

After years of politically charged litigation, former Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, above, has lost a round of high-profile defamation lawsuits against five mainstream media companies at the summary judgment stage. That’s according to court dockets and an opinion and order signed by a federal judge in the Eastern District of Kentucky on Tuesday.

Sandmann’s cases against ABC News, Rolling Stone magazine, CBS News, newspaper and television station owner Gannett, and The New York Times are now officially listed as “terminated” on the court record.

Sandmann sued the five organizations in question — and a few others, including CNN and NBC — on March 2, 2020. The lawsuits alleged that various articles and broadcasts defamed Sandmann by characterizing his actions toward Nathan Phillips, a Native American activist, on Jan. 18, 2019 in Washington, D.C., as nefarious.

Law&Crime, Dallas Jury Hits Charter Spectrum with $7 Billion Verdict After Cable Installer Robbed and Murdered an Elderly Woman, Adam Klasfeld, July 27, 2022. Charter Communications must pay the family of a 83-year-old woman murdered by her cable installer more than $7 billion, a Dallas jury ruled. The jurors found that the company ignored red flags about its employee and forged documents to minimize their liabilities.

On Dec. 11, 2019, Spectrum sent Roy Holden, Jr. to the home of the elderly Betty Thomas, who reported problems with her bundled phone, TV, and internet service. Returning to her home the next day, Holden arrived in his Spectrum car and uniform and told Thomas that he had to perform follow-up repairs, but he wasn’t on the clock. He stabbed her to death and stole her wallet and ID, reportedly using her debit card hours after her murder.

Holden later pleaded guilty to Thomas’s murder and is serving a life sentence.

“This was a shocking breach of faith by a company that sends workers inside millions of homes every year,” trial lawyer Chris Hamilton, who represented the family with Dallas-based firm Hamilton Wingo, said in a statement. “The jury in this case was thoughtful and attentive to the evidence. This verdict justly reflects the extensive evidence regarding the nature of the harm caused by Charter Spectrum’s gross negligence and reckless misconduct. For the safety of the American public, we can only hope that Charter Spectrum and its shareholders are listening.”

The massive verdict represents more than eight percent of Charter Communications’ market capitalization, currently estimated at more than $80 billion. The company operates under the name Spectrum.

Washington Post, Now on the tee for LIV Golf: Trump National and the polarizing former president, Josh Dawsey and Rick Maese, July 27, 2022. Former president Donald Trump joins hands this week with the biggest controversy in sports when his New Jersey golf club hosts the latest event in the Saudi-funded LIV Golf series, further cementing his relationship with Saudi Arabia and angering families of 9/11 victims who have decried the start-up venture as “sportswashing.”

While the renegade golf circuit has staged two other events, including another in the United States, this week’s event at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., promises to be an even more glaring flash point, given its proximity to Manhattan and the involvement of the ex-president.

In recent days, Trump has publicly and privately dismissed human rights concerns about the Saudi kingdom and railed against the professional golf establishment. He is expected to attend every day of this weekend’s event and has been in contact for months with organizers on event details, according to an adviser, who said Trump remains livid with PGA of America officials who moved the 2022 PGA Championship from his Bedminster club following the Jan. 6 insurrection. Doral, his club outside Miami, will host another LIV Golf event in October.

• National Press Club, Statement By National Press Club On LIV Golf Event At Trump Course, July 26, 2022 (See below for statement).

Washington Post, Facebook workers fear cuts after blunt warnings from Zuckerberg, leaders, Naomi Nix, July 27, 2022. Once the symbol of Silicon Valley’s prosperity, Meta executives are outlining a new era of high performance expectations and slowed hiring, amid economic challenges.

Facebook has a message for employees, one delivered relentlessly by executives in recent weeks: It’s time to shape up.

In a memo earlier this month, the company’s top human resources officer advised team leaders to return to the “rigorous performance management” practices that Facebook used before the coronavirus pandemic, including giving critical feedback to struggling employees.

“If someone is still unable to meet expectations with that additional support, transitioning them out of Meta is the right thing to do,” wrote Lori Goler in a memo viewed by The Washington Post.

The missive, one of multiple recent such messages to the workforce at the social media giant, is part of a broader crackdown following years of laxer management practices, according to current and former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters and internal message posts obtained by The Washington Post.

July 26

National Press Club, Statement By National Press Club On LIV Golf Event At Trump Course, July 26, 2022. The following is a statement by Jen Judson, President of the National Press Club, and Gil Klein, President of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, on the LIV golf tournament taking place this weekend in Bedminster, N.J.

“We are revolted by the way the Saudi-funded LIV enterprise has followed the fist bump in the desert by shoving themselves onto golf courses and television screens. We call on all Americans to see this unsavory attempt to minimize the grisly bone-saw attack on Washington Post opinion writer Jamal Khashoggi for what it is – an attempt to sweep under the rug a brutal state-sponsored murder. We call on people of conscience to reject this tournament. Do not attend. Do not watch it on television. Let it fail.

“That the tournament is being held at a course owned by former President Trump is, if possible, even more revolting. It reminds us that the former President bragged of distracting Congress from the murder, delaying the release of the final U.S. government report that concluded MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia (and recipient of the fist-bump from President Biden) was most likely involved in planning and approving Jamal’s murder. And the tournament on the Trump course reminds us how Saudi Arabia finds ways to personally enrich Trump and his family – including $2 billion to his son in law.

“We note that at one of LIV’s first news conferences their officials shouted down a question from an AP reporter and escorted him from the room saying that he was being rude. That is how the LIV episode started. They silenced the press. Again.

“Finally, we note that LIV is currently seeking representation by a public relations firm to make the slaughter of a journalist more acceptable to the American public through golf. We call on public relations firms, many of whom employ former journalists, to reject this blood money. We understand that clients need representation, but it seems reasonable to draw the line at clients that use a bone saw on a journalist. We hope the prospective PR firm thinks very carefully before agreeing to work for LIV. Their association with LIV will define who they are and damage their carefully developed reputation. This will not be good for their other clients or their business. We suggest they stay on the fairway.”

About The National Press Club: Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. The Club has 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization and is a leading voice for press freedom in the United States and around the world.

About The National Press Club Journalism Institute: The National Press Club Journalism Institute promotes an engaged, global citizenry through an independent and free press and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement.

 

OpEdNews, Opinion: The Whistleblower Crackdown, John Kiriakou, July 26, 2022. This is National Whistleblower Week, with Saturday marking National Whistleblower Appreciation Day. The National Whistleblower Center in Washington has its annual lunch, seminar, and associated events scheduled. Whistleblowers from around the U.S. attend, a couple members of Congress usually show up, and we talk about how important it is to speak truth to power.

I've been attending these events for much of the past decade. But I'm not sanguine about where our efforts stand, especially on behalf of national security whistleblowers. Since I blew the whistle on the C.I.A.'s torture program in 2007 and was prosecuted for it in 2012, I think the situation for whistleblowers has grown far worse.

In 2012, when I took a plea to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982 for confirming the name of a former C.I.A. colleague to a reporter who never made the name public, I was sentenced to 30 months in a federal prison.

In 2015, former C.I.A. officer Jeffrey Sterling, who blew the whistle on racial discrimination at the agency, was sentenced to what Judge Leonie Brinkema called "Kiriakou plus 12 months," because I had taken a plea and Jeffrey had had the unmitigated gall to go to trial to prove his innocence. So, he ended up with 42 months in prison.

Things just got worse from there.

The prosecutors of drone whistleblower Daniel Hale asked Judge Liam O'Grady to sentence him to 20 years in prison. O'Grady instead gave Hale 46 months. But to spite him, and to show prosecutors' anger with the sentence, the Justice Department ignored the judge's recommendation that Hale be sent to a low-security hospital facility in Butner, North Carolina, and instead incarcerated him in the supermax facility in Marion, Illinois, with no treatment for his debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder.

I was in the courtroom during Hale's sentencing. When prosecutors asked for the draconian sentence, Hale's attorneys cited my sentence of 30 months and Sterling's 42 months. Prosecutors retorted that they had "made a mistake with
Kiriakou. His sentence was far too short."

It was clear that since my own case, the Justice Department's ongoing prosecutions of national security whistleblowers wasn't discouraging people from going public with evidence of waste, fraud, abuse, or illegality in the intelligence community. Perhaps, they thought, tougher sentences would do it. Don't count on it, I say.

In the meantime, I ran into another national security whistleblower at an event recently. He told me that the F.B.I. had recently paid him a visit. I chuckled and said, "Because you're so close to them and they've been so kind to you?"

We laughed for a moment, but he was serious. He is still on probation and the F.B.I. offered to get that probation lifted if he would tell them anything and everything he knows about Julian Assange and Ed Snowden. He told them that he speaks through his attorney and wanted no further contact with them. His attorney told the F.B.I. that his client had nothing to say, would tell them nothing about Assange or Snowden even if he knew something and to not contact his client again. They haven't.

The Assange Nightmare

If you're reading this, you've likely followed the nightmare that Julian Assange has been experiencing for years now. He could be extradited to the United States by next year and he faces more than a lifetime in prison. That's the Justice Department's goal - that Assange die in a U.S. prison. Ed Snowden likely faces the same fate if he were to find his way back to the U.S.

In order to try to smooth the path for Assange's extradition, prosecutors have promised British authorities that Assange would not be placed in a Communications Management Unit or a Special Administrative Unit, where his access to the outside world would be practically nil.

They've also promised that he would not be placed in solitary confinement.

But that's all nonsense. It's a lie. Prosecutors have literally no say in where a prisoner is placed. It's not up to the judge and it's not up to the prosecutors. Placement is solely at the discretion of the Bureau of Prisons (on recommendation from the C.I.A., which spied on Assange and his lawyers) and they haven't made any promises to anybody.

Belmarsh Prison in London is awful. But Supermax Marion, Supermax Florence, USP Springfield, USP Leavenworth, USP Lewisburg, and any of the other American hell-holes where Assange and other whistleblowers are and can be placed would be worse.

Though it's National Whistleblower Week, we can't pause to celebrate. We can't bask in minor successes.

We have to keep up the fight because that's what the Justice Department is doing.

 

 

Politico, U.S. authorities hit former GOP Rep. Stephen Buyer with insider trading charges, Sam Sutton, July 26, 2022 (print ed). The SEC complaint claims that Buyer netted $330,000 from the transactions.

Federal authorities filed criminal and civil insider trading charges against former Rep. Stephen Buyer in U.S. court in Manhattan on Monday, alleging that the Indiana Republican used information gleaned from a golf outing with a T-Mobile executive to purchase securities before the company’s planned acquisition of Sprint.

Buyer, shown in a C-SPAN photo, was arrested on Monday, said U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams at a press conference.

Buyer, who had been working as a consultant to T-Mobile at the time, learned about the possible megamerger from a company executive while on a work trip to Miami, according to a civil complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Despite being warned about the confidential status of the merger, which was ultimately scuttled, Buyer purchased more than $500,000 of Sprint shares, which were then sold shortly after news of the deal went public, the agency alleged.

The former nine-term congressman also allegedly leveraged his role as a consultant to another company, Guidehouse LLP, to purchase shares of Navigant before his client’s acquisition of that business in 2019, according to the complaint.

The SEC’s complaint claims that Buyer netted roughly $330,000 from the transactions, which he spread across multiple accounts belonging to associates and family members, as well as an unidentified friend with whom he had allegedly engaged in a romantic relationship.

“When insiders like Buyer — an attorney, a former prosecutor, and a retired Congressman — monetize their access to material, nonpublic information, as alleged in this case, they not only violate the federal securities laws but also undermine public trust and confidence in the fairness of our markets,” said Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC Enforcement Division.

The SEC is seeking disgorgement of the gains allegedly accrued by Buyer and his wife, Joni Buyer, and to block the former congressman from ever serving as an officer or director at a public company.

“Congressman Buyer is innocent,” said Buyer’s attorney, Andrew Goldstein of Cooley LLP. “His stock trades were lawful. He looks forward to being quickly vindicated.”

ScheerPost, Commentary: CIA Vault 7 Leaker Found Guilty. What Did He Actually Reveal? John Kiriakou, right, July 26, 2022. CIA veteran John Kiriakou breaks down some of the most important elements of Vault 7—the biggest leak in CIA history—allegedly divulged to WikiLeaks by another former CIA officer.

A federal jury in New York last week convicted former CIA officer Joshua Schulte on nine felony counts under the Espionage Act for leaking information to Wikileaks that became known as Vault 7. Schulte has consistently denied that he was the source of the information. Two years ago, he was convicted on two of the original 11 charges, while the jury hung on the remaining nine. The most recent trial, in which Schulte represented himself, was on those nine counts, and he now faces up to 80 years in prison. Schulte is yet to be tried on state child pornography charges.

Prosecutors had literally no forensic evidence that Schulte, left, had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to WikiLeaks. But they contended that he was a computer genius so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks. They alleged that he leaked the information because he was a disgruntled former CIA employee who hated his boss, couldn’t get along with his coworkers and sought revenge against the agency. That was enough for the jury.

CIA Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Sean Roche called the Vault 7 leak “a digital Pearl Harbor.” Chief prosecutor Damian Williams said the revelations were “one of the most brazen and damaging acts of espionage in American history.” And Vice magazine said it was “the worst leak of CIA information ever.” The CIA leadership apparently thought the leak was so damaging that then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo ordered the agency to come up with a plan to kidnap or to kill Julian Assange in London. One former Trump Administration national security official said that Pompeo and other senior CIA leaders, “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7. They were seeing blood.”

All of the major media outlets reported on the finalization of Schulte’s case. What they haven’t reported on, though, is exactly what Schulte was accused of leaking in the first place. What did we learn from Vault 7?

Vault 7 was a series of 24 collections of documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages that included the most sophisticated computer hacking, surveillance and cyberwarfare tools that the CIA ever developed. Wikileaks published the first tranche, called “Year Zero,” on March 7, 2017. Just this first installment contained more information than all of that released by Edward Snowden and included vulnerabilities known to the CIA within web browsers, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox and Opera and the operating systems of most of the world’s cell phones, including Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

The fact that the CIA knew about these vulnerabilities and didn’t inform the companies was a violation of a longstanding policy the agency claims to have, stating it would assist US tech companies with their security if it learned of security weaknesses. Instead, it exploited those problems in its digital operations. We have no idea if the agency used these vulnerabilities to spy on Americans. Ashley Gorski, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney said at the time, “Our government should be working to help the companies patch vulnerabilities when they are discovered, not stockpile them.”

A second Vault 7 revelation came on March 23, 2017 and included accounts of CIA efforts to hack Apple’s iPhones and Mac computers.

Additional tranches were released every week or two until September 2017. Their revelations included proof that the CIA was able to hack into cars’ computer systems and could take over control of the vehicle. Was the purpose of this to force the vehicle off the road? Off a cliff? Into a tree? The CIA never commented. Still other documents showed how CIA officers could take over an unsuspecting person’s smart TV and turn its speaker into a microphone to surreptitiously bug a room, even while the television appears to be turned off. Yet more documents showed that the CIA was running digital operations against the National Security Agency (NSA). It is unclear whether this was done as an exercise between the two agencies or if it was something more sinister.

Other revelations included a CIA-created program that was able to track documents transferred by would-be whistleblowers to media outlets (the program is called “Scribblers”), malware that can take over and control computers using the Microsoft Windows 10 operating system (called “Athena”) and malware that can be transferred from one “clean” computer to another through internal systems that are otherwise protected by anti-virus software (called “Pandemic”).

The revelations were not limited to software. Also leaked was a program called “HammerDrill,” that injects a trojan horse onto CDs and DVDs and then documents information on the discs for later transmission to the CIA. An operation called “Dark Matter” revealed security vulnerabilities unique to Apple operating systems while a huge range of Cisco Systems router models also had their own compromised vulnerabilities known to the CIA, costing Apple and Cisco untold millions of dollars to redesign their products and correct the security flaws.

The American people have a right to know what the government is doing in their name, especially if what the government is doing is illegal. Unfortunately, we most often have to rely on whistleblowers to learn what we need to know.

Either way, I feel strongly about the treatment that Schulte has endured, being held in barbaric conditions over the past two years and kept in a literal cage in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Brooklyn. Now convicted, he’ll likely be placed in a Special Administrative Unit or a Communications Management Unit in a maximum-security or supermax penitentiary. The government will seek to cut him off from the rest of the world for as long as possible.

Read John Kiriakou’s piece on this topic here

In addition, the state of New York, simultaneously with the federal charges, charged Schulte with multiple counts of child pornography, which has given many of Schulte’s natural supporters pause. Prosecutors maintained that they only discovered the pornography when they seized the computer hard drives in Schulte’s apartment while looking for Vault 7 information. Schulte’s defense to the child pornography charges will be that the considers himself to be a libertarian anarchist and that he set up a server to allow people unfettered “free speech,” something akin to the 4chan and 8chan servers. He maintains that he has not “received” or “disseminated” any child pornography personally. However, when child pornographers saw that Schulte’s server supported “unfettered free speech,” they used it to trade illegal images and videos. Schulte is adamant that none of the pornography was his. His protestations likely won’t matter.

Washington Post, College alumni groups spread nationally to counter ‘cancel culture,’ Susan Svrluga, July 26, 2022 (print ed). Alumni groups are popping up at colleges across the country as some debates intensify.

Alumni groups pressing free-speech issues are popping up at colleges in many states, as debates over academic freedom, “cancel culture” and changes on campus intensify.

More than a dozen groups have joined the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, a group announced last fall that now includes graduates from schools including Harvard, Bucknell, Yale and Cornell universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Wofford and Davidson colleges. Organizers say hundreds of people from schools all across the country have contacted them, all graduates who have questions they say their traditional alumni associations are not asking.

To join, the groups must hold freedom of speech, academic freedom and viewpoint diversity as primary missions, said Edward Yingling, president of the alliance and a founder of Princetonians for Free Speech. “There is a feeling that a lot of universities are losing their way,” Yingling said. “There is very little diversity of thought.”

New York Times, Jared Kushner Says He Was Treated for Thyroid Cancer While in White House, Maggie Haberman, July 26, 2022 (print ed). Jared Kushner, former President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer while he was serving in the West Wing, he wrote in an upcoming memoir set to be published next month.

“On the morning that I traveled to Texas to attend the opening of a Louis Vuitton factory, White House physician Sean Conley pulled me into the medical cabin on Air Force One,” Mr. Kushner wrote in “Breaking History: A White House Memoir,” to be published on Aug. 23, according to an excerpt about his illness provided to The New York Times.

“‘Your test results came back from Walter Reed,’ he said. ‘It looks like you have cancer. We need to schedule a surgery right away.’”

In a memoir to be published next month, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law wrote that he wanted the diagnosis and treatment kept quiet.

July 25

OpEd News, 10th Annual Whistleblower Summit & Film Festival Celebrates Whistleblowers from Knapp to Now! Michael McCray, July 25-26, 2022. ACORN 8, in association with the Northeast Filmmakers Lab (NEFL) and the Society of Professional Journalists (DC Pro Chapter), will co-host the 10th Annual Whistleblowers Summit & Film Festival from July 25 through July 31, 2022.

The Whistleblower Summit features FREE public policy panels online and on Capitol Hill (registration required). However, the Film Festival and Special Event Tickets range from $20 for individual tickets to $150 for week-long passes, which are available NOW at (www.WhistleblowerSummit.com).

Recent events led to the theme for the annual conference"Does The Truth Still Matter? 50 Years After The Watergate Break-in.

The hybrid event will take place virtually and on Capitol Hill and will include panel discussions with prominent whistleblowers, distinguished authors, emerging filmmakers, and policymakers. At its core, the Whistleblower Summit celebrates free speech and advocacy. "Sometimes the hardest truths are best told in jest. Thus we are pleased to announce a 'Tribute to Dick Gregory Comedy Showcase' as a capstone event for this year's summit." said Marcel Reid, Festival Director.

Famed New York City Detective Frank Serpico (David Burnham, NYT Reporter and Inspector Paul Delise) are nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award. Earlier this year, Frank Serpico received his Medal of Honor from NYPD over 50 years after his heroic actions resulted in the creation of the Knapp Commission. Prior recipients include Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and Senator Charles "Chuck" Grassley.

In recognition of more recent acts of moral courage, the Vindman brothers are nominated to receive the Shaw Marvin Pillar Award, the highest military whistleblower award presented at the Whistleblower Summit.

Alexander Vindman, right (Photo by Ana Isabel Martinez Chamorro) is the Former Director for European Affairs for the United States National Security Council. He and his brother suffered retaliation after Alexander reported a shakedown for military aid to Ukraine by Former President Trump. He is currently a doctoral student and senior fellow for the Foreign Policy Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition, he is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, Here, Right Matters.

"This is an exciting collaboration," said Mike Camoin, Northeast Filmmakers Lab.

The 10th Anniversary Whistleblower Summit features a screenplay contest and a new creative support incubator hosted by the Northeast Filmmakers Lab. NEFL empowers emerging filmmakers to complete and present their projects by leveraging world-class industry expertise. Our Hollywood Pitch Lab, a three-day immersive training, will conclude with a "Pitch Contest" to industry professionals for valuable prizes.

"So whether you are a filmmaker, screenwriter, or a whistleblower"everything starts with a pitch!" said Michael McCray, Managing Director. Finally, the film festival will include an educational screening of the Netflix docu-series MELTDOWN. This vital film portrays the Three Mile Island whistleblower and the advocates who supported him, presented by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) on Capitol Hill.

July 24

 

New York Times, Ties Between Alex Jones and Radio Network Show Economics of Misinformation, Tiffany Hsu, July 24, 2022. The Genesis Communications Network built a lucrative business alongside the radio host.

Ted Anderson, a precious metals seller, was hoping to rustle up some business for his gold and silver dealership when he started a radio network out of a Minneapolis suburb a couple of decades ago. Soon after, he signed a brash young radio host named Alex Jones.

Together, they ended up shaping today’s misinformation economy.

The two built a lucrative operation out of a tangled system of niche advertisers, fund-raising drives and promotion of media subscriptions, dietary supplements and survivalist merchandise. Mr. Jones became a conspiracy theory heavyweight, while Mr. Anderson’s company, the Genesis Communications Network, thrived. Their moneymaking blueprint was reproduced by numerous other misinformation peddlers.

Mr. Jones eventually drifted from his dependence on Genesis, as he expanded beyond radio and attracted a large following online. Yet they were closely tied together again in lawsuits accusing them of fueling a bogus narrative about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Mr. Jones was found liable by default in those cases. Last month, the plaintiffs’ lawyers dropped Genesis as a defendant. Christopher Mattei, one of the lawyers, said in a statement that having Genesis involved at trial would have distracted from the main target: Mr. Jones and his media organization.

The move freed Genesis, which says on its website that it “has established itself as the largest independently owned and operated talk radio network in the country,” from the steep penalties that most likely await Mr. Jones. But the cases, soon headed before juries to determine damages, continue to shed light on the economics that help to drive misleading and false claims across the media landscape.

The proliferation of falsehoods and misleading content, especially heading into the midterm elections this fall, is often blamed on credulous audiences and a widening partisan divide. Misinformation can also be hugely profitable, not just for the boldface names like Mr. Jones, but also for the companies that host websites, serve ads or syndicate content in the background.

“Misinformation exists for ideological reasons, but there is always a link to very commercial interests — they always find each other,” said Hilde Van den Bulck, a Drexel University media professor who has studied Mr. Jones. “It’s a little world full of networks of people who find ways to help each other out.”

Mr. Jones and Mr. Anderson did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Genesis originated in the late 1990s as a marketing ploy, operating “hand-in-hand” with Midas Resources, Mr. Anderson’s bullion business, he has said. He told the media watchdog FAIR in 2011: “Midas Resources needs customers, Genesis Communications Network needs sponsors.”

Alex Jones and his doom-and-gloom worldview fit neatly into the equation.

Genesis began syndicating Mr. Jones around the time he was fired by an Austin station in 1999, the host said this year on Infowars, a website he operates. It was a complementary, if sometimes jarring partnership — “sort of a marriage made in hell,” Ms. Van den Bulck said.

New York Times, Scientists Find a Language Spoken Across the Globe: Baby Talk, Oliver Whang, July 24, 2022. In an ambitious cross-cultural study, researchers found that adults around the world speak and sing to babies in similar ways. We’ve all seen it, we’ve all cringed at it, we’ve all done it ourselves: talked to a baby like it was, you know, a baby.

“Ooo, hellooooo baby!” you say, your voice lilting like a rapturously accommodating Walmart employee. Baby is utterly baffled by your unintelligible warble and your shamelessly doofus grin, but “baby so cuuuuuute!”

Regardless of whether it helps to know it, researchers recently determined that this sing-songy baby talk — more technically known as “parentese” — seems to be nearly universal to humans around the world. In the most wide-ranging study of its kind, more than 40 scientists helped to gather and analyze 1,615 voice recordings from 410 parents on six continents, in 18 languages from diverse communities: rural and urban, isolated and cosmopolitan, internet savvy and off the grid, from hunter gatherers in Tanzania to urban dwellers in Beijing.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Right-wing rhetoric today is the same as that of the Nazis and fascists 90 years ago, Wayne Madsen, left (longtime commentator, author of 22 books, including The Rise of the Fascist Fourth Reich below, and former Navy intelligence officer), July 22-24, 2022. Donald Trump and his fellow far-right Republican candidates for national, state, and local office are relying upon the same politically-charged rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler and his Nazis in Germany and Benito Mussolini's fascists in Italy in the years leading up to and during World War II.

Terms like "radical left socialists," "Marxists," "black radicals," and "anarchists" match almost exactly the far-right propaganda lexicon manufactured by Joseph Goebbels' Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin and Dino Alfieri's Ministry of Popular Culture in Rome. During Trump's last year as president, he repeatedly attempted to have "antifa," which is an acronym for anti-fascism philosophy, declared a "terrorist group." Trump, like Hitler and Mussolini before him, has no problem with right-wing terrorism.

Moreover, Trump's and his supporters' use of Nazi German rhetoric were encouraged by two of the would-be U.S. dictator. White House aides. They were Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, and Andrew Veprek, a supporter of Miller's unbridled neo-Nazi and white supremacist political views.

The alt-right's stock phrases and terms, including "Great Replacement," "foreigner invasion," and "lying media," have often been cited in manifestos and social media posts by mass killers. These include Anders Breivik in Norway, Jared Loughner in Tucson, Dylann Storm Roof in Charleston, James Fields in Charlottesville, Brenton Tarrant in Christchurch, Elliott Rodger in Santa Barbara, Patrick Crusius in El Paso, Nikolas Cruz in Parkland, Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh, John Earnest in Poway, Robert Crimo in Highland Park, and Jonathan Sapirman at the Greenwood Park Mall in Indiana. The phrases used by the killers had been echoed on white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites, as well as frequently by Fox News and its resident fascist ideologue, Tucker Carlson.

The Republican Party is now the party of seditious conspiracy, white nationalism, and Donald Trump-level graft and corruption. It should be consigned to history, along with its political forbears, the Whigs, Federalists, and Know Nothings.

July 23

Washington Post, Opinion: Four reasons the Jan. 6 hearings have conquered the news cycle, Margaret Sullivan, right, July 23, 2022 (print ed.).  There was no guarantee these hearings would break through the way they have. Here’s what set them apart.

By their nature, congressional hearings are boring. Politicians speechify. The pace is slow and halting. If anyone manages to say anything important, it’s drowned in a sea of bloviation.

But the eight hearings held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol have been riveting to watch — and even more remarkably, they have captured the daily news cycle again and again, not only finding substantial TV and streaming audiences as they aired but also consistently landing at the top of broadcast and cable news reports and of newspaper front pages. This was far from a sure thing, given how much news coverage the Capitol riot already received over the past year and a half.

Thursday night’s hearing — the season finale, as it’s been dubbed — was no exception.

The New York Times led its website Friday morning with this headline: “Jan. 6 Panel Presents Evidence of Trump’s Refusal to Stop the Capitol Riot.” The Washington Post took its hearings headline across five of the six possible front-page columns in print — “Trump ignored many pleas to act” — with two related stories nearby. CNN spent nearly as much time recapping and analyzing afterward as the hearing itself had consumed. Nearly every other major media outlet — with the obvious exception of Fox News — gave the hearing an equivalent treatment.

“It’s surprising — certainly not what I would have predicted — the way these hearings have broken through and captured the news cycle again and again,” said Tom Bettag, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland.

Bettag was a longtime executive producer of the CBS “Evening News” and ABC’s “Nightline” whom I’ve found to be a savvy media observer, so I was eager to talk to him about how these hearings have managed to command the news cycle. Here are a few theories.

The Jan. 6 hearing was horrifying. It also gave me hope.

New York Times, Twitter’s Revenue Falls as It Struggles to Draw Advertisers, Kate Conger and Adam Satariano, July 23, 2022 (print ed.).  The company’s quarterly earnings failed to meet expectations, a sign of deeper troubles as it navigates a legal battle with Elon Musk.

July 22

Washington Post, Amazon will see you now: Tech giant buys health-care chain for $3.9 billion, Rachel Lerman and Hamza Shaban, July 22, 2022. The e-commerce giant’s plan to buy One Medical for $18 per share gives it a firm foothold in the health-care sector.

Amazon will dramatically expand its health-care reach with its planned $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical, a primary care provider with 188 offices in 25 markets nationwide.

The e-commerce giant went big: It offered $18 a share for One Medical’s parent company, 1Life Healthcare — 77 percent higher than the previous day’s closing price. Sparks flew on Wall Street after Thursday’s announcement, powering the stock up nearly 70 percent.

July 21

 

Daily Beast, Far-Right Channel One America News Officially Dropped by Last Major TV Carrier, Justin Baragona, Updated July 21, 2022. BUH BYE. Verizon announced on Thursday that One America News will be removed from its channel lineup on July 31, leaving the far-right network with almost no TV providers.

MAGA cable channel One America News has been on life support since satellite provider DirecTV dropped the far-right conspiratorial network from its lineup this spring. It now looks like it may be DOA.

Verizon Fios, currently the largest pay-TV platform still carrying OAN, announced on Thursday afternoon that it had been unable to come to terms with the network’s owners on a new agreement and would no longer carry the channel after this month.

“Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business-as-usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms,” a Verizon spokesperson said in a statement.

“Since we were unable to reach an agreement, effective July 31, 2022, we will no longer have the rights to provide our customers with this programming, and it will be removed from the Fios TV lineup,” the statement continued.

“Our company has long advocated for providing customers with the ability to choose what content they want to watch, and our Fios TV platform offers a wide and diverse choice of programming options, including a la carte options, that strive to meet our millions of customers' various content needs and preferences,” the telecommunications company concluded.

Following DirecTV’s decision to drop the pro-Trump channel, depriving OAN of its biggest revenue stream by far, the channel has gone through an existential crisis. Besides dealing with a talent exodus and dropping employee morale, One America News also faces billion-dollar lawsuits over the election lies spread by its hosts.

Meanwhile, even as the network has lobbed attacks at Verizon as their deal was about to expire, CEO Robert Herring Sr. has begged other cable companies to pick up the struggling channel. He even went so far as to peddle far-fetched rumors that Elon Musk was going to buy the network (something Musk quickly shot down.)

At the same time, however, the network’s hosts have also urged viewers to dig up dirt on executives of companies that had dropped OAN, not exactly helping Herring’s cause to attract new customers.

Washington Post, Perspective: Newspapers are dying? This digital media veteran launched one anyway, Margaret Sullivan, right, July 21, 2022.
Susan Clark knew that print newspapers had lost ground to the Internet. But in her Connecticut hometown, “we just desperately needed a paper."

It wasn’t even a decade ago that Susan Clark was in charge of the Economist magazine’s digital operation around the world.

This was a forward-looking role that seemingly placed her within journalism’s vanguard at the time — championing media’s online future, at an organization well-placed to tap into a lucrative global audience.

In other words, Clark was basically one of the last people you’d expect to launch a small-town print newspaper in 2022.

Yet she did just that with the Redding Sentinel in Fairfield County, Conn. And while it’s still early in the Sentinel’s trajectory, Clark is more than happy with how it’s going.

Washington Post, Top Russian tennis star criticizes Ukraine war, comes out as gay, Annabelle Timsit, July 21, 2022. Daria Kasatkina, Russia’s highest-ranked female tennis player, came out as gay and criticized the war in Ukraine in an unusually candid interview that highlighted the difficulties top athletes face in navigating the repercussions of the conflict — at home and abroad.

Kasatkina, 25, touched on two of the most sensitive topics in Russia — Ukraine and LGBTQ rights — in a wide-ranging conversation with Russian blogger Vitya Kravchenko that was recorded in Barcelona and released Monday on YouTube.

Kasatkina — the No. 12 in the world — said she wanted “the war to end” and described the conflict as “a full-blown nightmare.”

She said there “hadn’t been a single day since February 24,” when Russia invaded Ukraine, that she hadn’t read or thought about the war. She expressed empathy for Ukrainian players affected by the war.

“I want to play against players who have an opportunity to train and prepare for tournaments just like me, who don’t need to worry about courts being bombed and [having] nowhere to go,” she added. “I can’t imagine what it’s like to have no home — not because you haven’t bought it but because your home was taken away.”

Kasatkina is the latest Russian athlete to speak out against the war, in defiance of laws in Russia that ban anyone from criticizing what officials there call Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine. Several other Russian tennis players have called for an end to the war, including eighth-ranked Andrey Rublev — though many have done so in more vague terms than Kasatkina.

Washington Post, China fines Didi $1.2 billion for breaking data-security laws, Eva Dou and Pei-Lin Wu, July 21, 2022. The ride-hailing giant collected millions of pieces of data, including facial recognition details and screenshots from users’ photo albums, the regulator said.

China’s cybersecurity regulator fined ride-hailing juggernaut Didi Global $1.2 billion after a year-long probe, saying it had violated laws on data security and the protection of personal information.

The Cyberspace Administration of China said Thursday that Didi, a 10-year-old Chinese company based in Beijing, illegally collected 12 million pieces of “screenshot information” from users’ mobile photo albums and excessively accumulated 107 million pieces of passenger facial recognition information and 1.4 million pieces of family relationship information, among other violations.

The regulator also said there were “severe security risks” in Didi’s data-processing methods, which would not be detailed because they related to national security.

“The evidence is conclusive,” the regulator said in a statement published online. “The circumstances are serious, the nature is immoral, and the punishment should be severe.”

Washington Post, Tesla dumps Bitcoin amid pressure from factory shutdown, Faiz Siddiqui, July 21, 2022. Tesla recorded a smaller profit than the previous quarter after a covid-19 shutdown of its Shanghai Gigafactory slowed business.

Tesla sold more than $900 million worth of bitcoin last quarter, shedding 75 percent of its holdings and prompting the overall market value of the cryptocurrency to drop.

The company sold it off because of issues with car production in China, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said during an earnings call Wednesday.

“The reason we sold a bunch of our bitcoin holdings was that we were uncertain as to when the covid lockdowns in China would alleviate,” Musk said. “We are certainly open to increasing our bitcoin holdings in the future, so this should not be taken as some verdict on bitcoin — it’s just that we were concerned about overall liquidity to the company.”

Musk was enthusiastic about bitcoin last year when the company first announced it was investing $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency, saying on Twitter that the electric car manufacturer would soon accept the digital currency as payment. He said Tesla would not convert its bitcoin received from payments to fiat currency, or paper money.

Washington Post, George Clooney, Gladys Knight, U2 among next Kennedy Center honorees, Peggy McGlone, July 21, 2022. The 45th annual celebration of the performing arts will also salute Amy Grant and Tania León on Dec. 4 at the national arts center in Washington.

July 20

 

New York Times, Dana Canedy, Publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Flagship Imprint, Has Left the Job, Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, July 20, 2022 (print ed.). She was the first Black woman in the position, which she held for two years. Her hiring came amid a push for diversity in the industry.

Dana Canedy, shown above in a file photo, the first Black woman to serve as publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint, left her position after two years, the company said on Tuesday.

The announcement came amid an industrywide push to increase diversity. Several major publishing houses have over the past two years hired and promoted people of color into prominent editorial roles, including Lisa Lucas, the first Black publisher in Pantheon’s 80-year history, and Jamia Wilson, vice president and executive editor at Random House.

In a statement, Simon & Schuster said that Ms. Canedy was leaving to write a book, a sequel to her 2008 memoir, A Journal for Jordan, which was about her partner, First Sgt. Charles M. King, and the journal he wrote for their son, Jordan. Mr. King was killed in combat in Iraq in 2006.

Ms. Canedy came to her role at Simon & Schuster in July of 2020 with little publishing experience. She was a journalist at The New York Times for more than 20 years and later served as administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes.

When she joined Simon & Schuster, her appointment was welcomed as a sign that the publishing world, which has long been overwhelmingly white, was taking steps to become more inclusive in its upper ranks. Ms. Canedy said the wider significance of her position made it difficult to leave.

“The issue when you’re ‘the first’ or ‘the only,’ is that to many, you represent an entire industry,” she said. “And I embrace that. However, it made it harder to make a decision that I felt was right for me.”

While Ms. Canedy’s tenure was brief, she had a significant impact on the company.

She brought in Aminda Marqués González, the former executive editor of The Miami Herald, to be Simon & Schuster’s vice president and executive editor, and acquired books by prominent Black journalists and scholars, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, the journalist and editor Errin Haines, and Erica Armstrong Dunbar, a history professor at Rutgers University who specializes in African American women’s history.

But Ms. Canedy also angered and alienated much of her own staff, and drew criticism from liberals, when she signed a deal last April to publish an autobiography by Mike Pence, the former vice president, calling it “the definitive book on one of the most consequential presidencies in American history.”

More than 200 employees signed a petition demanding that the publisher cancel the deal, and were joined by thousands of other writers and publishing professionals. The letter argued that Simon & Schuster’s deal with Pence, left, had broken “the public’s trust in our editorial process, and blatantly contradicted previous public claims in support of Black and other lives made vulnerable by structural oppression,” it said.

Ms. Canedy and Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster’s chief executive, stood by the acquisition of Mr. Pence’s book as a crucial account of the Trump presidency, and maintained that publishers should acquire books from across the political spectrum. Ms. Canedy said she would continue to work on titles by Mr. Pence, Mr. Robinson and Ms. Dunbar.

Her departure comes at a tumultuous moment for Simon & Schuster. In the fall of 2020, Simon & Schuster’s parent company, ViacomCBS, struck a deal to sell it to another publishing company, Penguin Random House, but the acquisition has faced intense regulatory scrutiny, and is being challenged in an antitrust lawsuit by the Justice Department. If it goes through, Simon & Schuster will be absorbed into a much bigger rival, and may lose some of its autonomy; if the Justice Department blocks the deal, the company faces even greater uncertainty.

A spokesman for Simon & Schuster said that Mr. Karp, who was formerly the publisher of Simon & Schuster before becoming the chief executive, will “resume being publisher for the foreseeable future” while continuing his work as the head of the company.

 July 19

 New York Times, Elon Musk and Twitter will go to trial over their $44 billion deal in October, Kate Conger, July 19, 2022. Twitter had sought to expedite the case by requesting a trial in September, which Mr. Musk had countered by asking for a trial in February.

Twitter and Elon Musk, right, will go to trial in October over whether the billionaire must complete his $44 billion acquisition of the social media company, a Delaware judge ruled on Tuesday.

The ruling was the first decision in a lawsuit that Twitter filed this month to force Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, to go through with the blockbuster deal. Mr. Musk had agreed to buy Twitter in April, but indicated this month that he wanted to terminate the purchase. Twitter had sought to expedite the case by requesting a trial in September, which Mr. Musk had countered by asking for a trial in February.

“The longer the merger transaction remains in limbo, the larger a cloud of uncertainty is cast over the company,” said Kathaleen St. J. McCormick, the judge overseeing the case in the Delaware Court of Chancery, in a nearly two-hour hearing.

The ruling was a win for Twitter, which said an extended timeline would give Mr. Musk more time to badger the company and find a way out of the deal. Judge McCormick ruled that the trial would last five days, with the exact date to be based on the schedules of the court and the lawyers in the case.

“We are pleased that the court agreed to expedite this trial,” a Twitter spokesman said.

Alex Spiro, a lawyer representing Mr. Musk, said, “We’ll be ready.”

When Mr. Musk agreed to buy Twitter, he said that he would take it private and that the company had plenty of potential. But within weeks, he began arguing that Twitter had stymied his attempts to understand how many of the accounts on its platform were fake and said the company was not disclosing relevant information to him.

Twitter has said Mr. Musk was searching for a way out of the purchase as the stock market slumped. The company has said it worked with Mr. Musk to give him information about fake accounts.

In the hearing on Tuesday, Twitter pushed for the lawsuit to be resolved as quickly as possible. Bill Savitt, a lawyer for Twitter, said the “continued uncertainty” over the deal “inflicts harm on Twitter, every hour of every day,” and asked that a trial be scheduled in September. Postponements would allow Mr. Musk to run out the clock on financing for the deal, Mr. Savitt said.

 

New York Times, Word of Trump Media Deal Is Said to Have Leaked Months in Advance, Matthew Goldstein, July 19, 2022 (print ed.). Federal authorities are investigating a surge in trading that preceded the announcement of a $300 million deal with the former president’s media company.

Months before former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company unveiled an agreement to raise hundreds of millions of dollars last fall, word of the deal leaked to an obscure Miami investment firm, whose executives began plotting ways to make money off the imminent transaction, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The deal — in which a so-called special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, would merge with Mr. Trump’s fledgling media business — was announced in October. It sent shares of the SPAC soaring.

Employees at the Miami investment firm, Rocket One Capital, had learned of the pending deal over the summer, long before it was announced, according to three people familiar with the firm’s internal discussions. Two of the people said that Rocket One officials at the time talked about ways to profit off the soon-to-be-announced transaction with Trump Media & Technology Group by investing in the SPAC, Digital World Acquisition Corporation.

A top Rocket One executive, Bruce Garelick, was on the board of Digital World until he resigned in recent weeks.

In the days before the Trump Media deal became public, there was a surge in trading in a type of security known as warrants, which entitled investors to buy shares of Digital World at a preset price in the future.

Federal prosecutors and regulators are now investigating the merger between Digital World and Trump Media, including the frenzied trading in the SPAC’s warrants, according to people familiar with the investigation and public disclosures. Digital World said in a recent regulatory filing that a federal grand jury in Manhattan had issued subpoenas seeking information about Rocket One, among other things.

Washington Post, Opinion: How media coverage drove Biden’s political plunge, Perry Bacon Jr., right, July 19, 2022 (print ed.). The mainstream media has played a huge, underappreciated role in President Biden’s declining support over the past year. Its flawed coverage model of politics and government is bad for more than just Biden — it results in a distorted national discourse that weakens our democracy. The media needs to find a different way to cover Washington.

One of the sharpest dips in Biden’s approval rating — which has dropped from 55 percent in January 2021 to less than 39 percent today — happened last August, when it declined almost five points in a single month. There wasn’t a huge surge in gas prices, nor some big legislative failure. What caused Biden’s dip was the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan — or, rather, the media’s 24/7, highly negative coverage of it.

To be clear, Biden deserved criticism. The early stages of the U.S. exit were tumultuous, with desperate Afghans clinging to U.S. military planes and massing outside the Kabul airport. The Taliban took control far more quickly than the administration anticipated. But for much of August, the homepages of major newspapers and cable news programs were dominated by Afghanistan coverage, as if the chaotic withdrawal was the only thing happening in the world. Journalists and outlets tore into the president, with Axios calling the withdrawal “Biden’s stain,” NBC News correspondent Richard Engel declaring that “history will judge this moment as a very dark period for the United States,” and CNN’s Jake Tapper asking an administration official on his show, “Does President Biden not bear the blame for this disastrous exit from Afghanistan?”

Biden’s poll numbers plunged, closely tracking the media hysteria. As The Post’s Dana Milbank wrote in December, data analysis showed a marked increase in negativity in media coverage of Biden that started last August. After the withdrawal, the media lumped other events into its “Biden is struggling” narrative: infighting among Democrats over the party’s agenda, Democrats’ weak performances in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races, rising inflation, and the surge of the delta and omicron variants. Biden’s role in these issues was often exaggerated — there are many causes of inflation besides Biden’s policies; presidents can’t stop the emergence of coronavirus variants. This anti-Biden coverage pattern remains in place.

 

Washington Post, Preservationists say Library of Congress makeover plan is ‘vandalism,’ Peggy McGlone, July 19, 2022 (print ed.). The library’s Main Reading Room (shown above), included in a $60 million renovation of the Thomas Jefferson Building, lands on the D.C. Preservation League’s list of endangered places.

A proposed change to the ornate Main Reading Room at the Library of Congress that critics say would remove the symbolic and functional heart of the 1897 Beaux-Arts masterpiece has landed the library on the D.C. Preservation League’s 2022 list of Most Endangered Places.

The Library of Congress plans to remove the mahogany librarian’s desk that rises some 16 feet in the middle of this spectacular, first-floor room and replace it with a circular window in the floor that will offer a view of its decorative dome to visitors looking up from the floor below.

When the D.C. Preservation League announced the listing last month, it described the alternation as ill-advised and unnecessary and said it would “desecrate the Reading Room’s character and function.” It asked Congress and the Architect of the Capitol, the federal agency responsible for the Capitol complex, to stop it.

The league’s listing is the most recent and public criticism of the proposal, which was unveiled more than three years ago. It follows a retired librarian’s complaint submitted to the Library of Congress inspector general in April and expressions of outrage from arts and civic leaders.

“I’m appalled at this proposal,” Arthur Cotton Moore, the consulting architect on the building’s renovation between 1981 and 1997, said in a recent phone interview. “We are trying to head off a tragedy.”

The alteration is part of a $60 million makeover of the Thomas Jefferson Building, one of three Library of Congress structures on Capitol Hill. The makeover includes additional exhibition space, a learning lab and an orientation center and is intended to improve the visitor experience and increase attendance.

Principal Deputy Librarian of Congress Mark Sweeney called the project a “game changer” that is critical to the library’s future. The D.C. Preservation League’s posting about the plan has several errors, he added, including the idea that the library is turning away from its central function as a place for scholarship.

Washington Post, Opinion: The college football lunacy isn’t permanent. It’s going to get worse, Rick Reilly, July 19, 2022 (print ed.). College football is slaying its history. It’s selling all its tradition and fans and rivalries down the river on an out-of-control steamboat with a drunk donkey at the wheel.

The lunacy really kicked in on June 30 when USC and UCLA bolted the Pac-12 conference for the Big Ten (which now will have 16 teams, if that makes any sense).

That’s right. Starting in 2024, the Big Ten conference, longtime symbol of the hearty American Midwest, corn ice cream and 400-pound kickers, will now be playing teams full of surfers, lowriders and guys in hair buns.

Big Ten teams are now conveniently located near their banks, not each other. Take USC, which is near Hollywood, and their new conference foe Rutgers, which is somewhere near “The Sopranos.” This is going to be such an exciting new rivalry. One team has six Heisman Trophy winners, can claim 11 national championships and over the years has spent 91 weeks as the No. 1 team in the country. The other is Rutgers.

Then you have the University of Maryland — a Midwest-by-the-Chesapeake Big Ten team since 2014 — soon to be taking on UCLA, which is a six-hour flight away. The winner of the game will take possession of the coveted Dead Polar Bear trophy. Imagine that: The flyover states they’ll be flying over are where their conference resides. College football really needs to get Google Maps.

Why did UCLA abandon the traditions of nearly 100 years in the Pac-12, the conference that has more national championships in more sports than any other? Because its athletic program was $103 million in debt, according to USA Today, and stands to make about $60 million more per year in TV money with the Big Ten than it was with the Pac-12. What good are traditions if the repo man just took your blocking sleds?

But don’t fret, college football fans. None of this is permanent: It’s going to get worse, until what we’re left with is two superconferences — the Big Ten and the SEC — with maybe 40 teams total. The superconferences, controlling all the watchable college football in the country, will then put the NCAA out of its misery, take over the game and hold their own national championship.

July 18

 

New York Times, Amazon C.E.O. Andy Jassy Breaks From the Bezos Way, David McCabe and Karen Weise, July 18, 2022. Jeff Bezos’ successor has set himself apart with a hands-on approach in Washington.

When Jeff Bezos, above left, was chief executive of Amazon, he took an arms-length stance toward the company’s affairs in Washington. He rarely lobbied lawmakers. He testified only once before Congress, under the threat of subpoena.

Andy Jassy, above right, Mr. Bezos’ successor, is trying a different approach.

Since becoming Amazon’s chief executive last July, Mr. Jassy, 54, has visited Washington at least three times to traverse Capitol Hill and visit the White House. In September, he met with Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff. He has called Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, to lobby against antitrust legislation and talked with Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, about Amazon’s new corporate campus in the state.

“He was very inquisitive,” said Mr. Kaine, who met with Mr. Jassy at the Capitol in September and spoke with him by phone last month. Mr. Jassy was diplomatic rather than out to “bowl you over” by “force of personality,” Mr. Kaine said, and came prepared with knowledge of the lawmaker’s committee assignments.

Mr. Jassy’s actions in Washington are a sign of a new era taking shape at Amazon. The executive, who joined the company in 1997 and built its Amazon Web Services cloud computing business, followed Mr. Bezos’ footsteps for years and was viewed as one of his closest lieutenants. The succession last year was largely seen as a continuation of Mr. Bezos’ culture and methods.

But Mr. Jassy has quietly put his own imprint on Amazon, making more changes than many insiders and company watchers expected.

He has drilled into key parts of the business that Mr. Bezos pushed off onto deputies, especially the logistics operations. He has admitted that Amazon overbuilt and needed to cut costs, closing its physical bookstores and putting some warehouse expansion plans on ice. He has started a tumultuous overhaul of leadership. And while he has reiterated the company’s opposition to unions, he has also struck a more conciliatory tone with Amazon’s 1.6 million employees.

The starkest difference with Mr. Bezos may be the new chief executive’s far more hands-on approach to regulatory and political challenges in Washington.

Mr. Jassy has engaged more with the scrutiny on Amazon’s broader role as an employer and in society, beyond serving customers, said Matt McIlwain, a managing partner at Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, which was an early investor in the company.

New York Times, The Unraveling of an Award-Winning Documentary, Jane Arraf, July 18, 2022. In a pivotal scene of the 2021 documentary “Sabaya,” two men rescue a young woman named Leila from a Syrian detention camp for the families of ISIS fighters, bundling her into a car and driving her to safety as shots are fired behind them.

In interviews with BBC Radio and others, the film’s Iraqi-Swedish director, Hogir Hirori, recounted the tension of the rescue and the terror of the ride as they raced from Al Hol detention camp with the young woman, one of thousands of women and girls from Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS.

The dramatic scene helped the Swedish-government-funded film garner glowing reviews and awards, including best director for a foreign documentary at the Sundance Film Festival last year.

But following an investigation by a Swedish magazine, Kvartal, Hirori has admitted that he was not there when Leila was freed, that he substituted another woman instead and that he lied to a BBC interviewer.

The admissions follow findings by The New York Times last year that many of the traumatized women either did not initially consent to be in the film or refused but were included anyway. The director’s admissions have also renewed accusations that the documentary played down the coerced separation of mothers from their young children, born during enslavement by ISIS — and turned the very men responsible for that separation into heroes for rescuing them.

While Yazidi women sexually enslaved by ISIS were welcomed back by their communities after ISIS was defeated, the children were not. Some women did not want the children, but for most, the forced separations have had serious repercussions, including suicide attempts.

In a statement issued after the Kvartal investigation, Hirori acknowledged that he had depicted Leila’s escape “using a rescue scene of another woman which I participated in.” He said the woman who was presented as Leila, the main character, did not want to be filmed after the rescue and so he did not mention her in the documentary.

Speaking in Swedish through an interpreter, he told BBC Radio last year, “It was important for me to film it as it was happening because that was the reality.” In the interview, one of several in which he expressed the same sentiment, he also spoke of the Yazidi women: “They aren’t just numbers, they are people just like you and me.”

The BBC has removed the lengthy interview from its website after press queries. A BBC spokesperson said it was being reviewed. Hirori said in his statement that he regretted not telling the BBC the truth about the rescue scene.

A timeline by Kvartal also showed that in three scenes that included news reports about the battle against ISIS and a Turkish invasion, audio was inserted from events that had occurred several months earlier or weeks later. In at least one of the scenes, the film’s hero reacts to news from the car radio that he could not have been hearing.

The issue of forced separations is the single most contentious one among Yazidis. While the Yazidi Home Center featured in “Sabaya” was responsible for finding and caring for hundreds of Iraqi Yazidis freed from ISIS captivity, the organization, acting on instructions from Yazidi elders in Iraq, also arranged for the children to be taken from their mothers. Most were sent to an orphanage in northeastern Syria that the women were not allowed to visit once they returned to Iraq.

The director of “Sabaya,” about Yazidi women who had been sexually enslaved by ISIS, says that he wasn’t present for a key scene and substituted footage.

July 17

Washington Post, Book Review: What made Harvey Weinstein a monster? Does it matter? Caetlin Benson-Allott, July 17, 2022 (print ed.). Ken Auletta widens the lens on the sordid tale and inadvertently humanizes its villain.

Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence

By Ken Auletta

Penguin Press. 466 pp. $30

In horror movies, the monster (almost) always rises from the dead for one final scare. One could be forgiven for feeling the same way regarding books and articles about Harvey Weinstein, right. What is to be gained, one wonders, from reading another thousand or hundred thousand words about the studio executive-slash-sexual predator who raped or otherwise assaulted more than 100 women between the 1970s and 2010s?

His crimes have been well covered in newspaper and magazine stories and in books by the journalists behind those exposés, not to mention multiple podcasts and documentaries. Inasmuch as each new commentary extends Weinstein’s notoriety and postpones his obsolescence, it arguably serves his core desires: fame and influence.

A similar point has been made many times about true crime and serial killers; as Teen Vogue’s Sandra Song put it, “When we focus so much on the murderer — their neuroses, their troubled pasts — we ignore the fact that the victims of these crimes were also people.”

Ken Auletta, left, certainly does not ignore the victims in Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence, his new biography of the former film producer, now serving 23 years in prison. But in hunting for Weinstein’s “Rosebud,” Auletta both aggrandizes the monstrous mogul (by analogizing his megalomania to “Citizen Kane”) and extends the cultural conversation around the perpetrator and what makes him tick.

As a biography, Hollywood Ending focuses more on Weinstein himself than the issues of sexual misconduct and professional intimidation featured in Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” and Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. In those books, the journalists who broke the story of Weinstein’s serial sexual abuse in 2017 explain how their reporting for the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively, finally exposed Weinstein and led to his arrest, conviction and imprisonment. Kantor, Twohey and Farrow concentrate on the assault survivors and their bravery in exposing a predator. Notably, these authors also contextualize Weinstein’s downfall within the #MeToo movement.

By contrast, Auletta zooms out from the 2017 revelations about Weinstein to identify the producer’s other victims: the employees he bullied, the business partners he exploited and the brother he belittled.

Auletta also plumbs Weinstein’s childhood and early adult years to uncover factors that might have contributed to the mogul’s criminal behavior. Was it his angry and overbearing mother? Was it, as Weinstein himself puts it, growing up “poor, ugly, Jewish,” always the outsider and the underdog (positions, it should be clear, that Weinstein also embraced)?

Who cares? As anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie knows, ex post facto explanations of the monster’s pathology are beside the point. The revelations about Norman Bates’s terrible childhood at the end of Psycho do nothing to help Marion Crane, the victim of Bates’s murderous “shower scene” attack. Nor do such revelations prevent future Normans from assaulting future Marions or teach women how to avoid Normans altogether.

Like all of Auletta’s work, Hollywood Ending is thoroughly researched and eminently readable. Auletta is a highly skilled journalist whose ability to assemble compelling narratives from scores of sources helps him craft well-rounded characters and juicy prose. A prime example is his description of Weinstein’s “unhinged, Shakespeare-worthy relationship with his younger brother, Bob Weinstein, which gyrated from an impregnable partnership to screaming matches, stony estrangements, and, at least once, bloody blows.” Bob co-founded Miramax and the Weinstein Company with Harvey and initially shared Harvey’s mercurial temper and verbally abusive tendencies. Yet over the course of Hollywood Ending” Bob Weinstein emerges as an emblem of redemption. Whereas Bob too once berated staff and even paid the settlements to some of Harvey’s victims (ostensibly without realizing that their claims involved assault), he entered treatment for alcoholism in 2004 and later tried to guide his brother toward addiction recovery as well. What Bob knew and how much he enabled Harvey remains unclear, but in Auletta’s hands his character demonstrates that rehabilitation is possible, that Harvey could have changed but didn’t.

By exploring Harvey’s relationship with his brother and other men, Auletta humanizes the monster, which makes his approach feel fundamentally misguided. As Auletta himself is the first to admit, he failed to expose Weinstein’s sexual predations in a 2002 profile for the New Yorker. Auletta admirably addresses that shortcoming in his book and praises Kantor, Twohey and Farrow for eventually breaking the story he couldn’t. Yet Hollywood Ending persists in emphasizing the same bullying behavior Auletta uncovered in 2002: temper tantrums, verbal abuse of staff and colleagues, and profligate eating, smoking and spending. Perhaps this is the Harvey that Auletta knows best, or perhaps Auletta is quietly reasserting the significance of his 2002 profile and the revelations it contained.

Either way, I found myself wondering why I should care about Weinstein’s corporate power struggles, such as whether he was insubordinate to Michael Eisner after Disney bought Miramax in 1993. Maybe Miramax didn’t make as much money for Disney as the Weinstein brothers claimed, and maybe Harvey did refuse to acknowledge Eisner as his boss. But broken budgets and tyrannical arrogance are less grievous offenses than rape and sexual assault, and “Hollywood Ending” implicitly conflates them. For instance, in a 28-page chapter on “The Culture of Silence,” which protected Weinstein in the mid-1990s, Auletta devotes only eight pages to criminal sexual behavior. The other 20 inventory Miramax’s successes with “Pulp Fiction,” “Sling Blade,” “The Piano” and “Scream.” Auletta proposes that those successes are the reason Weinstein’s contemporaries protected him, but in devoting more pages to Weinstein’s business dealings than his victims, the author perpetuates a value system that prizes art over the people hurt by its maker. Certainly Weinstein should not have yelled at colleagues, started a whisper campaign to diminish the Oscar chances of “Saving Private Ryan,” or forcibly kissed, stripped and molested actresses and his employees. These offenses are not commensurate, however, and in his rush to document all of Weinstein’s inappropriate behavior, Auletta, however inadvertently, suggests that they are.

Hollywood Ending is a finely crafted biography of an ignominious sexual predator. It is not a prurient book, yet I could never stop questioning its approach to its subject. Like most true-crime reporting, it exists because women suffered.

Yet its main topic is neither those survivors nor the noble reporters and prosecutors who ended a monster’s reign of terror. It is, still, the monster himself. I am not convinced that knowing Weinstein better will help women “gain some sort of power over culturally endemic narratives in which girls and women are brutalized” — a common rationale for the genre that Tanya Horeck references in her book Justice on Demand: True Crime in the Digital Streaming Era. So read Hollywood Ending if you’re interested in how power is amassed and exploited in the U.S. film industry, but don’t read it expecting answers about sexual violence or how to stop it. The monster has nothing to teach you.

Caetlin Benson-Allott is a professor of English, film and media studies at Georgetown University and the author of “The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television.”

July 16

 

President Biden and Prime Minister Yair Lapid of Israel in Jerusalem on Thursday (New York Times Photo by Doug Mills).

Washington Post, Biden calls for full accounting of Palestinian American journalist’s death, Steve Hendrix, July 16, 2022 (print ed.). Several investigations, including one by The Post, have blamed Israeli gunfire for Shireen Abu Akleh’s death in May.

President Biden devoted the last hours of his Israeli visit to restoring the ties with Palestinians severed by his predecessor, visiting a Palestinian hospital Friday in East Jerusalem and crossing an Israeli military checkpoint to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem.

The president called for a full accounting of the May killing of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, right, during an Israeli raid in the West Bank, the first time he has publicly mentioned the incident during his visit.

Biden’s two events produced no progress toward renewed talks in the long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But the White House did announce a range of measures meant to improve the situation at a time “when Palestinians are hurting, you can just feel it,” Biden said after his meeting with Abbas.

“I know that the goal of the two state [solution] seems so far away, while indignities like restrictions on movement and travel or the daily worry of your children’s safety are real and immediate,” the president said. “So even if the ground is not ripe at this moment to restart negotiations, the United States and my administration will not give up on trying to bring the Palestinians and the Israelis closer together.”

The administration approved $316 million in new aid for Palestinians, including $100 million for a hospital network that serves patients from the West Bank and Gaza. Another $200 million will go to the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees, funding that was largely eliminated by the Trump administration. Biden, who has pledged to renew support for Palestinians, began restoring Washington’s contribution soon after taking office.

The White House also announced $15 million in emergency aid to help the territories during grain shortages caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as well as an initiative to speed the rollout of 4G technology in the West Bank and Gaza. The administration said it was also pressing Israel to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians by streamlining the crossing between the West Bank and Jordan.

July 15

Reuters, Judge in Twitter v. Musk made rare ruling: ordering a deal to close, Tom Hals and Hyunjoo Jin, July 15, 2022. The judge overseeing Twitter Inc's (TWTR.N) $44 billion lawsuit against Elon Musk, right, has a no-nonsense reputation as well as the distinction of being one of the few jurists who has ever ordered a reluctant buyer to close a U.S. corporate merger.

Kathaleen McCormick took over the role of chancellor or chief judge of the Court of Chancery last year, the first woman in that role. On Wednesday, she was assigned the Twitter lawsuit which seeks to force Musk to complete his deal for the social media platform, which promises to be one of the biggest legal showdowns in years.

"She already has a track record of not putting up with some of the worst behavior that we see in these areas when people want to get out of deals," said Adam Badawi, a law professor who specializes in corporate governance at the University of California Berkeley. "She is a serious, no-nonsense judge."

In contrast to Musk's brash and volatile behavior, she is known as soft-spoken, approachable and amiable -- but a person who also stands her ground. She advocates respect among litigants and integrity at legal conferences.

"We've always had each other's backs, we've always gone out for drinks after arguments and maintained this level civility," she told a gathering at the University of Delaware this year.

After weeks of confrontational tweets suggesting Twitter was hiding the true number of fake accounts, Musk said on Friday he was terminating the $54.20-per-Twitter share acquisition, worth $44 billion. On Tuesday, the social media platform sued.

Judges have ordered reluctant buyers to close corporate acquisitions only a handful of times, according to legal experts and court records. One of those was McCormick.

Last year, McCormick got the attention of Wall Street dealmakers by ordering an affiliate of private equity firm Kohlberg & Co LLC to close its $550 million purchase of DecoPac Holding Inc, which makes cake decorating products.

She described her ruling as "chalking up a victory for deal certainty" and rejected Kohlberg's arguments that it could walk away because of a lack of financing.

The case has many parallels to the Twitter deal. Like Musk, Kohlberg said it was walking away because DecoPac violated the merger agreement. Like Musk, Kohlberg argued in part that DecoPac failed to maintain ordinary operations.

There are also differences. Musk's deal is magnitudes bigger, involves a publicly traded target company in Twitter and might have implications for Tesla Inc , the electric vehicle maker that is the source of much of Musk's fortune.

In other cases, she has come down on the side of shareholders when they clashed with management.

Last year, she prevented energy company The Williams Cos Inc from adopting a so-called poison pill anti-takeover measure, saying it breached their fiduciary duty to shareholders.

A graduate of Notre Dame Law School, McCormick started her career with the Delaware branch of the Legal Aid Society, which helps low-income people navigate the court system.

She went into private practice "mainly for financial reasons," she told the Delaware Senate during her confirmation hearing, joining Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor, one of the state's main firms for business litigation.

She joined the Court of Chancery in 2018 as a vice chancellor and became the first woman to lead the Court of Chancery last year.

July 13

Washington Post, What to know as Elon Musk’s rocky deal with Twitter heads to court, Rachel Lerman, July 13, 2022. Twitter’s saga with billionaire Elon Musk, marked by months of negotiations and contentious tweets, has made its way to the court system.

Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, agreed to buy the social media company for about $44 billion in April, saying he wanted to promote free speech on the site and “defeat the spam bots.” But less than three months later, he filed to terminate the deal after accusing Twitter of withholding information about the bot accounts on its site.

On Tuesday, Twitter sued Musk in the Delaware Court of Chancery, seeking to enforce the deal and writing that “Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”

What are the next steps in the rocky deal between the social media company and the world’s richest person?

Twitter sues Elon Musk, setting stage for epic legal battle

What to know

In its lawsuit filed Tuesday, Twitter wrote that “Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away. This repudiation follows a long list of material contractual breaches by Musk that have cast a pall over Twitter and its business.”

Twitter has an obligation to act in the best interest of its shareholders — and right now, that path seems to involve a legal battle to compel Musk to fulfill the agreement. Twitter’s stock price has sharply sunk since Musk agreed to buy the company and is now nearly 40 percent below his offer price of $54.20 per share.

If Twitter lets Musk walk away from the deal, the company will be left with a workforce in turmoil, a rocky stock price — and no money or new owner to show for it.

“It puts the Twitter board in a tough position,” said David Larcker, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business who studies corporate governance, before the suit was filed this week. He added that he thought the company was doing what it is supposed to do from a corporate governance standpoint.

Delaware is one of the only remaining states in the United States to still have a chancery court, which mainly deals with issues such as guardianships, trusts, estates — and, particularly in Delaware’s case, corporate matters including mergers and acquisitions.

Many U.S. companies, including Twitter, are incorporated in Delaware, giving the experienced court jurisdiction over the case. The court has one chancellor, who acts like a chief judge, and six vice chancellors (judges) who oversee cases. It does not hold jury trials.

The court has a deep history of deciding on corporate fiduciary matters and mergers, including one example that might be relevant to Twitter’s case. In 2001, then-Vice Chancellor Leo E. Strine, Jr. ruled that Tyson Foods needed to complete its acquisition of IBP after the foods giant tried to cancel the deal.

Strine now works for Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the New York law firm Twitter hired to represent it in the upcoming case.
When will we finally know what happens with Musk and Twitter?
Return to menu

It’s unclear, though the Delaware court has the ability to expedite cases. It’s possible this case could take only four to six months to litigate, legal experts say, meaning there could be a resolution this year.

That assumes the case will be left in the judge’s hands. If Twitter and Musk instead reach a settlement deal, the matter could be settled even sooner.

No — not as long as Twitter works to hold him to his end of the agreement. The acquisition agreement includes a $1 billion breakup fee, which Musk might have to pay even if the judge agrees he can walk away from the deal.

“What does seem pretty clear to me is that Twitter’s board has concluded that they can’t just let this go and walk away empty-handed,” said Tom Redburn, partner and chair of the securities litigation group at firm Lowenstein Sandler.

But Twitter has argued that Musk does not have a good enough reason to abandon the deal and should be forced to buy the company at the price he agreed. Many legal experts agree that Musk’s argument about bot information does not seem to constitute a strong enough reason to leave the deal, according to the terms of the agreement.

July 12

Washington Post, Tiger Woods calmly condemns Greg Norman, LIV Golf before British Open, Chuck Culpepper, July 12, 2022. Tiger Woods has arrived at the crazy-historic 150th British Open and has brought along his voice, all earned and found and seasoned. He sounded statesmanlike on Tuesday morning as he spoke without reluctance about the blaring, glaring issue disrupting his sport: the breakaway, Saudi-funded LIV Tour. He even recoiled at the idea of loud music.

He started early at his news conference, fielding a question about the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews’s decision to disinvite Greg Norman because of the distracting noise Norman’s presence might cause given his chairmanship of the LIV Tour.

“The R&A obviously have their opinions and their rulings and their decision,” Woods said. “Greg has done some things that I don’t think are in the best interest of our game, and we’re coming back to probably the most historic and traditional place in our sport. I believe it’s the right thing.”

He specified a few answers later: “I know what the PGA Tour stands for and what we have done and what the tour has given us, the ability to chase after our careers and to earn what we get and the trophies we have been able to play for and the history that has been a part of this game. I know Greg tried to do this (a rival tour) back in the early ’90s. It didn’t work then, and he’s trying to make it work now.

“I still don’t see how that’s in the best interests of the game. What the European Tour and what the PGA Tour stands for and what they’ve done, and also all the professional — all the governing bodies of the game of golf and all the major championships, how they run it. I think they see it differently than what Greg sees it.”

Washington Post, Ada Limón is the next U.S. poet laureate, Jess Eng, July 12, 2022. In her new role as poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón will help bridge nature and humanity through new poetry initiatives.

Limón, 46, hopes to share her devotion to nature with the whole country. She was named the 24th poet laureate of the United States on Tuesday. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden called Limón with the news, much to the poet’s pleasant surprise. “For someone who is a poet and believes in the power of language, I can tell you that language definitely went out the window at that moment in my life,” she says.

Born in Sonoma, Calif., Limón was first enchanted by the world of poetry while working at her local bookstore. At the University of Washington, she majored in theater and planned to continue theater studies in graduate school. That is, until her poetry teacher Colleen McElroy pulled her aside during office hours.

July 11

Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: The fascists are coming after our history. Will we let them take it? Wayne Madsen, left, author of 22 books, longtime journalist and former Navy intelligence officer, July 11, 2022. The fascists are coming after our history. Will we let them take it?

Pro-democracy Americans, who continue to represent some 70 percent of the total voting age population of the country, can no longer delude themselves that what occurred in Germany in the early 1930s cannot happen here.

What has and is happening here is that a violent movement of Nazis, fascists, and racist Confederates have not only seized control of the Republican Party through their cult leader Donald Trump, but elected Republicans and candidates for office are moving to repaint American history.

The intentions of these dreadful products of the Trump movement are clear. They seek to justify the Holocaust of World War II as a necessary, African slavery as necessary for the development of the American economy, and the genocide of the Native Americans as an acceptable manifestation of European colonial expansion.

What is occurring in America is not only a re-writing of history but a movement to require Christo-fascist indoctrination of students in the same manner that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis required Germany’s public schools to teach Nazi racist ideology.

And who will be teaching a Nazi-laundered version of history in American schools? Arizona Republican Governor Doug Ducey just signed into law Senate Bill 1159, which states that a college degree is no longer required to teach in Arizona’s public schools. One only is required to be enrolled in college in order to teach. That means Bubba, the fat bearded and bald motorcycle gangster with swastika tattoos on his forearms, need only be signed up with some diploma mill in order to teach young children the benefits of being a Mexican- and black-hating racist.

Washington Post, American firm drops bid for Israeli spyware following U.S. concerns, Ellen Nakashima, July 11, 2022 (print ed.). The American defense firm L3Harris has ended talks with blacklisted Israeli spyware company, NSO Group, to buy the firm’s hacking tools following intelligence and security concerns raised by the Biden administration, according to people familiar with the matter.

Washington Post, Perspective: College football was betrayed by the adults who were supposed to protect it, Sally Jenkins, July 11, 2022 (print ed.). The game's real threat was never NIL payments to kids. It was administrative gluttons, with their combination of treachery and ineptitude.

July 10

Washington Post, As Elon Musk moves to abandon deal, Twitter faces ‘worst case scenario,’ Cat Zakrzewski, Naomi Nix and Joseph Menn, July 10, 2022 (print ed.). In attempting to walk away from the $44 billion acquisition, Elon Musk sets the stage for a legal battle, which could carry financial risks for the social network and further darken employee morale.

New York Times, Some Surprising Good News: Bookstores Are Booming and Becoming More Diverse, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, July 10, 2022. More than 300 bookstores have opened in the past couple of years — a revival that is meeting a demand for “real recommendations from real people.”

People told Lucy Yu it was a crazy time to open a bookstore in Chinatown. It was early 2021, and the pandemic had devastated the neighborhood, forcing dozens of stores and restaurants to close. The rise of anti-Asian hate crimes had shaken residents and local business owners.

But Ms. Yu believed that a bookstore was just what the neighborhood needed.

She raised around $20,000 on GoFundMe, enough to rent a narrow storefront — a former funeral supply store — on Mulberry Street in downtown Manhattan. A neighborhood grant gave her $2,000 for shelves and books. And in December, she opened Yu and Me Books, which specializes in titles by and about immigrants and people of color.

The store was profitable within four months, Ms. Yu said.

Yu and Me Books is one of more than 300 new independent bookstores that have sprouted across the United States in the past couple of years, in a surprising and welcome revival after an early pandemic slump. And as the number of stores has grown, the book selling business — traditionally overwhelmingly white — has also become much more diverse.

“People were hungry for a place focused on Asian American and immigrant stories,” said Ms. Yu, 27, who worked as a chemical engineer and supply chain manager before opening the store. “That’s something I was always searching for when I went to bookstores, and I wanted people to come here and not have to search.”

Two years ago, the future of independent book selling looked bleak. As the coronavirus forced retailers to shut down, hundreds of small booksellers around the United States seemed doomed. Bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, U.S. Census Bureau data showed. The publishing industry was braced for a blow to its retail ecosystem, one that could permanently reshape the way readers discover and buy books.

Instead, something unexpected happened: Small booksellers not only survived the pandemic, but many are thriving.

“It’s kind of shocking when you think about what dire straits the stores were in in 2020,” said Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent bookstores. “We saw a rally like we’ve never seen before.”

The association now has 2,023 member stores in 2,561 locations, up from 1,689 in early July of 2020. Some of the growth reflects the renewal of memberships by existing stores that put off doing it last year amid the uncertainly caused by the pandemic. But there has also been a sharp and sustained rise in new bookshops, and more than 200 additional stores are preparing to open in the next year or two, Ms. Hill said.

July 8

Washington Post, Opinion: Tucker Carlson: ‘I don’t clear anything with anybody,’ Erik Wemple, July 8, 2022. In recent years, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has promoted the racist “Great Replacement” theory, asserted that immigrants make the United States “dirtier" and “poor,” fearmongered over Black Lives Matter protests and spread conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the Capitol.

Any supervision from the higher-ups at Fox News? “I don’t clear anything with anybody,” Carlson said Thursday via remote connection to a media conference organized by the soon-to-launch digital outlet Semafor and sponsored by the Knight Foundation.

“I say what I want,” Carlson told Semafor co-founder Ben Smith. “I’m blessed, unlike a lot of journalists, who are leading miserable lives.”

Contrast Carlson’s own comments on his long leash at Fox News with those of senior executive producer Justin Wells, who was quoted in a recent New York Times investigative series as saying that stories on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” “undergo a rigorous editorial process.” That Times series reported that the top-rated host “boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with [Fox Corp. Chairman Lachlan] Murdoch.”

So much for a rigorous editorial process.

Carlson’s latitude to articulate racist viewpoints with no interference from higher-ups is among the more enduring stories in modern media. In Thursday’s interview, Smith pointed to Carlson’s promotion of the “Great Replacement” theory — a notion that elites are promoting immigration, and “replacing” White Americans, to reshape American politics — and asked about his history of working with people who hold racist views — all of which Carlson deflected, insisting, as he has before, that he is antiracist.

Washington Post, Elon Musk Moves to End $44 Billion Deal to Buy Twitter, Kate Conger and Lauren Hirsch, July 8, 2022. Less than four months ago, Elon Musk, right, the world’s richest man, struck a blockbuster $44 billion deal to buy Twitter. He proclaimed that the company had “tremendous potential.”

In the months since, Mr. Musk changed his tune. He sniped at Twitter’s top executives. He unleashed tweets taunting the company’s board. He complained that the social media service had too many spam accounts and that he could not get insight into the issue. He tweeted a poop emoji to express his displeasure.

And on Friday, Mr. Musk tried to back out of the acquisition altogether.

In a regulatory filing prepared by his lawyers, Mr. Musk said he wanted to terminate the Twitter deal because of a continuing disagreement over the number of spam accounts on the platform. He claimed that Twitter had not provided information necessary to calculate the number of those accounts — which the company has said is lower than 5 percent — and that the company had appeared to make inaccurate statements.

In a regulatory filing on Friday, Mr. Musk said Twitter was in “material breach” of the acquisition agreement.

Mr. Musk’s move sets him up for a protracted legal battle with Twitter. The billionaire signed a legally binding agreement in April to buy the company at $54.20 a share and had waived due diligence to get the deal done quickly. The terms also included a $1 billion breakup fee if the agreement fell apart and a clause that gives Twitter the right to sue Mr. Musk and force him to complete or pay for the deal, so long as the debt financing he has corralled remains intact.

Twitter’s shares fell 8 percent in after-hours trading.

• Washington Post, Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril, Faiz Siddiqui, Gerrit De Vynck and Joseph Menn

 

Washington Post, David Shipley named editor of Washington Post editorial page, Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi, July 8, 2022 (print ed.). David Shipley, the top editor of Bloomberg’s opinion section, was named editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page on Thursday, filling one of the most senior jobs at the newspaper and one of the most influential in American journalism.

Shipley, shown above in a Bloomberg photo, succeeds longtime Post opinions editor Fred Hiatt, who died in December at 66 after suffering sudden cardiac arrest.

Shipley, 59, is a well-respected but somewhat surprising choice to oversee The Post’s more than 80-member opinion staff, which operates independently from its news department and has been led by editors elevated from internal ranks for more than 60 years. He is the second top editor to be appointed by publisher Fred Ryan from outside the newspaper; last year he named Sally Buzbee, a former top editor of the Associated Press, as the executive editor of The Post’s news staff.

In a memo to staff, Ryan wrote that Shipley “emerged as a standout in an exhaustive search that involved more than 150 candidates” and began after Hiatt’s death.

Deputy editorial page editors Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have run the department on an interim basis for several months.

Shipley’s appointment comes at a tumultuous time for opinion journalism at American newspapers. The New York Times, which introduced the first “op-ed” section consisting of guest editorials in 1970, has recently reduced the number of opinion pieces it publishes by about 25 percent while expanding into other forms, such as audio, video and graphics.

Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, has been radically shrinking its editorial sections, prompted by both cost-cutting pressures and research indicating that many readers are repelled by overt opinion or confused by how it’s supposed to differ from the news coverage. Many of its papers have abandoned the traditional practice of endorsing candidates in local or national political races.

Yet opinion pieces have regularly ranked among the most-read pieces on The Post’s website. And The Post’s editorial pages have historically carried an outsize influence among the political and diplomatic class. It has also published guest commentaries from leading dissidents, such as writer and filmmaker Vladimir Kara-Murza, who is now imprisoned in Russia, and Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian journalist who was murdered in 2018.

 

 New York Times, Brittney Griner Pleads Guilty as Her Trial Resumes in Russia, Anton Troianovski and Ivan Nechepurenko, July 8, 2022 (print ed.). The Biden administration has said the basketball star, jailed on drug smuggling charges, is a hostage of Moscow. Follow updates.

The detained American basketball star Brittney Griner pleaded guilty to drug charges in a court near Moscow on Thursday, her lawyer said.

“I’d like to plead guilty, your honor. But there was no intent. I didn’t want to break the law,” Ms. Griner said in English, which was then translated into Russian, Reuters reported.

Ms. Griner has been detained in Russia since Feb. 17, accused by the Russian authorities of having a vape cartridge with hashish oil in her luggage at an airport near Moscow.

Aleksandr Boikov, her lawyer, said cartridges appeared in Ms. Griner’s luggage “because of carelessness.”

“She pleaded guilty, stressing that she was carrying substances prohibited in Russia unintentionally, because she was packing in a hurry,” Mr. Boikov said.

If Ms. Griner is convicted, she could face up to 10 years in a Russian penal colony. Ms. Griner still faces formal conviction and sentencing proceedings, and her next day in court is scheduled to be July 14.

Her guilty plea came hours after a top Russian diplomat lashed out at the Biden administration for trying to “foment hype” around her case.

The Russian diplomat, Sergei A. Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister, said that the publicity around the case was not helping Ms. Griner, who American officials say is essentially a hostage taken by President Vladimir V. Putin in the run-up to the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Ryabkov indicated that Moscow would be prepared to negotiate her fate, but only after the court reached a verdict on the drug charges that were brought against her.

“We have a long-established form of discussing these matters,” Mr. Ryabkov told reporters on Thursday in Moscow, according to the Interfax news agency. “The American side’s attempts to foment hype and make noise in the public environment are understandable, but they don’t help to practically resolve issues.”

After her trial began last week, Ms. Griner sent a handwritten letter to Mr. Biden asking him not to “forget about” her and other American detainees overseas.

• New York Times, President Biden spoke with the wife of the W.N.B.A. star Brittney Griner, who has been detained in Russia since February

New York Times, James Caan, Actor Who Won Fame in ‘The Godfather,’ Dies at 82, Clyde Haberman, July 8, 2022 (print ed.). A Bronx native, he starred in countless movies and TV shows, but was most closely identified with the volatile character Sonny Corleone.

James Caan, who built a durable film career in varied roles across six decades but was forever identified most closely with one of his earliest characters, the quick-tempered, skirt-chasing Sonny Corleone in the original “Godfather” movie, died on Wednesday. He was 82.

July 7

Washington Post, Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in peril, Faiz Siddiqui, Gerrit De Vynck and Joseph Menn, July 7, 2022. Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter is in serious jeopardy, three people familiar with the matter say, as Musk’s camp concluded that Twitter’s figures on spam accounts are not verifiable.

Musk’s team has stopped engaging in certain discussions around funding for the $44 billion deal, including with a party named as a likely backer, one of the people said. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing discussions.

Talks with investors have cooled in recent weeks as Musk’s camp has raised doubts about the recent data “fire hose” — a trove of data sold to corporate customers — they received from Twitter. Musk’s team’s doubts about the spam figures signal they believe they do not have enough information to evaluate Twitter’s prospects as a business, the people said.

Now that Musk’s team has concluded it cannot verify Twitter’s figures on spam accounts, one of the people said, it is expected to take potentially drastic action. The person said it was likely a change in direction from Musk’s team would come soon, though they did not say exactly what they thought that change would be.

The spam accounts are not the only reason Musk might try to wriggle out of the deal. Twitter’s share price has fallen TK% since his takeover bid in April, leading to the impression that he is overpaying. And Musk also runs two other major companies, Tesla and SpaceX, along with some start-ups.

But the terms of the deal mean it wouldn’t be easy for Musk to walk away. The deal carries a $1 billion break up fee. And legal experts expect a giant legal battle if Musk tries to pull out. Twitter, which initially fought Musk’s takeover bid, would be a much weaker company if the deal falls apart than when Musk first bought a stake, and experts expect Twitter to fight to get it done. Twitter could attempt to force Musk to go through with the purchase if his reason for scuttling it is not based on the company’s fundamental business.

Musk shook up the social media world earlier this year with his unprecedented offer to take the company private, arguing he would be able to grow Twitter and make it more open and, in his mind, politically neutral. He said he would let former president Donald Trump back on the service and argued its content moderation practices infringed on free speech. Musk waived his right to take a deeper look at the company’s finances when he signed the deal.

But soon after, questions arose about whether he would actually follow through. A global sell-off in tech stocks deeply cut into his personal net worth, which he had leveraged to get commitments for the debt he needed to buy Twitter.

New York Times, Disinformation Has Become Another Untouchable Problem in Washington, Steven Lee Myers and Eileen Sullivan, July 7, 2022 (print ed.). Numerous federal agencies agree that widely promoted falsehoods threaten the nation’s security. Doing something about them is another matter.

The memo that reached the top of the Department of Homeland Security in September could not have been clearer about its plan to create a board to monitor national security threats caused by the spread of dangerous disinformation.

The department, it said, “should not attempt to be an all-purpose arbiter of truth in the public arena.”

Yet when Secretary Alejandro N. Mayorkas announced the disinformation board in April, Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators denounced it as exactly that, calling it an Orwellian attempt to stifle dissenting views. So did some critics from the left, who questioned the powers that such an office might wield in the hands of future Republican administrations.

Within weeks, the new board was dismantled — put on “pause,” officially — undone in part by forces it was meant to combat, including distortions of the board’s intent and powers.

There is wide agreement across the federal government that coordinated disinformation campaigns threaten to exacerbate public health emergencies, stoke ethnic and racial divisions and even undermine democracy itself. The board’s fate, however, has underscored how deeply partisan the issue has become in Washington, making it nearly impossible to consider addressing the threat.

The failure to act, according to experts, has left openings for new waves of disinformation ahead of November’s midterm elections — and even for violence like the racist massacre at a Buffalo supermarket in May, which was motivated by a baseless conspiracy theory that global forces aimed to “replace” white Americans with immigrants.

“I think we’re in a really bleak situation here in this country,” said Nina Jankowicz, who briefly served as the board’s director before resigning when the controversy boiled over.

 

New York Times, The White House communications director is stepping down, the latest senior adviser to leave the Biden administration, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, July 7, 2022 (print ed.). Kate Bedingfield, shown above in a file photo at the White House briefing room, will be the latest senior adviser to leave the Biden administration, whose messaging has faced growing criticism from Democrats.

Kate Bedingfield, the White House communications director, will step down from her position this summer, White House aides said on Wednesday, marking the latest departure of a senior adviser from the Biden administration.

Ms. Bedingfield is a longtime aide to President Biden who helped shape the messaging strategy for his campaign and during his presidency. She is expected to assist the White House from outside the administration, although her next position remained unclear.

Ron Klain, the president’s chief of staff, credited Ms. Bedingfield with helping Mr. Biden win the 2020 election, pass the coronavirus stimulus and infrastructure packages, and secure the Supreme Court nomination of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

“She has played a huge role in everything the president has achieved — from his second term as vice president, through the campaign and since coming to the White House,” Mr. Klain said in a statement.

It will be the latest departure from a White House communications apparatus that has faced growing criticism from members of the president’s own party. Democrats have in recent weeks pressed Mr. Biden for a more forceful and consistent message in response to multiple mass shootings, the Supreme Court’s ruling to eliminate the federal right to abortion and record-high inflation.

The announcement comes just weeks after Jen Psaki left her job as the White House press secretary for an on-air role at MSNBC. A number of more junior press aides have also exited in recent weeks, as well as some higher-ranking staff members. Cedric Richmond, a former senior adviser, left the White House in May for a similar role at the Democratic National Committee. Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House Covid czar, also departed the administration this year.

But Mr. Biden has also brought in longtime advisers, a sign that he is preparing his re-election campaign. Anita Dunn, a senior adviser, recently returned to the White House from her public affairs firm. Ian Sams, who had been a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, has joined the White House staff as a spokesman for the counsel’s office.

Ms. Bedingfield, an aide for Mr. Biden since he was vice president during the Obama administration, was one of the more visible public faces of his 2020 campaign. As deputy campaign manager and communications director, she has often appeared on television as a surrogate for Mr. Biden.

She was tasked with building support for Mr. Biden after he finished fourth in the Iowa caucuses and fifth in the New Hampshire primary, raising doubts about his ability to win the election. She then helped craft Mr. Biden’s message of unifying the country, which he has continued to turn to during his presidency.

As communications director, Ms. Bedingfield holds a role that is typically more behind the scenes than that of Ms. Psaki or the current press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. But when they both were sidelined with the coronavirus, Ms. Bedingfield made multiple appearances hosting the White House daily press briefing.

July 6

New York Times, With Rising Book Bans, Librarians Have Come Under Attack, Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, July 6, 2022. Caustic fights over which books belong on the shelves have put librarians at the center of a bitter and widening culture war.

Martha Hickson, a high school librarian in Annandale, N.J., heard last fall that some parents were going to call for her library to ban certain books. So at 7 p.m., when she and her husband would usually watch “Jeopardy!” she got comfortable in her recliner and turned on a livestream of the local school board meeting.

A parent stood up and denounced two books, Lawn Boy and Gender Queer, calling them pornographic. Both books, award winners with L.G.B.T.Q. characters and frank depictions of sex, have been challenged around the country and were available at the North Hunterdon High School library. Then the woman called out Ms. Hickson, who is the librarian there, by name, for allowing her 16-year-old son to check out the books.

“This amounts to an effort to groom our kids to make them more willing to participate in the heinous acts described in these books,” said the parent, Gina DeLusant, according to a video recording of the meeting. “It grooms them to accept the inappropriate advances of an adult.”

Ms. Hickson said the accusation left her sick to her stomach, with a tightness in her chest. “I was stunned,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

As highly visible and politicized book bans have exploded across the country, librarians — accustomed to being seen as dedicated public servants in their communities — have found themselves on the front lines of an acrimonious culture war, with their careers and their personal reputations at risk.

They have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials. Some librarians have quit after being harassed online. Others have been fired for refusing to remove books from circulation.

New York Times, ‘I Don’t Want to Help Him’: Joe Rogan Says He Refused Trump as a Podcast Guest, Isabella Simonetti, July 6, 2022. The commentator, who is no stranger to controversy, claimed he had declined several times to have the former president on his influential podcast on Spotify.

Joe Rogan, right, whose contrarian views on vaccines and political conspiracy theories have made him popular with many supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, revealed that he has declined to host Mr. Trump on his influential podcast several times.

“I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once. I’ve said no every time,” Mr. Rogan, the host of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” said on Lex Fridman’s podcast on Monday. “I don’t want to help him.”

Mr. Rogan, a comedian and sports commentator in addition to a podcast host, is Spotify’s highest paid podcaster, with a $200 million deal for exclusive rights to host his show, which attracts millions of listeners per episode.

On Monday, he described the former president as “a polarizing figure” and “an existential threat to democracy.” Mr. Rogan, who endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders, the progressive from Vermont, for president in 2020, recently voiced his support on his podcast for Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, if he were to run for president.

The podcast host has been condemned for using a racial slur on his show, mocking the first openly transgender athlete in mixed martial arts and having a “love-hate relationship with conspiracies.” He has been criticized for amplifying Covid-19 misinformation on his platform, prompting medical professionals to call on Spotify to take action at the beginning of this year.

New York Times, On Conservative Radio, Misleading Message Is Clear: ‘Democrats Cheat,’ Stuart A. Thompson, July 6, 2022 (print ed.). Election fraud claims from 2020 are widespread on talk radio, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.

July 5

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary:The Republican Party joins a list of other disreputable puppet parties, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 22 books, longtime journalist and former Navy intelligence officer, July 5-6, 2022. Not since the puppet parties of Quisling and Vichy France has the world seen a political apparatus as foreign-controlled as the Republicans.

Like many political parties totally dependent on one or more outside powers for ideological direction, the U.S. Republican Party, founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 by abolitionists, has become a puppet party expressing the fascist principles espoused by leaders in Russia, Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, India, and Israel.

Financial support for the Republicans has not only come from offshore contrivances linked to the Russian, Hungarian, Turkish, Brazilian, Israeli, Indian, and other like-minded governments but domestic wealthy fascist ideologues like Peter Thiel, Charles G. Koch, Rupert Murdoch, John Childs (Childs was arrested in the same 2019 solicitation for prostitution sting in Jupiter, Florida, which involved human sex trafficking, that also tagged New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft), Tatnall Hillman, Ken Griffin, Lewis Topper, Richard Uihlein, and Robert and Rebekah Mercer.

Perhaps the worst form of dynastic fascism exists within the media. NewsCorp's Rupert Murdoch, who was largely responsible for the rise of right-wing governments in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where he has maintained large media holdings in newspapers and television, has turned the reins of power over to his son, Lachlan Murdoch. The Trump presidency could not have been possible without the constant din of propaganda masquerading as legitimate journalism from Fox News.

New York Times, Is Baltimore Big Enough for the Two of Them? Katie Robertson, July 5, 2022 (print ed.). The internet has pretty much killed local news wars. The Baltimore Banner, a nonprofit start-up, is trying to change that by taking on The Baltimore Sun.

July 4

 

Charles Bausman, right, in a red MAGA hat and with a black glove, has said he entered the Capitol in the capacity of a journalist (Photo via YouTube). He has said he entered the Capitol in the capacity of a journalist. He is shown also in a photo (by Mikhail Voskresenskiy for Sputnik, distributed by the Associated Press) pattending a 2015 conference in Moscow sponsored by the Russian-government owned television network RT and featuring a number of American attendees, including future Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein, Trump national security Advisor Michael Flynn. A banquest including a number of conference attendees was attended also by Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Stein and Flynn sitting at his table.

New York Times, Investigation: An American’s Murky Path From Russian Propagandist to Jan. 6, Mike McIntire, July 4, 2022 (print ed.). Charles Bausman recorded footage in the Capitol for a Russian television producer for a propaganda video. Then he fled to Moscow as a “political refugee.”

In security footage from Jan. 6, it is easy to overlook the thin man wearing a red Trump hat who filters into the U.S. Capitol Building to record the mayhem with his phone.

He blends in with the mob, seemingly unexceptional by the chaotic standards of that day. But what he did afterward was far from routine.

Within 24 hours, the man, Charles Bausman, gave his recordings and commentary to a Russian television producer for a propaganda video. He then decamped to Moscow, where, appearing on a far-right television network owned by a sanctioned oligarch, he recently accused American media of covering up for neo-Nazis in Ukraine.

“We must understand that in the West,” Mr. Bausman told Russian viewers, “we are already in a situation of total lies.”

For Mr. Bausman — an American alumnus of Phillips Exeter Academy and Wesleyan University who speaks fluent Russian — it was the latest chapter in a strange odyssey. Once a financial executive who voted for President Barack Obama, he emerged in 2014 as a public critic of the left and of the United States, boosted by Russian state-sponsored organizations through speaking invitations, TV appearances and awards.

Central to his transformation was a series of websites he created pushing anti-America, pro-Russia themes, as well as racist and homophobic messaging. Some of his posts have racked up millions of views, and his 5,000-word screed on “the Jewish problem” has been hailed by antisemites around the world and translated into multiple languages.

Mr. Bausman’s path in some ways tracks a broader shift on the political right that embraces misinformation and sympathy toward Russia while tolerating an increasingly emboldened white nationalism. For its part, the Kremlin has sought to court conservatives in the United States and sow discord through a network of expats, collaborators and spies.

People who have written for Mr. Bausman’s websites or promoted his work have come under scrutiny by American intelligence, and the founder of a pro-Russia forum that hosted him and others was charged in March with being an unregistered agent of Moscow.

After surfacing as a voluble defender of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, Mr. Bausman became an outspoken Trump supporter. With white nationalism on the rise, he threw himself into promoting it, relocating to rural Pennsylvania and hosting neo-Nazis at his property. He joined Republican protests against coronavirus restrictions and the 2020 election and most recently has reappeared in Russian media to criticize the West’s response to the war in Ukraine.

Mr. Bausman attended a 2015 conference hosted by RT, a news channel tied to the Kremlin.
Konstantin Malofeev, an influential oligarch indicted by the United States over alleged sanctions violations, said he had asked Mr. Bausman to appear on his television network because Mr. Bausman was one of the few Russian-speaking Americans willing to do it.

“Who else is there to invite?” Mr. Malofeev asked.

Mr. Bausman, 58, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. No charges have been brought against him related to the events of Jan. 6, though he appears inside the Capitol in video clips introduced in court cases against others. When a Russian TV host referred to him as “a participant” in storming the Capitol, Mr. Bausman interrupted to say that the description could get him into trouble, and that he was a journalist.

Mr. Bausman has always said he did not receive support from Russian authorities. But there is little doubt that his emergence as an American salesman of pro-Kremlin views was aided greatly by entities controlled by or tied to the Russian state.

After Russia Insider went live, Mr. Bausman began appearing on RT and other Russian media, and a news crew from a major state-owned TV channel traveled to his parents’ home in Connecticut to film him discussing his new website. On Facebook, he boasted that “our traffic exploded after this aired.”

His older sister, Mary-Fred Bausman-Watkins, said last year that her brother “was always short on money” and that their parents frequently helped him out, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has compiled several reports on his activities. Ms. Bausman-Watkins died in May.

“They funded his whole life,” she told the center, “and then he inherited their money when they died, and they’re still funding his life.”

On Facebook, Mr. Bausman posted an appeal for people to go to Washington “to support Trump.” At various points during the riot, Mr. Bausman can be seen inside the Capitol, often using his phone to record the chaos.

Afterward, he returned to Lancaster and gave a lengthy interview for a video about the insurrection produced by Arkady Mamontov, a Russian television host known for splashy pro-Kremlin propaganda pieces. The video also included footage of Mr. Bausman outside his home that appears to have been filmed months earlier. Mr. Mamontov did not respond to a request for comment.

In the video, Mr. Bausman suggested, without evidence, that federal agents had instigated the violence at the Capitol to “discredit Trump,” and he painted a dystopian, conspiratorial picture of American society. It is a theme that he has carried forward to more recent appearances on Mr. Malofeev’s television network, in which he has accused Western media of lying about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Mike McIntire is an investigative reporter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, and has written in depth on campaign finance, gun violence and corruption in college sports. @mmcintire

July 2

 New York Times, Trump Media Is Subpoenaed in Federal Inquiry of Truth Social Deal, Matthew Goldstein July 2, 2022 (print ed.). The investigation threatens to delay a merger that would provide Trump Media and its platform, Truth Social, with up to $1.3 billion. The investigation by federal prosecutors and securities regulators into a proposed merger between a cash-rich blank check company and former President Donald J. Trump’s social media company has gotten closer to Mr. Trump’s end of the deal.

Federal prosecutors served grand jury subpoenas on Trump Media & Technology Group and “certain current and former TMTG personnel,” according to a regulatory filing on Friday by Digital World Acquisition, the special purpose acquisition company that has a tentative deal to merge with Trump Media.

Grand jury subpoenas are typically issued in connection with a potential criminal investigation. The filing said the Securities and Exchange Commission also served a subpoena on Trump Media this week.

Just days earlier, Digital World revealed that it, too, had received a grand jury subpoena from federal prosecutors in Manhattan along with similar subpoenas served on its board of directors.

The grand jury subpoenas appear related to earlier S.E.C. subpoenas on Digital World that sought communications concerning potential merger talks with representatives of Trump Media before Digital World’s initial public offering in September.

The regulatory filing on Friday said the grand jury subpoenas served on Trump Media were “seeking a subset of the same or similar documents demanded in subpoenas to Digital World and its directors.”

The expanding investigation threatens to delay the completion of the merger, which would provide Mr. Trump’s company and its social media platform, Truth Social, with up to $1.3 billion in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.

The S.E.C. investigation has focused on whether there were serious discussions between the leadership of Digital World and Trump Media before the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, went public in September and, if so, why those talks were not disclosed in regulatory filings. SPACs, which raise money to go public in the hopes of finding a merger candidate, are not supposed to have an acquisition target in mind when they raise money from investors.

July 1

Cellphone inventor Marty Cooper is seen holding up his Motorola DynaTAC in 2003 — 30 years after he made the first-ever cell phone call in front of stunned newspaper reporters (Associated Press Photo).

New York Post, Inventor of world’s first cellphone: Put down your devices and ‘get a life,’ Andrew Court, July 1, 2022. Inventor of world’s first cellphone: Put down your devices and ‘get a life.’

The inventor of the world’s first cellphone says he’s stunned by how much time people now waste on their devices, telling users to “get a life.”

Martin Cooper, 92, made the declaration during an interview with “BBC Breakfast” on Thursday, responding to a co-host who claimed she whiled away upwards of five hours per day on her phone.

“‘Do you really? You really spend five hours a day? Get a life!” he stated, before bursting into laughter.

Chicago-based Cooper invented the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X — the world’s first cellphone — back in 1973.

The engineer had been working at Motorola for more than two decades and was frustrated by the growing popularity of car phones.

“People had been wired to their desks and their kitchens for over 100 years, and now they’re gonna wire us to our cars, where we spend 5% of our time?” Cooper recalled thinking in a recent interview with CBS News.

He subsequently came up with the idea to make a portable phone that people could bring with them into their car, but also take out of the vehicle and use while they were out and about running errands.

Before he focused on the mechanics of the cellphone, he envisioned what the device would look like, saying he wanted it to be “small enough to put in your pocket, but big enough so that it could go between your ears and your mouth.”

Cooper wanted each person to have their own phone number — which he now calls his “greatest accomplishment.” Until that time, phone numbers had been associated with places, such as a home, car or desk.

Motorola subsequently poured millions into Cooper’s project and it took the engineer and his team just three months to make the phone, given they had used similar technology to previously put together police radios.

Once the device was completed, it was named the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. It weighed 2½ pounds and was 10 inches long. It lasted just 25 minutes before it ran out of battery and took a whopping 10 hours to recharge.
Cooper is seen holding the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X in Manhattan on April 4, 1873 — the day after he made the first ever cell phone call.

Cooper is seen holding the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X in Manhattan on April 4, 1973 — the day after he made the first-ever cellphone call.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper made the first-ever cellphone call using the device, deciding to ring his competitor, Joel Engel, who was working as a head engineer at AT&T.

The event took place outdoors in front of reporters in Midtown Manhattan, with Cooper dialing Engel’s landline.

“Joel, this is Marty. I’m calling you from a cellphone, a real handheld portable cellphone,” he stated, as the reporters watched on in amazement.

Washington Post, LAPD confirms Miles Bridges’s domestic violence arrest; wife details injuries, Matt Bonesteel, July 3, 2022 (print ed.). Miles Bridges, one of the bigger names of this summer’s NBA free agency period, was arrested on a felony domestic violence charge Wednesday in Los Angeles.

The L.A. Police Department confirmed the details in a statement Friday, saying that Bridges was arrested for “intimate partner violence with injury” following an incident Monday in West Los Angeles.

According to online records, Bridges was booked and released on $130,000 bond Wednesday evening. His arraignment is July 20.

Bridges’s wife, Mychelle Johnson, shared photos of various injuries Friday on Instagram, as well as an apparent medical report. Dated Tuesday, the report listed her diagnosis as: “Adult victim of physical abuse by male partner; assault by strangulation; brain concussion; closed fracture of nasal bone; contusion of rib; multiple bruises; strain of neck muscle.”

“I hate that it has come to this but I can’t be silent anymore,” Johnson wrote on Instagram. “I’ve allowed someone to destroy my home, abuse me in every way possible and traumatize our kids for life. … I won’t allow the people around him to continue to silence me and continue to lie to protect this person.”

Johnson also said she suffered “torn muscles in my neck from being choked until I went to sleep.”

Bridges, a 6-foot-7 forward, averaged a career-best 20.2 points, 7 rebounds and 3.8 assists for the Charlotte Hornets last season, his fourth in the NBA after he was selected with the 12th overall pick in the 2018 draft out of Michigan State. He is a restricted free agent and the Hornets have given him a qualifying offer, meaning they can match offers from other teams. Before his arrest, he was expected to draw sizable offers from a number of teams, including the Detroit Pistons (Bridges hails from Flint, Mich.) and Indiana Pacers.

 

June

June 29

Washington Post, You scheduled an abortion. Planned Parenthood’s website could tell Facebook, Tatum Hunter, June 29, 2022. The organization left marketing trackers running on its scheduling pages.

The Supreme Court’s decision last week overturning the nationwide right to an abortion in the United States may have sent worried people flooding to Planned Parenthood’s website to learn about nearby clinics or schedule services.

But if they used the organization’s online scheduling tool, it appears Planned Parenthood could share people’s location — and, in some cases, even the method of abortion they selected — with big tech companies.

An investigation by Lockdown Privacy, the maker of an app that blocks online tracking, found that Planned Parenthood’s web scheduler can share information with a variety of third parties, including Google, Facebook, TikTok and Hotjar, a tracking tool that says it helps companies understand how customers behave. These outside companies receive data including IP addresses, approximate Zip codes and service selections, which privacy experts worry could be valuable to state governments looking to prosecute abortions.

Big Tech silent on data collection as workers call for post-Roe action

In a video shared with The Washington Post, Lockdown founder Johnny Lin visited the Planned Parenthood website, opened the scheduling tool, input a Zip code and selected “surgical abortion” as a service. As he clicked around, a development tool let him see how data such as his IP address was being shared with Google, Facebook and many other third-party companies. Only the companies would know for sure how they use our data, but any data sitting on servers is vulnerable to potential cyberattacks or government subpoenas. In a criminal abortion case, an IP address would be pertinent because with the help of internet service providers, law enforcement can trace IP addresses back to individuals.

New York Times, First Amendment Confrontation May Loom in Post-Roe Fight, Jeremy W. Peters, June 29, 2022. Without a federal right to abortion, questions about how states can regulate speech about it suddenly become much murkier.

The Supreme Court declared clearly last week that there is no federal right to abortion. But how the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization affects the right to talk about abortion remains far from settled, teeing up what legal experts said was a looming confrontation over whether the First Amendment allows censoring speech about a medical procedure that will become illegal in much of the country.

In states where abortion is outlawed, for instance, how can women be informed of their options elsewhere? Will media outlets be free to publish advertisements across state lines from providers operating in states where abortion has not been outlawed — as the Supreme Court long ago ruled they could? Will women be allowed to accept information about abortion if they then decide to terminate a pregnancy but don’t live in a state that allows it? What if states move to make this kind of exchange of information illegal?

“You have the right, ostensibly, to talk about abortion,” said Will Creeley, the legal director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “The question then becomes whether that talk can be regulated if it aids and abets or encourages others to have an abortion.

“That presents a First Amendment problem,” he added. “Will you still have the First Amendment right to speak when you no longer have the constitutional right to an abortion? And that is going to get messy.”

A top anti-abortion lobbying group, the National Right to Life Committee, recently proposed model legislation for states that would make it a crime to pass along information “by telephone, the internet or any other medium of communication” that is used to terminate a pregnancy.

Many states essentially did just that before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973. And it is not clear whether courts will find that the protections afforded to speech in the Constitution still apply to abortion rights supporters as they look to circumvent the raft of new restrictions.

Many legal scholars say such protections still should apply. It is generally not illegal to promote an activity that isn’t a crime. And since abortion will remain legal in many places, offering information about how women can obtain one legally shouldn’t become a crime, scholars said.

“There will be some tougher questions,” said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Let’s say you’re deliberately advertising in a Texas newspaper and say, ‘Would you like an abortion? Go to this New Mexico abortion clinic.’ Can Texas prohibit that?”

Washington Post, Opinion: Two more newspapers close every week — and ‘news deserts’ grow larger, Margaret Sullivan, right, June 29, 2022. In poorer, less-wired parts of the U.S., it’s harder to find credible news about your local community. That has dire implications for democracy. Penelope Muse Abernathy may be the nation’s foremost expert on what media researchers call “news deserts”— and she’s worried.

News deserts are communities lacking a news source that provides meaningful and trustworthy local reporting on issues such as health, government and the environment. It’s a vacuum that leaves residents ignorant of what’s going on in their world, incapable of fully participating as informed citizens. What’s their local government up to? Who deserves their vote? How are their tax dollars being spent? All are questions that go unanswered in a news desert.

Local newspapers are hardly the only news sources that can do the job, but they are the ones that have traditionally filled that role. And they are disappearing.

One-third of American newspapers that existed roughly two decades ago will be out of business by 2025, according to research made public Wednesday from Northwestern University’s Medill School, where Abernathy is a visiting professor.

 

Washington Post, FCC commissioner calls on Google and Apple to ban TikTok app, Aaron Gregg, June 29, 2022. Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican, expressed concerns that personal data from millions of U.S. TikTok users is being accessed in China.

A Federal Communications commissioner is calling on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over concerns that user data from the wildly popular social media platform is being accessed in China.

In a tweet Tuesday, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr shared a letter addressed to Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, the chief executives of Apple and Google parent Alphabet, respectively. He raised concerns over TikTok’s Chinese ownership, saying that “it harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.”

Carr can’t single-handedly compel them to ban TikTok, since the FCC doesn’t regulate app stores.

But the request nonetheless underscores the scrutiny that the leading tech firms continue to draw from powerful regulators in both parties and marks yet another chapter in TikTok’s complicated dance with the U.S. government.

Washington Post, Fact-checking movement grapples with a world awash in false claims, Glenn Kessler, June 29, 2022. Members of fact-checking organizations from around the globe met last week for their first in-person conference in three years, confronting a world awash in baseless claims promoted by politicians and even governments and increasingly embraced by receptive audiences.

Washington Post, Pelosi receives Communion at Vatican after earlier U.S. bishop refusal, Stefano Pitrelli and Amy B Wang, June 29, 2022. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), right, a Catholic and vocal supporter of abortion rights, received Holy Communion on Wednesday during a papal Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, according to an attendee at the Mass.

Pro Publica, Investigating The Other Cancel Culture: How a Public University Is Bowing to a Conservative Crusade, Daniel Golden and Kirsten Berg, June 29, 2022. With a rising national profile and donor base and relatively little state funding, Boise State University should be able to resist pressure by the Idaho Legislature. Instead the university, led by a liberal transplant, has repeatedly capitulated.

National Press Club, Statement on Murder of Mexican Journalist Antonio de la Cruz, June 29, 2022. Following is a statement by Jen Judson, President of the National Press Club and Gil Klein, President of the National Press Club Journalism Institute on the murder of Antonio de la Cruz, a reporter for the Mexican newspaper Expreso, today in Tamaulipas.

“We call on the Mexican government and law enforcement to bring to justice the killers of Antonio de la Cruz – the 12th journalist murdered in Mexico this year. Those who murder journalists must be arrested, prosecuted and punished. Because cases of violence against Mexican journalists are almost never solved, the state is sending a very bad message to the gangs and cartels who carry out these atrocities. De la Cruz was active on social media and regularly denounced politicians for corruption. In the same attack where he was killed, his wife was also killed, and their daughter was injured. This kind of tragedy must stop. Journalists must have better protection and when they are attacked the response from law enforcement and the government must be swift and vigorous.”

Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. The Club has 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization and is a leading voice for press freedom in the U.S. and worldwide.

The National Press Club Journalism Institute promotes an engaged global citizenry through an independent and free press and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement.

June 25

 

Washington Post, U.N. rights body says Israeli soldiers killed American journalist in West Bank, Shira Rubin and Kareem Fahim, June 25, 2022 (print ed.). Israeli authorities originally said the fatal shots came from Palestinian gunmen.

A veteran Palestinian American journalist was killed by Israeli forces while covering a military raid in the occupied West Bank, a spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Friday, summarizing the results of the office’s investigation into the fatal shooting in May of Shireen Abu Akleh, a correspondent for Al Jazeera.

Abu Akleh was not shot “from indiscriminate firing by armed Palestinians, as initially claimed by Israeli authorities,” Ravina Shamdasani said in a statement.

A correspondent with decades of experience for Al Jazeera news network covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Abu Akleh was fatally shot in the head early on the morning on May 11, while reporting on an Israeli raid on the West Bank city of Jenin. Witnesses said the fire appeared to come from a convoy of Israeli military vehicles, but Israeli officials initially said she was likely killed by Palestinian gunfire, before reversing course and saying it was possible she unintentionally been shot by an Israeli soldier.

• Washington Post, American journalist killed by Israeli forces in West Bank, network says, Steve Hendrix, Sufian Taha and Shira Rubin, May 12, 2022 (print ed.).

New York Times, Leader of the QAnon Conspiracy Theory Returns, Stuart A. Thompson, June 25, 2022. Three posts on Friday night signaled the resurfacing of a figure who used a variety of conspiracy theories to marshal support for former President Trump.

After more than a year of silence, the mysterious figure behind the QAnon conspiracy theory has reappeared.

The figure, who is known only as Q, posted for the first time in over a year on Friday on 8kun, the anonymous message board where the account last appeared. “Shall we play the game again?” a post read in the account’s typical cryptic style. The account that posted had a unique identifier used on previous Q posts.

The posts surprised disinformation researchers and signaled the ominous return of a figure whose conspiracy theories about an imaginary ring of elite sex traffickers marshaled support for then-President Donald J. Trump. Message boards and Telegram channels devoted to QAnon lit up with the news, as followers speculated about the meaning of Q’s return.

June 23

Politico, Book bombs: Trump aide tell-alls fail to sell, Daniel Lippman, Meridith McGraw and Max Tani,  A number of top aides to the 45th president churned out books after his presidency ended. The public isn’t buying. Multiple book editors and publishers interviewed for this story said the hefty advances doled out to the authors before publication – for some, in the millions, like Kellyanne Conway and Bill Barr – might not be made back by the publisher with sales.

A year after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, right, released a tell-all book about his 10 months in the White House that promised to be a “frank, candid account” of running Trump’s chaotic West Wing.

The buzz around it was heavy. But in the publishing world, it was a bust.

The Chief’s Chief has sold only 21,569 books, according to NPD Bookscan, a market research firm that tracks book sales. And it’s not the only book by an ex-Trump aide that has failed to fly off the shelves.

The memoir of Deborah Birx, the Covid response coordinator under Trump, has sold fewer than 6,000 copies; Dr. Scott Atlas’ book sold 27,013 copies; Dr. Ben Carson’s book sold 21,786 copies; former White House press secretary turned Trump critic Stephanie Grisham sold 38,249 books; counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway has sold 42,273 books since it was published in late May; and former defense secretary Mark Esper sold 20,900 books.

Former attorney general Bill Barr sold 64,103 books.

But the one Trump post-White House book sales that did best appears to be Peter Navarro’s, whose In Trump Time has sold 80,218 copies of his book so far. The book, unlike the others, is less a revelation about life inside the former administration than an ode to Trump’s approach to governance. Perhaps for that reason, it has earned extensive publicity in MAGA circles and is currently advertised on Steve Bannon’s The War Room website.

June 22

New York Times, Judge Allows Fox News Defamation Suit to Include Fox Corporation, Jeremy W. Peters, June 22, 2022. The decision broadens the possible legal exposure to the highest ranks of the Fox media empire.

A judge presiding in the defamation lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems ruled this week that the cable channel’s parent company, Fox Corporation, can be included in the suit, broadening the possible legal exposure to the highest ranks of the Fox media empire.

Dominion had argued that Fox Corporation should also be part of the litigation because its two most senior executives, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, played “a direct role in participating in, approving and controlling” statements that fed false perceptions of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

In a decision, Judge Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court said Dominion had “adequately pleaded” facts supporting its claim that Fox Corporation was “directly liable” for what Fox News put on the air. He reasoned that the Murdochs were widely known to have a hand in shaping Fox News coverage. Judge Davis also said it was reasonable to infer that Fox Corporation had “participated in the creation and publication of Fox News’s defamatory statements.”

 

New York Times, Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall Are Said to Be Divorcing, Jim Rutenberg and Benjamin Mullin, June 22, 2022. The media mogul’s fourth divorce is unlikely to change the ownership structure of Mr. Murdoch’s empire, but it could reverberate through companies such as Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

The October-December pairing — Ms. Hall is 65, Mr. Murdoch 91 — made the couple (shown above in a file photo) the regular subject of rival tabloids, with paparazzi regularly catching the two smiling broadly on a pristine beach, in a wintry football stadium or at a black-tie opening.

June 21

Palmer Report, Opinion: Why the media and pundit class is shocked that the January 6th public hearings are changing minds about Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, right, June 21, 2022. For months, we’ve heard large chunks of the media and pundit class insist that no matter how convincing or damning the January 6th Committee public hearings end up being, it won’t matter, because the public’s view of Trump isn’t going to change one way or the other at this late date.

But even as we keep hearing MSNBC talking heads and Twitter pundits insisting that “Everyone’s view of Trump is locked in and no one will ever change their minds,” new polling from ABC News reveals that eight percent of Americans have in fact changed their minds about Trump being prosecuted in the past week alone.

Eight percent may not sound like a lot, until you consider that every competitive election in modern American history has ended up being decided by less than eight points. It’s the difference between winning and losing. And if eight percent of Americans have changed their minds about Trump in the past week, how many of them will end up changing their minds about how they’re going to vote in November, given that Trump’s Republican Party is on the ballot?

The media and pundit class loves to pretend that the nation consists solely of the two bases. This is because it’s the two bases who spend every day tuning in to the media and pundit class, which loves to pander to its audience. But this ignores the fact that a couple hundred million Americans don’t really follow or care about day to day politics, and only occasionally take a side when things are made easy for them.

These January 6th public hearings have clearly been designed to speak to those in the middle who normally don’t care about politics. And all signs, from the huge TV audiences to the stark shift in polling, point to these hearings working. It’s the people who don’t normally care about politics who are persuadable when it comes to this sort of thing. These hearings were never, ever about either base.

• Palmer Report, Opinion: The numbers prove it: January 6th public hearings are shifting America further against Donald Trump and the GOP, Bill Palmer

June 20

New York Times, Google Says It’s Time for Longtime Small-Business Users to Pay Up, Nico Grant, June 20, 2022. Google is charging some small businesses for email and other apps after more than a decade of free use. Business owners say Google is being callous.

When Google told some small businesses in January that they would no longer be able to use a customized email service and other workplace apps for free, it felt like a broken promise for Richard J. Dalton Jr., a longtime user who operates a scholastic test-prep company in Vancouver, British Columbia.

“They’re basically strong-arming us to switch to something paid after they got us hooked on this free service,” said Mr. Dalton, who first set up a Google work email for his business, Your Score Booster, in 2008.

Google said the longtime users of what it calls its G Suite legacy free edition, which includes email and apps like Docs and Calendar, had to start paying a monthly charge, usually around $6 for each business email address. Businesses that do not voluntarily switch to a paid service by June 27 will be automatically moved to one.

Washington Post, Peter Thiel helped build Big Tech. Now he wants to tear it all down, Elizabeth Dwoskin, June 20, 2022. Inside the billionaire investor’s journey from Facebook board member to an architect of the new American right.

Since March of 2021, Thiel, left, has pumped more than $20 million into 16 political campaigns, including the Ohio Senate race where close associate J.D. Vance last month won the Republican nomination, in part by attacking Big Tech and social media censorship. Thiel also has given at least $13.5 million to acolyte Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for Senate in Arizona who serves as president of Thiel’s personal foundation and has positioned himself as an adversary of Big Tech.

Thiel’s growing political clout mirrors that of another Silicon Valley billionaire, Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed libertarian who espouses increasingly right-wing views to his 94 million Twitter followers, as he finalizes his deal to buy the social network. The men are not close — Thiel pushed out Musk when the two ran PayPal — but they’ve become more aligned politically, often echoing each other’s rhetoric as they criticize “socially responsible” investing and express concern about Big Tech’s control of speech.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Thiel’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

New York Times, Swimming Authority Restricts Transgender Women From Elite Competition, Matthew Futterman, June 20, 2022 (print ed.). The world governing body for swimming effectively barred transgender women from the highest levels of women’s international competition on Sunday, intensifying a debate over gender and sports that has roiled state legislatures and increasingly divided parents, athletes and coaches at all levels.

The vote by FINA, which administers international competitions in water sports, prohibits transgender women from competing unless they began medical treatments to suppress production of testosterone before going through one of the early stages of puberty, or by age 12, whichever occurred later. It establishes one of the strictest rules against transgender participation in international sports. Scientists believe the onset of male puberty gives transgender women a lasting, irreversible physical advantage over athletes who were female at birth.

World swimming would also establish a new, “open” category for athletes who identify as women but do not meet the requirement to compete against people who were female at birth.

More than 70 percent of FINA’s member federations voted to adopt the policy, which was devised by a working group set up in November that included athletes, scientists and medical and legal experts. The policy will go into effect Monday, just days after the start of the world swimming championships in Budapest.

New York Times, Opinion: Feminism Made a Faustian Bargain With Celebrity Culture. Now It’s Paying the Price, Susan Faludi (a journalist and the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, among other books), June 20, 2022. One month almost to the day after Americans learned of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would eviscerate the constitutional right of women to control their bodies and so their lives, millions sat glued to their screens to witness the verdict in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation trial, in which the jury awarded more than $10 million to Mr. Depp.

In a statement afterward, Ms. Heard said she was “disappointed with what this verdict means for women.” “It sets back the clock,” she said, “to a time when a woman who spoke up and spoke out could be publicly shamed and humiliated.”

The ruination of Roe and the humiliation of Ms. Heard have been cast as cosmic convergence, evidence of a larger forced retreat on women’s progress. “Johnny Depp’s legal victory and the death of Roe v. Wade are part of the same toxic cultural movement,” a Vox article asserted. “These examples may seem disparate, but there’s an important through line,” a USA Today reporter wrote, citing academics who linked the Alito draft opinion, the Depphead mobbing and, for good measure, the “public consumption” of cleavage at the Met Gala (held the same night the Supreme Court draft leaked): “This is backlash.”

Backlash it may be. Even so, putting the pillorying of Ms. Heard in the same backlash-deplorables basket as the death rattle of Roe is a mistake. Lost in the frenzy of amalgamation lies a crucial distinction. There’s a through line, all right. Both are verdicts on the recent fraught course of feminism. But one tells the story of how we got here; the other where we’re headed. How did modern feminism lose Roe v. Wade? An answer lies in Depp v. Heard.

June 15

 

Washington Post, White House has security concerns about any deal for NSO hacking tools, Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg, June 15, 2022 (print ed.). The Biden administration is warning that a potential deal between a major American defense firm and NSO Group, a blacklisted Israeli spyware company, to buy the Israeli firm’s hacking tools would raise “serious” counterintelligence and security concerns for the U.S. government.

“We are deeply concerned,” said a senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.

The defense contractor, L3Harris, is in talks with NSO Group to buy phone-hacking spyware in a deal that would give the U.S. company control of one of the world’s most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools, according to people familiar with the talks. This story was jointly reported by The Washington Post, the Guardian and Haaretz.

The unusual transaction appears to be an attempt to salvage some utility from a firm facing serious financial straits, by selling its most valuable product — its hacking code and access to the software’s developers — to a company that would restrict its use to the United States and trusted Western allies.

June 14

Washington Post, Perspective: Chris Stirewalt lost his job at Fox News. But he knows he was right, Margaret Sullivan, right, Jan. 14, 2022 (print ed.). The politics editor behind the Arizona 2020 call that enraged Trump brought his journalism bona fides to the House Jan, 6 hearing.

For a guy who made a controversial election-night call and then lost his treasured role with what he has called “the best decision desk in the news business,” Chris Stirewalt appears to have no regrets.

Testifying Monday morning, the former politics editor at Fox News spoke confidently, colorfully and, yes, decisively, about what happened in November 2020 when an erstwhile news organization that has morphed into former president Donald Trump’s propaganda arm went temporarily off script.

Stirewalt and his colleagues on the decision desk made a stunningly early call that challenger Joe Biden had won Arizona. It was only 11:20 p.m. Eastern time, with 73 percent of the vote counted.

That the Arizona call freaked out Trump World was obvious; having such a verdict, especially coming from his usually dependable cheerleading squad at Fox News, was devastating. The call made it immeasurably harder to put forth the idea that Trump ultimately would prevail, and harder to even pretend that he would. Of course, as we know all too well, that didn’t stop him.

June 11

New York Times, At least 20 million people watched the Jan. 6 hearing, a Nielsen tally showed, John Koblin, June 11, 2022 (print ed.). The number is in the ballpark of big television events like a “Sunday Night Football” game.

An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.

By scheduling a congressional hearing for 8 to 10 p.m., committee members and Democrats were hoping to make the case to the biggest audience possible. ABC, CBS and NBC pre-empted their prime-time programming and went into special-report mode to cover it live.

Though the Thursday night figure pales next to presidential debates (63 million to 73 million) or this year’s State of the Union address (38 million), it’s still much larger than the audience that would normally watch a daytime congressional hearing. And it’s in the ballpark of television events like a big “Sunday Night Football” game or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

ABC attracted the biggest audience, with 5.2 million viewers. NBC and CBS each had an audience of more than three million. MSNBC averaged more than four million, and CNN drew 2.7 million. (The 20 million figure did not yet include PBS, so the total audience was most likely a bit bigger.)

The Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity dedicated their shows to Jan. 6, and both had the hearing playing live in a split screen — but the feed from Congress was muted while the hosts spent two hours belittling the committee’s efforts.

“It’s deranged, and we’re not playing along,” Mr. Carlson said of the hearings. “This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth.”

Fox’s counterprogramming efforts drew an average audience of three million, which is just about normal.

June 10

Washington Post, Opinion: The Jan. 6 hearing was horrifying. It also gave me hope, Margaret Sullivan, June 10, 2022. That we could see the grim facts laid out on network television restored my faith that a quest for accountability might succeed.

The hearing was riveting. It was skillfully and wisely presented for an American audience that hasn’t been paying attention to every news development or investigation stemming from the incomprehensible Capitol assault of Jan. 6. An audience that, for a multitude of reasons, may have been tuned out.

And it was horrifying. Can anyone who heard U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards testify before the House select committee Thursday night ever forget her account of slipping in blood as she struggled through hours of hand-to-hand combat with her own countrymen who were calling her a traitor? I can never forget hearing her say these six words: “It was carnage. It was chaos.”

So, yes: Riveting. Horrifying. But strangely, for me, at least, the hearing was also heartening — and even inspiring. The material was awful to behold, but these two hours, presented by every broadcast TV network without interruption during prime time, radiated something simple and deeply important: the truth.

Washington Post, How the pro-Trump web responded to the hearing, Drew Harwell and Will Oremus, June 11, 2022 (print ed.). Ironically, online accounts that helped organize the insurrection tried to debunk the evidence the Jan. 6 committee presented Thursday.

Former president Donald Trump’s supporters scrambled to defend him online in the hours after the Jan. 6 committee’s hearings began, seeking to sow doubt about his involvement via the same social media channels that had captured clear evidence linking him to the Capitol assault.

In so doing, they reinforced the unmistakable role social media played in the 2021 insurrection and made clear that his supporters are determined to remain a major internet force, despite Trump’s ban from major platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Trump War Room, a Twitter account once run by his reelection campaign, tweeted, “Trump and the rally had nothing to do with the Capitol breach!,” defying the House committee’s effort to pin responsibility for the riot squarely on Trump.

On the message board Patriots.win — a spinoff of TheDonald.win, where members had shared ideas on how to sneak guns into Washington before the riot — a popular thread Friday called Jan. 6 “the most patriotic thing I’ve ever seen” and said anyone who disagrees is “an enemy of the nation.”

June 9

June 8

 

A crowd of Trump supporters surrounded a newly erected set of wooden gallows outside the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. "Hang Mike Pence!" members of the crowd shouted at times about the Republican Vice President who had announced that he could not comply with the president's call to block election certification that day. The wooden gallows are near the Capitol Reflecting Pool.

New York Times, How Jared Kushner Washed His Hands of Donald Trump Before Jan. 6, Peter Baker, June 8, 2022. The role of the former president’s son-in-law as the Trump administration ended will be scrutinized by a committee investigating the Capitol attack.

On Thursday, Nov. 5, 2020, barely 24 hours after President Donald J. Trump claimed in the middle of the night that “frankly, we did win this election,” Jared Kushner woke up in his Kalorama mansion and announced to his wife that it was time to leave Washington. “We’re moving to Miami,” he said.

The election had not even been called for Joseph R. Biden Jr., but as Mr. Kushner, right, later told the story to aides and associates, the White House’s young power couple felt no need to wait for the official results. They saw which way the votes were going and understood that, barring some unforeseen surprise, the president had lost his bid for a second term. Even if he refused to accept it himself.

No matter how vociferously Mr. Trump, left, claimed otherwise, neither Mr. Kushner nor Ivanka Trump believed then or later that the election had been stolen, according to people close to them. While the president spent the hours and days after the polls closed complaining about imagined fraud in battleground states and plotting a strategy to hold on to power, his daughter and son-in-law were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency.

Their decision to move on opened a vacuum around the president that was filled by conspiracy theorists like Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who relayed to Mr. Trump farcically false stories of dead voters, stuffed ballot boxes, corrupted voting machines and foreign plots. Concluding that the president would not listen even to family members urging him to accept the results, Mr. Kushner told Mr. Trump that he would not be involved if Mr. Giuliani were in charge, according to people he confided in, effectively ceding the field to those who would try to overturn the election.

Proof, A Guide to Watching the January 6 Hearings, Seth Abramson, left, June 8, 2022. Congress will televise its most significant hearings in a half-century beginning June 9. PROOF has offered readers America’s most comprehensive January 6 coverage; now it offers a HJ6C viewing guide.

What to Watch: Live, televised hearings of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, commonly known as the “House January 6 Committee” or (colloquially) the “HJ6C.”

Where to Watch: The HJ6C direct link. Also ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.

When to Watch: Session 1: June 9, 8PM ET [primetime]; Session 2: June 13, 10AM ET; Session 3: June 15, 10AM ET; Session 4: June 16, 10AM ET; Session 5: June 21, 10AM ET; Session 6: June 23, 8PM ET [primetime]. Note that the Committee has previously said that there will be “eight” live, televised hearings in June 2022, so it’s possible that two additional hearing sessions will be announced sometime soon.

What You’ll Get: Live testimony; taped depositions; multimedia presentations; visual exhibits; and limited statements from committee members. A former ABC executive is working with the Committee to craft what aims to be a highly watchable experience.

What to Watch For: CNN recently reported a House January 6 Committee member as saying that the hearings will “blow the roof off the House.” A different Committee member—a Republican—told reporters that based on the evidence the Committee has discovered and will reveal in these hearings, Donald Trump was part of a “chilling” “conspiracy” that was both “extremely broad” and “extremely well-organized.”

One thing we know for certain, via NPR and countless other major-media outlets, is that the Committee promises “previously unseen [January 6] material” will be shared.

The House January 6 Committee has interviewed over 900 witnesses, per CBS News. The list below will be updated in real time as Proof receives additional witness information.

Witnesses Reported By Major Media Outlets

• Ivanka Trump, daughter of former president Donald Trump (recorded depo)
• Jared Kushner, son-in-law of former president Trump (recorded depo)
• Nick Quested, documentarian embedded with the Proud Boys
• Caroline Edwards, USCP officer injured in the attack on the U.S. Capitol
• J. Michael Luttig, former U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit judge
• Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows
• Marc Short, aide to former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence
• Greg Jacobs, counsel to former Vice President Pence

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).

Washington Post, Opinion: Fox News’ blackout of Jan. 6 points to a hidden crisis for Democrats, Greg Sargent, right, June 8, 2022. The not-so-shocking revelation that Fox News will not carry House committee hearings about the insurrection is yet another sign that right-wing media will go to extraordinary lengths to shield the GOP base from brutal truths about Jan. 6, 2021.

That partly reflects a serious political problem for Republicans. The hearings starting Thursday will feature a documentary filmmaker who has new video evidence of the violent mob assault incited by Donald Trump and extensive advance planning among paramilitary-type groups. Riveting material about Trump’s corruption and the GOP’s enabling of it will follow.

By contrast, Fox hosts are gearing up to substitute a propagandistic alternative story in which the only real victims related to Jan. 6 and the hearings are Trump and his supporters. House Republicans allied with Trump will manufacture material for this disinformation push designed to keep the truth from the base at all costs.

Yet Fox’s blackout also highlights severe information challenges that Democrats will face for the foreseeable future. The fact that Republicans enjoy a massive media apparatus that manufactures a separate reality for the base, even as Democrats rely on traditional news organizations to communicate with voters, creates deep information asymmetries that continue to bedevil them.

I reached out to Dan Pfeiffer, the longtime communications adviser to former president Barack Obama, who experienced the evolution of this situation firsthand. Pfeiffer has a new book about the depths of this problem and how to counter it.

The Fox blackout of the Jan. 6 hearings is a case in point. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have already telegraphed that they’re going to offer a completely contrary fake propagandistic narrative, in which the primary victims of the Jan. 6 investigation are Trump and Republicans.

Dan Pfeiffer (shown above in a University of Delaware photo): If there is one last human being in Washington D.C. who clung to the idea that Fox is a center-right journalistic institution with opinion at night, this should be the end of that. They are going to ensure that their audience not only doesn’t see the hearings, but also gets conspiracy theories about what happened.

Sargent: The other side of this is that the right-wing media also exerts gravitational pull on the mainstream media.

Pfeiffer: When I worked at the White House, this right-wing operation existed, but it was a fraction of the size. Our biggest concern was not what was on Fox. It was that Fox was helping dictate what the rest of the press was covering. Washington Post, Biden to propose making underwater canyon off New York a marine sanctuary, Anna Phillips, June 8, 2022. The Biden administration said Wednesday it intends to protect a massive underwater canyon about 100 miles off the coast of New York City. The Hudson Canyon rivals the Grand Canyon in scale and is home to sperm whales, sea turtles and deep-sea corals.

New York Times, A New Way to Choose Your Next Book, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris, June 8, 2022 (print ed.). Most books are sold online, where it’s impossible to replicate the experience of browsing in a brick-and-mortar store. Book-discovery apps aim to change that.

By some measures, the book business is doing better than ever.

Last year, readers bought nearly 827 million print books, an increase of roughly 10 percent over 2020, and a record since NPD BookScan began tracking two decades ago.

But all is not as rosy as it seems. As book buyers have migrated online, it has gotten harder to sell books by new or lesser known authors. With the exception of surprise runaway best-sellers (“Where the Crawdads Sing,” for example) and books by celebrities or brand name authors (Matthew McConaughey, James Patterson), most writers fail to find a much of an audience. Of the 3.2 million titles that BookScan tracked in 2021, fewer than one percent of them sold more than 5,000 copies.

Washington Post, Opinion: Fox News’ blackout of Jan. 6 points to a hidden crisis for Democrats, Greg Sargent, right, June 8, 2022. The not-so-shocking revelation that Fox News will not carry House committee hearings about the insurrection is yet another sign that right-wing media will go to extraordinary lengths to shield the GOP base from brutal truths about Jan. 6, 2021.

That partly reflects a serious political problem for Republicans. The hearings starting Thursday will feature a documentary filmmaker who has new video evidence of the violent mob assault incited by Donald Trump and extensive advance planning among paramilitary-type groups. Riveting material about Trump’s corruption and the GOP’s enabling of it will follow.

By contrast, Fox hosts are gearing up to substitute a propagandistic alternative story in which the only real victims related to Jan. 6 and the hearings are Trump and his supporters. House Republicans allied with Trump will manufacture material for this disinformation push designed to keep the truth from the base at all costs.

Yet Fox’s blackout also highlights severe information challenges that Democrats will face for the foreseeable future. The fact that Republicans enjoy a massive media apparatus that manufactures a separate reality for the base, even as Democrats rely on traditional news organizations to communicate with voters, creates deep information asymmetries that continue to bedevil them.

I reached out to Dan Pfeiffer, the longtime communications adviser to former president Barack Obama, who experienced the evolution of this situation firsthand. Pfeiffer has a new book about the depths of this problem and how to counter it.

The Fox blackout of the Jan. 6 hearings is a case in point. Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity have already telegraphed that they’re going to offer a completely contrary fake propagandistic narrative, in which the primary victims of the Jan. 6 investigation are Trump and Republicans.

Dan Pfeiffer: If there is one last human being in Washington D.C. who clung to the idea that Fox is a center-right journalistic institution with opinion at night, this should be the end of that. They are going to ensure that their audience not only doesn’t see the hearings, but also gets conspiracy theories about what happened.

Sargent: The other side of this is that the right-wing media also exerts gravitational pull on the mainstream media.

Pfeiffer: When I worked at the White House, this right-wing operation existed, but it was a fraction of the size. Our biggest concern was not what was on Fox. It was that Fox was helping dictate what the rest of the press was covering. Washington Post, Biden to propose making underwater canyon off New York a marine sanctuary, Anna Phillips, June 8, 2022. The Biden administration said Wednesday it intends to protect a massive underwater canyon about 100 miles off the coast of New York City. The Hudson Canyon rivals the Grand Canyon in scale and is home to sperm whales, sea turtles and deep-sea corals.

New York Times, Twitter Is Said to Agree to Give Musk Access to Stream of Tweets, Lauren Hirsch and Mike Isaac, June 8, 2022. The move may make it tougher for Elon Musk, who has said he is not getting enough information from the company, to end the $44 billion acquisition.

Elon Musk, right, has threatened to pull out of a $44 billion deal for Twitter, saying the company has refused to give him information about its fake accounts.

So Twitter now plans to give Mr. Musk access to a large swath of its data, potentially down to its very last tweet.

The social media company has agreed to allow Mr. Musk direct access to its “firehose,” the stream of millions of tweets that flow through the company’s network on a daily basis, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. Whether Mr. Musk will get full or partial access to that “firehose” is unclear.

The information would give Mr. Musk the tools to discern how many accounts on Twitter’s platform may be fake. But it isn’t likely to help him reach Twitter’s conclusion that 5 percent of its active accounts are fake, since the company uses a different methodology involving proprietary data and human analysis to get to that figure. Mr. Musk has said he doesn’t believe that just 5 percent of Twitter’s active accounts are fake.

Twitter’s move may make it more difficult for Mr. Musk to terminate the deal. On Monday, his lawyers sent a letter to the company, accusing it of stonewalling his efforts to obtain information that was essential to closing the acquisition. For weeks, Mr. Musk has also tweeted increasingly barbed comments about Twitter’s fake accounts, appearing to lay the groundwork to renegotiate or get out of the agreement.

Mr. Musk agreed to buy Twitter in April for $54.20 a share. If the deal falls apart, there is a $1 billion breakup fee. But the agreement includes a “specific performance clause,” which gives Twitter the right to sue him and force him to complete or pay for the deal, so long as the debt financing he has corralled remains intact.

New York Times, Threats, Then Guns: A Journalist and an Expert Vanish in the Amazon, Jack Nicas, Ana Ionova and André Spigariol, June 8, 2022. A British journalist and a Brazilian expert on Indigenous groups have not been seen since Sunday. Before they disappeared, they faced threats.

The Javari Valley in the Amazon rainforest is one of the most isolated places on the planet. It is a densely forested Indigenous reserve the size of Maine where there are virtually no roads, trips can take a week by boat and at least 19 Indigenous groups are believed to still live without outside contact.

The reserve is also plagued by illegal fishing, hunting and mining, a problem exacerbated by government budget cuts under President Jair Bolsonaro. Now local Indigenous people have started formally patrolling the forest and rivers themselves, and the men who exploit the land for a living have responded with increasingly dire threats.

That tension was the kind of story that has long attracted Dom Phillips, a British journalist in Brazil for the past 15 years, most recently as a regular contributor to The Guardian. Last week, Mr. Phillips arrived in the Javari Valley to interview the Indigenous patrols for a book. He was accompanied by Bruno Araújo Pereira, an expert on Indigenous groups who had recently taken leave from the Brazilian government in order to aid the patrols.

About 6 a.m. Saturday, the two men were with a patrol, stopped along a snaking river, when another boat approached, according to officials at Univaja, a Javari Valley Indigenous association that helps organize the patrols. The approaching vessel carried three men known to be illegal fishermen, Univaja said, and as it passed, the men showed the patrol boat their guns. It was the kind of threat that Univaja had been recently reporting to authorities.

June 7

 

Media Confidential, WaPo Reporter Dave Weigel Suspended Following Retweet, Edited by Tom Benson, June 7, 2022. Washington Post politics reporter Dave Weigel (above at right) has been suspended following uproar over a sexist joke he retweeted, reports The NY Post.

The newspaper suspended Weigel Monday without pay, CNN reported, after he reposted a tweet from Youtuber Cam Harless that stated, “Every girl is bi. You just have to figure out if it’s polar or sexual.”

Colleague Felicia Sonmez (above left), who also covers national politics, then blasted Weigel for sharing the off-putting joke, tweeting, “Fantastic to work at a news outlet where retweets like this are allowed!” with a screenshot of Weigel’s retweet.

Later that day Weigel removed the tweet.

“I just removed a retweet of an offensive joke,” Weigel said. “I apologize and did not mean to cause any harm.”

It’s unclear how long the suspension will last, but an email to Weigel seeking comment led to automatic reply that said he was out of the office and returning July 5.

Weigel’s retweet led to weekend-long turmoil at the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper. Another Washington Post reporter, Jose Del Real, admonished Sonmez for calling out Weigel publicly. That led to a back-and-forth between the two.

Sonmez was briefly suspended by the newspaper in January 2020 after she mentioned a rape allegation against NBA legend Kobe Bryant after he, his daughter and seven others died in a helicopter crash. She was reinstated after colleagues rallied to her defense.

She also sued the news organization last year claiming she was the victim of discrimination after the newspaper barred her from covering high-profile cases involving sexual misconduct, though a judge threw the case out in March. In 2018, Sonmez, who at the time was at the Wall Street Journal, alleged that a then-Los Angeles Times reporter, Jonathan Kaiman, 31, groped her and sexually assaulted her in Beijing.

The Washington Post barred Sonmez from covering sexual assault cases because the newspaper felt there was a conflict of interest.

June 6

Washington Post, Musk accuses Twitter of withholding data on fake accounts in letter, Taylor Telford, June 6, 2022. The Tesla CEO says the platform’s refusal to provide information is violates the terms of their $44 billion deal. Elon Musk, below right, accused Twitter of “actively resisting” his right to information about bogus accounts on the social media platform and violating the terms of their $44 billion sale agreement, according to a letter sent Monday.

In the letter to the company drafted by his legal team, the world’s richest man reiterated concerns that caused him to pause his bid for Twitter weeks ago, claiming Twitter was breaching obligations to turn over any data he deems relevant to the deal. The Tesla CEO now believes Twitter is “transparently refusing to comply” with the terms they agreed to, “which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover.”

The move adds to speculation that Musk is trying to wriggle free of the agreement — which comes with a $1 billion breakup fee, though his past tweets suggest he may try to get around that cost. Since he first voiced interest in Twitter in April, Tesla’s stock has been pummeled amid a broader pullback for tech stocks. Last week, he instituted a hiring freeze and pledged to cut Tesla’s salaried staff by 10 percent, saying in an email to staff that he had a “super bad feeling” about where the economy was headed.

June 5

New York Times, CNN Enters a Post-Jeff Zucker Era. Bye-Bye, ‘Breaking News’ Banners, Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, June 5, 2022. Chris Licht, the new CNN chairman, is encouraging a more nuanced approach to coverage. Some at the network are skeptical.

CNN’s ubiquitous “Breaking News” banner is gone, now reserved for instances of truly urgent events. Snarky on-screen captions — “Angry Trump Turns Briefing Into Propaganda Session,” for instance — are discouraged. Political shows are trying to book more conservative voices, and producers have been urged to ignore Twitter backlash from the far right and the far left.

A month into his tenure as the new leader of CNN, Chris Licht is starting to leave his mark on the 24-hour news network he inherited in May from its prominent former president, Jeff Zucker. So far, the Licht Doctrine is a change from the Zucker days: less hype, more nuance and a redoubled effort to reach viewers of all stripes.

Running a network is a new challenge for Mr. Licht, a 50-year-old lifelong producer who has never led an organization as big as CNN. (His last employer, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” had a staff of about 200 people; CNN has roughly 4,000.) Some CNN journalists say they wonder if he can navigate a sprawling, unwieldy global news network past what has been a no good, very bad year.

Washington Post, Barry Sussman, Washington Post editor who oversaw Watergate reporting, dies at 87, Emily Langer, June 5, 2022 (print ed.). Working alongside reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he provided invaluable if at times unheralded contributions to the news coverage that helped force President Richard M. Nixon from office.

Barry Sussman, left, the Washington Post editor who directly oversaw the Watergate investigation by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, providing invaluable — if at times unheralded — contributions to the news coverage that helped force President Richard M. Nixon from office, died June 1 at his home in Rockville, Md. He was 87.

The cause was an apparent gastrointestinal bleed, said his daughter Shari Sussman Golob.

In Hollywood and in the public eye, newspapering is often imagined as a solitary undertaking, the work of shabbily dressed reporters hunched over their keyboards with telephones cradled between shoulder and ear, barricaded in by notepads and papers piled high atop their desks.

In truth, journalism is a far more collective enterprise, with crucial roles played by people whose names do not appear below headlines in the space known in newspaper jargon as the byline. One such person, and perhaps the chief example in The Post’s unraveling of the Watergate affair, was Mr. Sussman.

By Saturday, June 17, 1972, when five burglars wearing business suits broke into the Democratic national headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, Mr. Sussman was The Post’s city editor, in charge of 40 to 45 reporters and editors responsible for coverage of the District.

One standout Metro reporter was 29-year-old Woodward. A button-down former Navy lieutenant, he had been with The Post only nine months but had already distinguished himself with his inexhaustible work ethic and investigative zeal, although not with his literary flair. Mr. Sussman took Woodward on as a protege and personal friend, journalist and Watergate scholar Alicia C. Shepard reported, helping him improve his writing “at a time when colleagues joked that for Woodward, English was a second language” and teaching him “how to take his hard-earned facts and massage them into readable stories.” The morning of the Watergate break-in, Mr. Sussman immediately phoned Woodward at home and called him into the newsroom.

The more renegade Bernstein, 11 months younger than Woodward but with more than a decade of journalism experience, sensed intrigue in the Watergate burglary and wanted in on the action. While other editors at The Post had grown exasperated by Bernstein’s more trying habits — he was allergic to deadlines and once rented a car on The Post’s dime, parked it in a garage and forgot about it — Mr. Sussman recognized his value as both a reporter and a writer and argued successfully to keep him on the Watergate story.

Paired by Mr. Sussman, Woodward and Bernstein — known collectively as Woodstein — became the most famous reporters in American journalism. Their incremental and inexorable revelations of the political sabotage, corruption and coverup that began with the Watergate break-in helped send numerous Nixon associates to prison and ultimately precipitated Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 9, 1974. During their reporting, Mr. Sussman was detailed to serve as special Watergate editor.

The Post’s Watergate coverage received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for public service, the highest honor in journalism, and was dramatized in All the President’s Men, the 1976 movie directed by Alan J. Pakula. Robert Redford played Woodward, convening by night in a parking garage with his highly placed source called Deep Throat. Dustin Hoffman played the shaggy-haired Bernstein. Mr. Sussman was omitted entirely.

In her 2007 book Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate, Shepard wrote that the filmmakers excised Mr. Sussman “for dramatic reasons.” The story already had three editors — executive editor Benjamin C. Bradlee, portrayed in an Oscar-winning turn by Jason Robards; managing editor Howard Simons, whose real-life role the movie diminished, played by Martin Balsam; and Metropolitan editor Harry M. Rosenfeld, played by Jack Warden.

If Mr. Sussman was deemed superfluous for the movie — a decision that deeply wounded him, according to Shepard’s reporting — he was by all accounts the opposite in the actual events that inspired it.

“Barry was essential for The Post’s Watergate” coverage, said former executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., who worked as an editor on the Watergate investigation, “just as essential as Bob and Carl.”

Journalist David Halberstam, writing in his 1979 book about American media, The Powers That Be, described Mr. Sussman as “the perfect working editor at exactly the right level.”

“Almost from the start, before anyone else at The Post,” Halberstam wrote, Mr. Sussman “saw Watergate as a larger story, saw that individual events were part of a larger pattern, the result of hidden decisions from somewhere in the top of government which sent smaller men to run dirty errands.”

Woodward and Bernstein, for their part, described Mr. Sussman as “Talmudic” in his mastery of the most arcane details of the Watergate affair and “Socratic” in his ability to elicit leads from them through his insightful questioning.

“More than any other editor at The Post, or Bernstein and Woodward, Sussman became a walking compendium of Watergate knowledge, a reference source to be summoned when even the library failed,” the two reporters wrote in All the President’s Men, their 1974 book upon which the movie was based.

“On deadline, he would pump these facts into a story in a constant infusion, working up a body of significant information to support what otherwise seemed like the weakest of revelations. In Sussman’s mind, everything fitted. Watergate was a puzzle and he was a collector of the pieces.”

The book All the President’s Men reportedly contributed to a rift that opened between Mr. Sussman and the two reporters he had supported through the most difficult days of the Watergate investigation, when an error in their reporting involving grand jury testimony invited questions about their credibility, and when Nixon was privately threatening “damnable, damnable” consequences for The Post in retaliation for its coverage.

Mr. Sussman had hoped to co-author the account of Watergate with Woodward and Bernstein, Shepard wrote, but the reporters ultimately moved forward alone with “All the President’s Men,” which became a bestseller. Shepard quoted Woodward as saying that “it was a reporter’s story to tell, not an editor’s,” and that Mr. Sussman’s “role is fully laid out in the book.”

By the time the book was published, Shepard wrote, Mr. Sussman had stopped speaking to Woodward and Bernstein. According to Mr. Sussman, they were “wrong often on detail” in the book and had a tendency to “sentimentalize” the Watergate story.

Mr. Sussman wrote his own book about Watergate, The Great Cover-Up (1974), which broadcast journalist Brit Hume, writing in the New York Times, praised as establishing “with clarity the compelling case for Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate coverup.”

Decades later, when Shepard called Mr. Sussman to inquire about his two former colleagues, he replied, “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them.”

Reached after Mr. Sussman’s death, Woodward, left, said in an interview that “Barry was one of the great imaginative, aggressive editors at The Washington Post during Watergate. We all owe him a debt of gratitude, particularly Carl Bernstein and myself.”

In 1987, Mr. Sussman was hired by United Press International as managing editor for national news; he resigned within months in opposition to large-scale staff cuts at the troubled news agency.

He later ran a private survey research firm, was a consultant to newspapers in Spain, Portugal and Latin America and served as editor of the Nieman Watchdog Project at Harvard University. As the Internet upended the newspaper business model and hollowed out newsrooms across the United States, he cited reductions in the ranks of editors as “the single greatest failing of newspaper investigations these days.”

“There’s no cohesion in the reporting,” he told Investigating Power, an online history of investigative journalism. It seemed, he said, that when new scandals arose, “there’s not an editor who is told ‘[this] is your story,’ the way I was told Watergate was my story, and you’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

Washington Post, Perspective: Beware partisan ‘pink slime’ sites that pose as local news, Margaret Sullivan, June 5, 2022. Why you should ask more questions before posting that enraging story on social media.

Increasingly, “articles” that look like news may be something entirely different — false or misleading information grounded not in evidence but in partisan politics, produced not by reporters for a local newspaper but by inexperienced writers who are paid, in essence, to spread propaganda.

Last week provided a case in point when what looked like a legitimate news story went viral.

Published in the “West Cook News,” the story purported to reveal that a Chicago suburban school would soon be giving students different grades depending on their race. It started like this:

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students. In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.

It found a ready audience. “But of course,” tweeted the conservative author Andrew Sullivan, as he shared the story to his hundreds of thousands of followers.

He was far from alone in promoting the story. There was a big problem, though. It wasn’t true.

New York Times, Critic's Notebook: ‘The Wire’ Stands Alone, James Poniewozik, June 2, 2022. After 20 years, the classic drama is much praised and rarely imitated. For a series based on the idea that institutions don’t change, that’s fitting.

When critics get to assessing a classic TV show, we have a weird tendency to turn into evolutionary biologists. We pull out the old television family tree and gauge the series’s achievement by how many branches we can trace back to it — how many series modeled one or another aspect on it. “Dragnet,” “The Simpsons,” “Lost” — you shall know them by their copycats.

And sure, influence is one measure of greatness. But so is inimitability. There is the painter who leaves behind a school of disciples, but there is also the artist who sees a color that no one has envisioned before or since.

“The Wire” premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. In the two decades since, its reputation has only grown, as has its audience. It is one of those series, like the original “Star Trek,” that future generations will refuse to believe struggled with low ratings during its entire run. (Let alone that it was nominated for an absurd two Emmys, and won exactly none.)

But has anyone made another “Wire” since? Who — besides the creator, David Simon, in his later series — has emulated its sprawl, its complexity, its bucking of TV’s easy-to-digest episodic structure? TV fans and makers praise the show as a landmark and inspiration. Yet 20 years later, “The Wire” — like the cheese in the tune whistled by the show’s notorious drug bandit, Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) — stands alone.

June 2

 

Washington Post, Analysis: Barr’s extraordinary defense of the John Durham probe, Aaron Blake, June 2, 2022. From the start, then-Attorney General William P. Barr’s decision to appoint special counsel John Durham to investigate the origins of the Russia investigation was controversial.

And more than three years later, the inquiry has largely come up empty. It has secured one guilty plea that led to a sentence of probation, and it has now come up short in the much-watched trial of Michael Sussmann, who was acquitted Tuesday.

It’s a marked contrast to the probe Durham was tasked with investigating, in which Robert S. Mueller III secured more than half a dozen guilty pleas or verdicts. Those included several high-profile aides and associates of then-President Donald Trump. And that’s to say nothing of the extensive evidence Mueller laid out suggesting Trump might have committed obstruction of justice. A later bipartisan Senate report also suggested there was more to the collusion portion of the investigation than even Mueller was able to unearth.

To the extent people on the right have believed the Russia investigation was a “hoax” and the real crime was the Mueller probe itself, the evidence thus far paints quite a different picture.

Which leaves everyone involved to account for that. And on Wednesday, Barr himself attempted to do so — in a rather novel way for a lawman. Indeed, his defense reinforced Barr’s dual role under the Trump presidency as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and a political actor often preoccupied with taking extraordinary steps to right the supposed wrongs committed against Trump.

Fox News had hyped the significance of the Sussmann verdict beforehand and then just as quickly downplayed the acquittal afterward, suggesting the jury was unfriendly. But when Barr, right, appeared for an interview, one of its hosts pressed him on the probe’s lack of deliverables.

“Do you feel in any way responsible for how this Durham situation’s unfolding?” Jesse Watters asked. “And are you disappointed in John Durham?”

Barr assured he wasn’t disappointed. He noted that it’s difficult to obtain guilty verdicts and suggested repeatedly that the jury was slanted.

But he also pointed to a way in which Durham’s probe was supposedly successful: telling a story.

To wit (emphasis added):

“I think he accomplished something far more important, which is he brought out the truth in two important areas. First, I think he crystallized the central role played by the Hillary campaign in launching as a dirty trick — the whole Russiagate collusion narrative and fanning the flames of it. And second, I think he exposed really dreadful behavior by the supervisors in the FBI, the senior ranks of the FBI, who knowingly use this information to start an investigation of Trump …”

“The other aspect of this is to get the story out.”

“Complicated cases like this take a long time to build; they occur step-by-step and in secret. People don’t like that. If they want people punished, that’s what it takes. If they want the facts of what happened, you can get it that much more quickly.”

To summarize: Even without convictions, this is good, because it has exposed something. And that something apparently need not be proven crimes or anything amounting to the supposed conspiracy that has been alleged.

That is decidedly not how this is supposed to work. There is a reason the Justice Department doesn’t generally disclose its investigations when it can avoid doing so: because it wants to avoid impugning those who didn’t commit crimes. The role of the Justice Department is to enforce the law — not to expose “dirty tricks” that haven’t been shown to be crimes. Yet Barr is basically suggesting the value of this investigation lay largely in getting information out there, regardless of whether that information is ultimately tied to a proven crime.

(Here, we are leaving aside the actual substance of the information Durham has put out, which has been misleading in its most high-profile instances.)

This is a remarkable view of the special counsel investigation Barr launched, to be sure, but it’s also in keeping with Barr’s general posture. While decrying the politicization of law enforcement, he took an extraordinary interest in the affairs of Trump and Trump allies who found themselves afoul of the law. Some prosecutors resigned in response. In what was arguably an audition for his job in the first place, Barr wrote a remarkable 2018 memo, while he was still a private citizen, assailing Mueller’s investigation. At one point, he even suggested that Mueller’s probe was less substantiated than a debunked conspiracy theory involving the Clintons and Uranium One.

Against that backdrop, saying that your decision to launch a special counsel investigation is validated by the information it has put out, rather than the laws enforced, isn’t terribly surprising. But it’s still a remarkable admission.

New York Times, Racist and Violent Ideas Jump From Web’s Fringes to Mainstream Sites, Steven Lee Myers and Stuart A. Thompson, June 2, 2022 (print ed.). Despite some efforts by tech companies to limit the spread of the disturbing content that fuels mass shootings, it often remains only a click or two away. On March 30, the young man accused of the mass shooting at a Tops grocery store in Buffalo surfed through a smorgasbord of racist and antisemitic websites online.

On BitChute, a video sharing site known for hosting right-wing extremism, he listened to a lecture on the decline of the American middle class by a Finnish extremist. On YouTube he found a lurid video of a car driving through Black neighborhoods in Detroit.

Over the course of the week that followed, his online writing shows, he lingered in furtive chat rooms on Reddit and 4chan but also read articles on race in HuffPost and Medium. He watched local television news reports of gruesome crimes. He toggled between “documentaries” on extremist websites and gun tutorials on YouTube.

The young man, who was indicted by a grand jury last week, has been portrayed by the authorities and some media outlets as a troubled outcast who acted alone when he killed 10 Black people in the grocery store and wounded three more. In fact, he dwelled in numerous online communities where he and others consumed and shared racist and violent content.

 

New York Times, Sheryl Sandberg Is Stepping Down From Meta, Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, June 2, 2022 (print ed.). The longtime chief operating officer of Facebook’s parent company, shown above in a CNBC screenshot, has had a lower profile during Mark Zuckerberg’s pursuit of the so-called metaverse.

When Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, recruited a Google executive named Sheryl Sandberg to his social network in 2008, he said he had hired her because “she has just about the most relevant industry experience for Facebook, especially since we need to scale our operations and scale them globally.”

Ms. Sandberg answered in kind. “The opportunity to help another young company to grow into a global leader is the opportunity of a lifetime,” she said at the time.

Mr. Zuckerberg was 23, and Ms. Sandberg was 38.

Today Mr. Zuckerberg is the same age that Ms. Sandberg was when he brought her on board, and Facebook has ballooned into a behemoth. Over the past year, Mr. Zuckerberg has begun taking the social network into a new direction — toward the immersive online world of the so-called metaverse — and renamed the company Meta. And Ms. Sandberg, 52, has increasingly lowered her profile as Mr. Zuckerberg has taken over more of her responsibilities and reorganized the company for its new chapter.

On Wednesday, Ms. Sandberg said she was leaving Meta — which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger — this fall. In an interview, she said she had expected to be at the company only for roughly five years rather than the 14 she has served. She added that she planned to focus on her personal philanthropy and her foundation, Lean In, and that this summer she would marry Tom Bernthal, a television producer.

June 1

Washington Post, Supreme Court puts on hold Texas law that limits social media companies’ moderation efforts, Robert Barnes and Cat Zakrzewski, June 1, 2022 (print ed.). The law would bar social media companies from removing posts based on a user’s political ideology.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped a Texas law that would regulate how social media companies police content on their sites, while a legal battle continues over whether such measures violate the First Amendment.

The vote was 5 to 4. The five in the majority — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — did not provide reasoning for their action, which is common in emergency requests.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, said he had not made up his mind about the constitutionality of the law, but would have allowed it to go into effect while review continues. Justice Elena Kagan also would have let stand for now a lower court’s decision allowing the law to take effect, but she did not join Alito’s dissent or provide her own reasons.

Washington Post, A ‘Dynamite’ guest at the White House: K-pop group BTS meets with Biden on anti-Asian discrimination, Seung Min Kim, June 1, 2022 (print ed.). A horde of eager journalists began to crowd the aisles of the White House briefing room Tuesday long before the daily parrying session with reporters would begin — and they weren’t there for Brian Deese.

For one afternoon, the White House became an exclusive stage for global K-pop phenomenon BTS, with each of the 49 briefing room seats becoming the most coveted tickets in town. The group had been invited by the administration to raise awareness of the prevalence of anti-Asian discrimination.

“We are BTS,” said RM, whose formal name is Kim Nam-Joon and is considered the megagroup’s de facto leader, as he stepped up to the briefing room lectern. “It is a great honor to be invited to the White House today to discuss the important issues of anti-Asian hate crimes, Asian inclusion and diversity.”

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who opened up for the group, noted that while “many of you many know BTS as Grammy-nominated international icons, they also play an important role as youth ambassadors, promoting a message of respect and positivity.”

The other group members then took turns delivering their own messages in Korean. Later, an interpreter summed up their various messages, such as: “equality begins when we open up and embrace all of our differences” and “we hope today is one step forward to respecting and understanding each and every one as a valuable person.”

Then RM returned to the lectern.

“Lastly, we thank President Biden and the White House for giving this important opportunity to speak about the important causes,” he said. “Remind ourselves of what we can do as artists.”

Washington Post, 4 homes tied to Mass. reporter hit with bricks, graffitied with spray paint, Jonathan Edwards, June 1, 2022. The vandal warned it was ‘JUST THE BEGINNING!’ in latest incident.

Journalist Lauren Chooljian came home last month to discover that a brick had been thrown through the front window of her home in Melrose, Mass. On the white siding just below the shattered glass, the vandal had spray-painted an ominous warning in big, red letters.

“JUST THE BEGINNING!”

In fact, the beginning had started nearly a month earlier. Since late April, there had been four other attacks on homes tied to Chooljian, all hit with the same two weapons: a brick and red spray paint. Targets included her former address, her boss’s place and her parents’ home, which was hit twice.

Police in four towns are investigating the five incidents. On Thursday, Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan in Massachusetts released video footage of a vandal hurling a brick into Chooljian’s home and asked anyone with information about his identity to contact police. Ryan said investigators are considering the possibility that the attacks are linked to Chooljian’s work as a senior reporter and producer for New Hampshire Public Radio. The possible motive: revenge for stories she’s published in the past, intimidation to silence her in the future, or both.

 

May

May 31

Emptywheel, Analysis: Jury aquits Michael Sussmann; Sussman lawyer calls prosecution "Extraordinary prosecutorial overreach," emptywheel (Dr.  Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D., right, independent national security analyst), May 31, 2022. The Michael Sussmann jury just announced its verdict. Michael Sussmann was acquitted of lying to the FBI.

The jury deliberated for six hours. This morning, they asked for exhibits that include the taxi receipts showing that Sussmann did not bill the Hillary campaign for the meeting with the FBI. They also asked whether they all had to agree on the elements of the offense, suggesting some people believed Durham had not proven some aspects (such that Sussmann had lied or that he did so intentionally) whereas others believed Durham had not proven other parts (such as that it was material — remember that FBI largely proceeded as if this were a tip from the Hillary campaign).

Durham released a statement:

While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service. I also want to recognize and thank the investigators and the prosecution team for their dedicated efforts in seeking truth and justice in this case.

Sussmann read a statement:

I have a few thoughts to share, now that trial has ended.

First, I told the truth to the FBI, and the jury clearly recognized that with their unanimous verdict today.

I am grateful to the members of the jury for their careful and thoughtful service. Despite being falsely accused, I am relieved that justice ultimately prevailed in this case.

As you can imagine, this has been a difficult year for my family and me. But right now, we are grateful for the love and support of so many during this ordeal, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the work that I love.

Finally, I want to thank my legal team at Latham & Watkins—Sean Berkowitz, Michael Bosworth, Natalie Rao, & Catherine Yao. They are the finest lawyers, and they worked tirelessly on my case.

Thank you.

The statement from his attorney, Sean Berkowitz, is more interesting.

We have always known that Michael Sussmann is innocent and we are grateful that the members of the jury have now come to the same conclusion.

But Michael Sussmann should never have been charged in the first place. This is a case of extraordinary prosecutorial overreach. And we believe that today’s verdict sends an unmistakable message to anyone who cares to listen: politics is no substitute for evidence, and politics has no place in our system of justice.

Media Matters via Twitter, Fox last hour before Sussman was found not guilty, Lis Power, May 31, 2022. 

• Fox last hour before Sussman was found not guilty: An acquittal in the Sussman trial "could raise doubts about the legal merits of Durham's entire investigation."
• Fox this hour after Sussman was found not guilty: THE JURY WAS RIGGED, ANOTHER BLACK EYE FOR OUR JUSTICE SYSTEM

May 30

Washington Post, First she documented the alt-right. Now she’s coming for crypto, Gerrit De Vynck, May 30, 2022 (print ed.). Molly White, a veteran Wikipedia editor, is fast becoming the cryptocurrency world’s biggest critic.

In a strange, animated YouTube video, Cryptoland paints itself as the ultimate utopia, featuring luxurious villas, a casino and a private club, all located on a pristine island in Fiji. Built by and for cryptocurrency enthusiasts, it was looking for investors.

To Molly White, the project wasn’t just cringeworthy bluster, it was promotional material for yet another potential scam — one that was targeting the money of real people. Digging into Cryptoland’s organizing documents, she found a business plan full of contradictions and other red flags, like an address in the Seychelles islands, a tax haven which has hosted previous high-profile crypto scams.

White unpacked the project in a dashed-off Twitter thread, which went viral, kicking off a wave of criticism and ridicule and spawning copycat videos that boast millions of views. Now, Cryptoland’s website appears inactive, and supporters have abandoned it. Requests for comment to its founders were not answered.

Washington Post, Perspective: Why the press will never have another Watergate moment, Margaret Sullivan, right, May 30, 2022 (print ed.). Fifty years ago, the nation was gripped by media coverage of Nixon’s crimes — and there was no Fox News to tell it to look away.

You’ll be hearing a lot about Watergate in the next several weeks, as the 50th anniversary of the infamous June 17, 1972, burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters approaches. There will be documentaries, cable-news debates, the finale of that Julia Roberts miniseries (“Gaslit”) based on the popular Watergate podcast (“Slow Burn”). I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at the Library of Congress on the anniversary itself — and you can certainly count on a few retrospectives in this very newspaper.

The scandal has great resonance at The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1973 for its intrepid reporting and the courage it took to publish it. And it has particular meaning for me, because, like many others of my generation, I was first drawn into journalism by the televised Senate hearings in 1973, and I was enthralled by the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” based on the book by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

Yet thinking about Watergate saddens me these days. The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.

Washington Post, French journalist killed in strike on humanitarian convoy, officials say, Meryl Kornfield and Tara Bahrampour, May 30, 2022. A French photojournalist covering evacuation efforts in eastern Ukraine was killed during a Russian strike that hit the humanitarian truck he was in, officials say.

Frédéric Leclerc-Imhoff, who was carrying press credentials, was fatally wounded after shrapnel pierced the armored evacuation truck that was about to pick up refugees near Severodonetsk, a focal point of the ongoing battle, according to Ukrainian officials. The shrapnel struck his neck.

May 29

New York Times, The Fall of the ‘Sun King’ of French TV, and the Myth of Seduction, Norimitsu Onishi, May 29, 2022 (print ed.). Patrick Poivre d’Arvor has been accused by more than 20 women of rape, sexual assault and harassment in France’s belated #MeToo reckoning.

France’s most trusted anchorman for decades, he used to draw millions in an evening news program that some likened to a religious communion. In an earlier time, he embodied an ideal of the French male — at ease with himself, a TV journalist and man of letters, a husband and a father who was also, unabashedly, a great seducer of women.

Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, nicknamed the Sun King of French TV, seemed so confident of his reputation that last month he sued for defamation 16 women who had accused him of rape, sexual assault and harassment, saying that they were simply “jilted” and “bitter.”

Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.

May 26

 

New York Times, Palestinian Inquiry Accuses Israel of Intentionally Killing Al Jazeera Journalist, Raja Abdulrahim and Hiba Yazbek, May 26, 2022. The Palestinian Authority reported its final findings from a two-week investigation into the killing of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (shown above in a file photo).

The Palestinian Authority announced on Thursday its final findings from a two-week investigation into the killing of a veteran Palestinian-American journalist, again accusing Israeli soldiers of intentionally killing her.

The Authority’s attorney general said at a news conference in the West Bank city of Ramallah that an Israeli soldier shot the Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, on May 11 with an armor-piercing bullet fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle. It based its findings in part on examination of the high-velocity 5.56 mm bullet that struck her in the back of the head.

Palestinian officials said that they were the only ones who had examined the bullet and neither Israeli nor U.S. authorities were permitted to examine it.

“It was proven that a member of the Israeli occupation forces stationed in the middle of the street fired a live bullet that hit the martyr journalist” directly in the head, said the attorney general, Akram Al-Khateeb. She was shot “while she was trying to escape from the successive gunshots fired by the occupation soldiers,” he added.

• Washington Post, American journalist killed by Israeli forces in West Bank, network says

May 25

Washington Post, How two Texas newspapers broke open the Southern Baptist sex scandal, Elahe Izadi, May 25, 2022. Houston Chronicle city hall reporter Robert Downen was on the night shift one evening in 2018, just a few months into the job, when something caught his attention.

Scrolling through an online federal court docket, he spotted a lawsuit that accused Paul Pressler, a prominent former judge and leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, of sexual assault. While the case had been previously reported, newly filed documents painted an even more damning picture, including the revelation that Pressler had previously agreed to pay his accuser $450,000. Downen, then 25, probed more deeply and discovered other survivors of church abuse, who made it clear to him, he recalled, that “if you think this problem is confined to one leader, we have quite a bit to show you.”

Downen’s ever-growing spreadsheet of cases soon inspired a larger reporting effort to quantify the scope of sex abuse within the massive Protestant denomination. Journalists at the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News teamed up to create a database of cases involving nearly 300 church leaders and more than 700 victims for their landmark 2019 “Abuse of Faith” series.

A wave of outrage in response to the series rocked the Southern Baptist Convention, prompting its Executive Committee to hire an outside firm to investigate. The result was Sunday’s release of an explosive, nearly 300-page report that found church leaders had covered up numerous sex abuse cases and belittled survivors.

May 23

Washington Post, 11th Circuit blocks major provisions of Florida’s social media law, Cat Zakrzewski, May 23, 2022. The appeals court harshly criticized arguments that social media platforms (such as Twitter and Facebook) should be considered ‘common carriers’ subject to government regulation.

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday ruled it is unconstitutional for Florida to bar social media companies from banning politicians, in a major victory for tech companies currently fighting another appeals court ruling that allowed a similar law in Texas to take effect.

In a detailed, 67-page opinion, the court rejected many of the legal arguments that conservative states have been using to justify laws governing the content moderation policies of major tech companies after years of accusations that the tech companies are biased against their political viewpoints.

Though the court struck down the most controversial aspects of the law, it did rule that some provisions could stand, including that people banned from the platforms should be able to access their data for 60 days and disclosure provisions, such as clear content standards.

Tech groups ask Supreme Court to block Texas social media law

The decision stated that tech companies’ content moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment, which prohibits the government from regulating free speech.

Washington Post, D.C. attorney general sues Zuckerberg over Cambridge Analytica scandal, Cat Zakrzewski, May 23, 2022. The suit, filed Monday, accuses the Meta CEO of being directly involved in the decision-making that led to the siphoning of personal data of millions of Facebook users.

D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D), right, on Monday sued Mark Zuckerberg, below left, seeking to hold the CEO of Facebook parent company Meta liable for data abuses and for misleading Facebook users about their privacy protections.

The suit, filed in D.C. Superior Court, alleges that Zuckerberg directly participated in decisions that enabled the Trump-allied political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to siphon the personal data of millions of users. Racine sued the company over its data practices in 2018 in a case that is ongoing, but he is now seeking to fine Zuckerberg personally over his role in the events.

“This unprecedented security breach exposed tens of millions of Americans’ personal information, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s policies enabled a multi-year effort to mislead users about the extent of Facebook’s wrongful conduct,” Racine said in a news release. “This lawsuit is not only warranted, but necessary, and sends a message that corporate leaders, including CEOs, will be held accountable for their actions.”

• Washington Post, Analysis: Cyber pros are fed up with talk about a cyber-Manhattan Project, Joseph Marks and Aaron Schaffer, May 23, 2022.

New York Times, Once a star at CBS News, Lara Logan has now become one for the far right, Jeremy W. Peters, May 23, 2022 (print ed.). The former chief foreign affairs correspondent is now a popular guest on podcasts hosted by vaccine skeptics and deniers of the 2020 election.

When Lara Logan, left, reached the heights of American journalism more than a decade ago, as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News, her bosses didn’t think twice about sending her to cover the biggest stories in the world. Producers clamored to work with her as she landed interviews with a Taliban commander, chronicled the Arab Spring and tracked the Ebola outbreak. Former President Barack Obama called her to wish her well after the most traumatic event of what seemed like a limitless career: She was sexually assaulted while covering a demonstration in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011.

But today Ms. Logan cuts a far different figure in American media. Instead of on national news broadcasts, she can be found as a guest on right-wing podcasts or speaking at a rally for fringe causes, promoting falsehoods about deaths from Covid vaccines and conspiracy theories about voter fraud.

Recently, she downplayed the seriousness of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol on one of those shows. “This is now the crime of the century?” she asked sarcastically. She has echoed pro-Kremlin attacks on the United States, accusing Americans of “arming the Nazis of Ukraine.” And she has compared Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Hillary Clinton to some of Hitler’s most notorious henchmen.

Her latest project is a forthcoming documentary on voting machines called “Selection Code” that is being financed by Mike Lindell, the chief executive of My Pillow, who has helped spread some of the most outrageous myths about the 2020 presidential election.

 May 20

Washington Post, Oracle’s Larry Ellison joined Nov. 2020 call about contesting Trump’s loss, Isaac Stanley-Becker and Shawn Boburg, May 20, 2022. The GOP donor participated along with Fox’s Sean Hannity and Sen. Lindsey Graham, according to court filings and a participant.

Larry Ellison, right, the billionaire co-founder and chairman of the software company Oracle and the biggest backer of Elon Musk’s attempted Twitter takeover, participated in a call shortly after the 2020 election that focused on strategies for contesting the legitimacy of the vote, according to court documents and a participant.

The Nov. 14 call included Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.); Fox News host Sean Hannity; Jay Sekulow, an attorney for President Donald Trump; and James Bopp Jr., an attorney for True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit that has promoted disputed claims of widespread voter fraud.

Ellison’s participation illustrates a previously unknown dimension in the multifaceted campaign to challenge Trump’s loss, an effort still coming into focus more than 18 months later. It is the first known example of a technology industry titan joining powerful figures in conservative politics, media and law to strategize about Trump’s post-loss options and confer with an activist group that had already filed four lawsuits seeking to uncover evidence of illegal voting.

Ellison is the 11th-richest person in the world, with a net worth of about $85 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. He became a major political power broker during the Trump administration, hosting the president in 2020 for a fundraiser at his estate in California’s Coachella Valley and contributing millions to Republican candidates and committees, including to Graham, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

During the Trump administration, in 2020, Oracle partnered with the Department of Health and Human Services to collect data from doctors treating coronavirus infections with hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malaria drug touted by the president, among other drugs. That fall, it won praise from Trump as a “great company” as it became the preferred U.S. buyer of TikTok, in a potential deal with Chinese company ByteDance that did not come to fruition.

Details of the November 2020 call and questions about Ellison’s role in it were revealed in new filings made in litigation brought against True the Vote and its representatives by Fair Fight, a political action committee associated with the voting rights organization founded by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.

Washington Post, Tesla’s stock price plummets as Twitter deal hangs in the balance, Rachel Lerman and Faiz Siddiqui, May 20, 2022. Shares continued falling on Friday, possibly imperiling Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter.

Tesla’s stock — and Elon Musk’s wealth — took a huge hit Friday, continuing a downward spiral and possibly imperiling the billionaire’s deal to buy Twitter.

Shares of the electric car company, from which much of Musk’s wealth comes, sank more than 10 percent during trading Friday, falling at one point to about $636 per share. That’s about a 35 percent drop from its price on the day Musk’s deal to buy Twitter was announced.

The downturn of Tesla’s stock could have more than just a superficial impact on Musk’s wealth.

Musk has taken out extensive personal loans that are heavily tied to the value of Tesla’s stock. At times, he has put down as much as 50 percent of his Tesla shares as collateral to back them. As the company’s share price approaches $600, Musk enters dangerous territory with lenders — where they could seek some of his equity to ease their confidence in his ability to pay, according to analysts.

May 19

Washington Post, Elon Musk, notorious Twitter troll, is now trolling Twitter itself, Elizabeth Dwoskin, May 19, 2022 (print ed.). The stock price is plummeting, and executives are heading for the doors. Can the social media company withstand Musk’s takeover bid? Billionaire Elon Musk fired off yet another tweet Tuesday potentially sabotaging his $44 billion bid to buy Twitter. His scorched-earth campaign may also be sabotaging Twitter itself.

For weeks, Musk has needled the social media company on its own platform, driving down its stock price and alarming employees who live in fear of being attacked by Musk’s legions of online followers. Rank-and-file workers are polishing their résumés, saying they can’t get straight answers to basic questions, such as whether there would be layoffs, whether there would be a board of directors after the acquisition, and whether Musk would change the company’s content moderation policies. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s firing of top executives and reduction in hiring have added to the sense of chaos.

Twitter has seen its share of disruption in 16 years, from absentee leaders to employee uprisings. But over the past six weeks, Musk has brought next-level dysfunction to the company’s San Francisco headquarters and beyond.

• New York Times, Twitter Presses Ahead on Deal as Elon Musk Casts Doubt on It

Washington Post, Pentagon spokesman Kirby will move to senior commmunications role at White House, Tyler Pager, May 20, 2022 (print ed.). Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, shown below left in a file photo, will move to the White House in a senior communications role, according to two people familiar with the personnel move.

Kirby’s move to the White House comes after Karine Jean-Pierre took over as White House press secretary from Jen Psaki, who left the administration last week. Kirby met with President Biden at the White House the day after he offered the press secretary job to Jean-Pierre.

Kirby’s exact title and role remain unclear. Some in the White House said Kirby would make regular appearances at the daily press briefing, while others said he would not share duties with Jean-Pierre and only appear alongside her.May 18

New York Times, Twitter Presses Ahead on Deal as Elon Musk Casts Doubt on It, Lauren Hirsch, Kate Conger and Adam Satariano, May 18, 2022 (print ed.). The company urged shareholders to vote in favor of the deal, even as Mr. Musk said he wouldn’t move ahead without more data on spam.

Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, continued creating confusion around his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter on Tuesday, even as the social media company tried to keep the deal on course. Early in the morning, the billionaire tweeted that “this deal cannot move forward” until he got more details about the volume of spam and fake accounts on the platform.

A few hours later, Twitter said it was “committed to completing the transaction on the agreed price and terms as promptly as practicable.” It urged its shareholders to back the bid by Mr. Musk, who appeared to be carrying out a public tweet-by-tweet negotiation even though he had struck the blockbuster deal to buy Twitter last month.

Mr. Musk’s increasingly skeptical — and erratic — comments about the takeover have kept investors, bankers and Twitter itself guessing about his motives. Some analysts figure that the 50-year-old is trying to drive down the acquisition price or walk away from the deal altogether. Many were unnerved by his methods, with market-moving pronouncements made off the cuff at conferences or in emoji-laden tweets in the middle of the night.

Yet his comments are in keeping with Mr. Musk’s longtime methods of operation, where he often wings it in the biggest moments, eschews experts and relies almost solely on his own counsel. Years ago, he said that he had stopped making business plans. And people close to Mr. Musk have said that he had no plan whatsoever when he piped up with an offer to buy Twitter last month.

Washington Post, Google’s Russian subsidiary will file for bankruptcy, citing asset seizure, Aaron Gregg, May 18, 2022 (print ed.). The tech giant, which already paused most of its operations in the country, says it cannot pay workers or carry out other basic business operations.

Google’s Moscow-based subsidiary plans to file for bankruptcy, a company spokesperson said Wednesday, because Russia’s seizure of its assets has rendered basic business operations — including paying its staff — “untenable.”

The tech giant submitted a notice of intention to declare itself bankrupt, according to Reuters, which cited a filing in Russia’s federal register.

“The Russian authorities’ seizure of Google Russia’s bank account has made it untenable for our Russia office to function, including employing and paying Russia-based employees, paying suppliers and vendors, and meeting other financial obligations,” the Google spokesperson said in a statement.

May 16

 

Washington Post, Racist ‘great replacement’ theory a popular refrain among Carlson, Ingraham and Coulter, Paul Farhi, May 16, 2022. The suspect in Saturday’s killing of 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket allegedly wrote a document endorsing “great replacement theory,” a once-fringe racist idea that became a popular refrain among media figures such as Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham of Fox News and conservative writer Ann Coulter.

Before the shooting rampage that also left three wounded, the suspect, Payton S. Gendron, 18, allegedly posted a lengthy document invoking the idea that White Americans were at risk of being “replaced” by people of color because of immigration and higher birthrates.

Gendron, who is White, allegedly indicated that he chose a neighborhood with a large number of Black residents for his alleged attack. In the document that Gendron is suspected to have written, he indicated that he was radicalized online. There’s no indication that he watched Carlson’s program.

The theory was once confined to far-right White extremists, who cast immigration as part of a plot by “elites” to take political and economic power away from White people. It has gained broader circulation in recent years as a talking point among prominent conservative media figures.

Tucker Carlson twists Biden’s 2015 comments to push conspiracy theory

On Sept. 22, Fox News host Tucker Carlson misrepresented past immigration remarks by President Biden to suggest the existence of the “great replacement theory.” (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

Carlson, whose weeknight program is typically the most popular on Fox News, has been an especially avid promoter of the thesis. He has mentioned variations on the idea in more than 400 episodes since 2016, according to a New York Times analysis of his program. In April of last year, he said on Fox News that people from the “Third World” are immigrating to the United States “to replace the current electorate” and “dilute the political power of the people who live there” — language that essentially distills the replacement thesis.

He was more explicit in a video posted on Fox News’s YouTube account in September. Carlson said President Biden was encouraging immigration “to change the racial mix of the country, … to reduce the political power of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion of Americans newly arrived from the Third World.”

Washington Post, Opinion: Democracy is at stake in the midterms. The media must convey that, Margaret Sullivan, right, May 16, 2022 (print ed.). We ournalists have to try harder and find new ways to convey to voters how badly things could turn out.

I was mesmerized this past week by two astonishing videos, watching them both multiple times.

One showed the stunning Kentucky Derby, where the little-known chestnut colt Rich Strike came out of nowhere to blast past the favorites and win the race by less than a length. The other showed an entire North Carolina beach house tumbling into the ocean, yet another indication of Outer Banks shoreline erosion and, more generally, the world’s catastrophic climate crisis.

And I couldn’t help but see both as metaphors for the precarious state of democracy in America and the news media’s role in helping to save the day or in succumbing to disaster.

Here’s what I mean. Since Jan. 6 of last year, a growing chorus of activists, historians and political commentators have spoken of “democracy on the brink” or “democracy in peril.” What they mean is that, thanks to a paranoid, delusional and potentially violent new strain in our nation’s politics, Americans may not be able to count on future elections being conducted fairly — or the results of fair elections being accepted.

And at least some news organizations are taking heed.

The Washington Post established a “democracy team” to expand reporting on the nationwide battles over voting rules, access to polls, and efforts to create unfounded doubt about the outcome of elections.

At the New York Times, soon-to-be executive editor Joe Kahn, right, is talking frankly about the need to investigate efforts to undermine the institutions that uphold democracy. (If they don’t, he told the Columbia Journalism Review, “we’re not doing our job as a leading news organization.”)

A number of regional journalists are beginning to push against industry norms to speak more clearly about the threat: The Philadelphia Inquirer boldly declined to use the euphemism word “audit” to dignify state Republicans’ endless probes for nonexistent voter fraud — essentially the GOP’s attempt to cast unwarranted doubt on the results of the 2020 election in Pennsylvania.

But the clearest recognition I’ve heard so far came last week from a managing editor for CNN. Alex Koppelman is not the editor overseeing the network’s political coverage; instead, he supervises business and media news. But CNN gave him a voice to lay out the harsh reality of what the nation is up against, and what we in the media need to do about it.

New York Times, Jeff Bezos Battles With President Biden Online Over Taxes, Ephrat Livni, May 16, 2022. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is trolling President Biden on Twitter. After Mr. Biden on Friday connected lowering inflation with corporations paying “their fair share,” Mr. Bezos quipped, “The newly created Disinformation Board should review this tweet, or maybe they need to form a new Non Sequitur Board instead.” He said that conflating lower inflation with higher corporate taxes amounted to “misdirection.”

Still bristling, Mr. Bezos (shown in a file photo), who owns the Washington Post, fired again on Sunday, the DealBook newsletter reports. He lauded Joe Manchin, the centrist West Virginia senator who has often declined to vote with other Democrats on economic issues, halting additional stimulus plans.

“Manchin saved them from themselves,” Mr. Bezos wrote, plunging the company into politics at a fraught time internally, amid an employee unionization push. Externally, many executives recently have been trying to stay out of difficult debates, given the backlash some companies have faced.

Wrangling with the government over taxes on Twitter means calling public attention to a touchy topic for Amazon. The company reported nearly $36 billion in U.S. pretax income in 2021 yet said it owed only about $2 billion in federal taxes. That’s a 6 percent tax rate — less than a third of the rates both corporations and workers must pay. When Mr. Biden unveiled plans to raise rates and close tax loopholes last year, he singled out Amazon, saying, “I don’t want to punish them, but that’s just wrong.” Amazon did not respond to DealBook’s request for comment.

Disney last month lost its special tax status in Florida after opposing a law limiting gender identity discussions in schools. Now, Republican lawmakers at the state and federal levels are drafting similarly retributive legislation for politically minded businesses.

But for executives, it’s a balance. Many workers, shareholders and customers are demanding that corporations speak up, and pressure could increase now that abortion rights have become a major midterm election issue. So Amazon’s current chief executive, Andy Jassy, is probably not looking for this fight right now.

Mr. Bezos, for his part, quietly butters up the government, just like Elon Musk. While both have been publicly critical of the Biden administration, Mr. Bezos’ Blue Origin and Mr. Musk’s SpaceX spend significant resources lobbying officials to pick up their space exploration tabs and to win NASA contracts. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has accused the two billionaires of using NASA like an A.T.M. He tweeted at Bezos on Saturday about Amazon’s labor issues and soaring profits.

 

New White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre arrives to speak to reporters in the James S Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on May 16, 2022.

CNN, Karine Jean-Pierre holds first briefing as White House press secretary, Kate Sullivan, May 16, 2022. Karine Jean-Pierre held her first briefing as White House press secretary on Monday after making history as the first Black and out LGBTQ person to step into one of the most visible roles in the administration.

"I am a Black, gay, immigrant woman. The first of all three of those to hold this position," Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday.
She said, "If it were not for generations of barrier-breaking people before me I would not be here. But I benefit from their sacrifices, I have learned from their excellence and I am forever grateful to them."

"Representation does matter -- you hear us say this often in this administration, and no one understands this better than President (Joe) Biden," Jean-Pierre said.

Jean-Pierre has briefed reporters in her previous role of principal deputy White House press secretary many times, both from the podium in the White House briefing room but more often off-camera on Air Force One. Last May she became the second Black woman in history to hold the daily press briefing.

She has served on the White House's senior communications team since Biden took office, and prior to that was an adviser to his campaign and chief of staff to now-Vice President Kamala Harris. Jean-Pierre has traveled with the President on several occasions, including when she replaced Psaki at the last minute for Biden's four-day trip to Europe amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine after Psaki tested positive for Covid-19.
Jean-Pierre's family includes her partner, CNN national correspondent Suzanne Malveaux, and their daughter.

Psaki had long been public about her intention to leave the job after one year. CNN has reported Psaki will be joining MSNBC.

After Psaki's departure and Jean-Pierre's promotion was announced by the President, Psaki invited Jean-Pierre up to the podium and gave an emotional tribute to her colleague and friend. The two women embraced as Psaki went through Jean-Pierre's qualifications and the significance of her taking the job.

"She will be the first Black woman, the first out LGBTQ+ person to serve in this role, which is amazing because representation matters and she is going to, she will give a voice to so many and allow and show so many what is truly possible when you work hard, and dream big and that matters, and ... we should celebrate that," Psaki said.

Mediaite, WHCA Threatens Reporter Who Interrupted Psaki Briefing With Possible Expulsion in Scathing Email, Jackson Richman, May 16, 2022. Reporter Simon Ateba Asks Jen Psaki if Biden Blames Her or Her Comms Team for Low Approval Ratings.

A reporter who interrupted Friday’s White House press briefing has been threatened with suspension or expulsion from the White House Correspondents Association were he to do the same again.

During Jen Psaki’s last press briefing as White House press secretary, Simon Ateba of Today News Africa twice interrupted and called on Psaki, left, to call on the reporters in the back rows. He interrupted the Associated Press’ Zeke Miller and ABC News’ Mary Bruce.

In an email to Ateba, obtained by Mediaite, White House Correspondents Association President and CBS News Radio White House Correspondent Steven Portnoy chided him on Monday for the interruptions.

“Your disruptive behavior at last Friday’s briefing interrupted your colleagues and reflected poorly on the press corps,” he said. “There is no right of any reporter to be called on by any official. Preventing your colleagues from asking their questions is no way to seek relief.”

Portnoy warned that Ateba would be suspended or expelled were he to repeat his behavior from Friday.

“We note that you have been granted status as an Associate Member of our organization. With that comes a responsibility to act in a collegial manner with your fellow WHCA members,” he said. “If you again demonstrate disrespect for your colleagues in the manner you did last Friday, the WHCA Board will act on behalf of the collective. I am pasting Article X of our bylaws below for your reference.”

In a statement to Mediaite, Ateba said he received the email “with a heavy heart.”

“I received the email from WHCA’s President Steven Portnoy with a heavy heart. I am the victim here and I am being treated so unfairly by WHCA. It is sad and it is heartbreaking,” he said. “America is the greatest country in the world and no country comes even close. Here in the United States, press freedom is respected, or so I thought, or so I was made to believe.”

Ateba, who is Black, said his rationale for interrupting was due to being discriminated against “due to his origins, being an African covering the White House and focusing on U.S.-Africa ties and interactions for Today News Africa” and since he questioned the White House about the Biden administration’s African travel bans in November. In light of this, Ateba made numerous appearances on Fox News and called out the administration for the bans.

May 14

 

White House Chronicle, Many Newspapers Are on Death Row; Will They Be Reprieved? Llewellyn King (executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS), May 14, 2022. Newspapers are on death row. The once great provincial newspapers of this country, indeed of many countries, often look like pamphlets. Others have already been executed by the market.

The cause is simple enough: Disrupting technology in the form of the internet has lured away most of their advertising revenue. To make up the shortfall, publishers have been forced to push up the cover price to astronomical highs, driving away readers.

One city newspaper used to sell 200,000 copies, but now sells fewer than 30,000 copies. I just bought said paper’s Sunday edition for $5. Newspapering is my lifelong trade and I might be expected to shell out that much for a single copy, but I wouldn’t expect it of the public to pay that — especially for a product that is a sliver of what it once was.

New media are taking on some of the role of the newspapers, but it isn’t the same. Traditionally, newspapers have had the time and resources to do the job properly; to detach reporters to dig into the murky, or to demystify the complicated; to operate foreign bureaus; and to send writers to the ends of the earth. Also, they have had the space to publish the result.

More, newspapers have had something that radio, television and the internet outlets haven’t had: durability.

I have a stake in radio and television, yet I still marvel at how newspaper stories endure; how long-lived newspaper coverage is compared with the other forms of media.

I get inquiries about what I wrote years ago. Someone will ask, for example, “Do you remember what you wrote in 1980 about oil supply?”

Newspaper coverage lasts. Nobody has ever asked me about something I said on radio or television more than a few weeks after the broadcast.

There is authority in the written word that doesn’t extend to the broadcast word, and maybe not to the virtual word on the internet in promising, new forms of media like Axios.

If publishing were just another business — and it is a business — and it had reached the end of the line, like the telegram, I would say, “Out with the old and in with the new.” But when it comes to newspapers, it has yet to be proved that the new is doing the job once done by the old or if it can; if it can achieve durability and write the first page of history.

Since the first broadcasts, newspapers have been the feedstock of radio and television, whether in a small town or in a great metropolis. Television and radio have fed off the work of newspapers. Only occasionally is the flow reversed.

The Economist asks whether Russians would have supported President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine if they had had a free media and could have known what was going on; or whether the spread of COVID in China would have been so complete if free media had reported on it early, in the first throes of the pandemic?

The plight of the newspapers should be especially concerning at a time when we see democracy wobbling in many countries, and there are those who would shove it off-kilter even in the United States.

There are no easy ways to subsidize newspapers without taking away their independence and turning them into captive organs. Only one springs to mind, and that is the subsidy that the British press and wire services enjoyed for decades. It was a special, reduced cable rate for transmitting news, known as Commonwealth Cable Rate. It was a subsidy, but a hands-off one.

Commonwealth Cable Rate was so effective that all American publications found ways to use it and enjoy the subsidy.

That is the kind of subsidy that newspapers might need. Of course, best of all, would be for the mighty tech companies to pay for the news they purloin and distribute; for the aggregators to respect the copyrights of the creators of the material they flash around the globe. That alone might save the newspapers, our endangered guardians.

 

New York Times, Israeli Police Attack Mourners Before Funeral of Al Jazeera Journalist, Patrick Kingsley and Raja Abdulrahim, May 14, 2022 (print ed.). As hundreds gathered to witness the start of Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral procession, riot police assaulted the people carrying her coffin.

In life, Shireen Abu Akleh, above, an acclaimed Palestinian American broadcaster, was one of the leading chroniclers of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Her death, while covering an Israeli raid in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, turned her into one of the conflict’s most prominent recent victims. Palestinian witnesses and officials said Ms. Abu Akleh, 51, long a leading television reporter for Al Jazeera, was shot by Israeli soldiers, though Israeli officials said she could have been struck by either Palestinian or Israeli fire.

Then, on Friday in Jerusalem, her funeral was marred by another burst of violence.

Early that afternoon, as thousands of people massed in East Jerusalem for one of the largest Palestinian funerals in recent memory, a phalanx of Israeli riot police assaulted a group of mourners carrying the coffin containing Ms. Abu Akleh’s body, causing them to almost drop it.

The Israeli police later said they had intervened because the mourners, who wanted to carry the coffin by foot to the funeral, had refused to put it in a hearse, an arrangement the police said had previously been agreed to with Ms. Abu Akleh’s family.

But the police intervention drew shock and condemnation both in Israel and beyond, with the assault on mourners regarded as egregious regardless of its motive.

It was the latest and perhaps most startling salvo of the most violent period in Israel and the occupied territories, outside of full-scale war, in several years.

The assault occurred outside a hospital in East Jerusalem, where Ms. Abu Akleh’s body had been kept since another memorial on Thursday, and where hundreds had gathered to witness the start of her funeral cortege.

Tensions arose between Palestinians and Israeli police officers after the Palestinians began waving Palestinian flags and chanting nationalist slogans. They escalated after the police refused to allow mourners to take the coffin on their shoulders to the church, according to Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, a senior foreign diplomat who witnessed the dispute.

At the White House, the press secretary Jen Psaki described video footage of the clash as “deeply disturbing” and said, “We regret the intrusion into what should have been a peaceful procession.”

East Jerusalem is mostly populated by Palestinians, and most of the world views it as occupied territory — but Israel has annexed the area, considers it part of its capital, and often prevents expressions of Palestinian nationalism there.

New York Times, Fact-Check Analysis: Republicans Wrongly Tie Biden Immigration Policies to Baby Formula Shortage, Linda Qiu, May 14, 2022 (print ed.). Republicans have misleadingly claimed that the Biden administration is sending formula to undocumented immigrants amid a national shortage. Here’s a fact check.

Republican lawmakers have misleadingly suggested that the Biden administration is sending baby formula to undocumented immigrants at the expense of American families amid a national shortage.

Around the country, more than 40 percent of formulas are out of stock, caused by supply chain issues and the closure of a major manufacturing plant in February. The limited availability has left parents desperate and scrambling for a solution. The Biden administration announced modest steps on Thursday to address the crisis, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Friday that the House would take action on the issue next week.

The shortage has become fodder for political attacks from Republicans, who have fused the issue with criticisms of the administration’s immigration policies. Democrats have countered that those opposed to providing migrant infants with formula belong to a “pro starvation caucus,” as one lawmaker put it.

But it is inaccurate to suggest that President Biden is choosing to prioritize the needs of immigrant children over those of American children. Providing food — like formula — and water to migrant children detained at the border is required by a lawsuit settlement, and the Trump administration also adhered to that requirement. And it is unlikely that the amount of formula in stock at detention facilities would meaningfully ease the shortage.

Washington Post, Analysis: Twitter’s bots likely won’t be grounds for Musk to back out, Reed Albergotti, May 14, 2022. But the Tesla CEO can try to use the issue as leverage to open renegotiations. The up-and-down saga of Elon Musk’s bid to acquire Twitter took a turn this week that many long suspected: The Tesla CEO tweeted something declaring the deal was in jeopardy.

Musk said in a tweet early Friday that the deal was temporarily on hold, pending an inquiry into the number of “spam/fake,” accounts that exist on Twitter. He later clarified he was still serious about the acquisition.

Two people close to the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak publicly said the tweet reflected an effort by Musk to bring down the $44 billion price tag. That amount was settled before the stock market tanked in recent weeks, making the acquisition price comparatively more expensive.

These so-called “bot” accounts he raised concerns about represent a financial risk for Twitter. Musk has said he intends to remove these accounts when he completes his acquisition of the company. But bots generate revenue just like normal accounts, thanks to viewing the same ads. If there are more fake accounts than Twitter lets on, that would mean a drop in revenue if they are removed.

Musk’s question about bots nothing new for Twitter

Musk, whose net worth dropped roughly $50 billion in recent weeks as the markets roiled Tesla and other tech stocks, is free to back out of the deal if he’s getting cold feet. Much of Musk’s wealth comes from his 17 percent stake in Tesla. The electric car company is now worth close to $800 billion. Musk has financed the majority of his Twitter acquisition but still needs to put up $21 billion, which he aims to offset with outside investments.

But even if Musk discovers that Twitter grossly underestimates the number of bots on its service, Musk will likely still be on the hook for a $1 billion fee for killing the deal, legal experts say. And, were he to pull out of the deal, he’d likely face a lawsuit from Twitter, which could claim heavy financial damages for the turmoil Musk has caused since agreeing to acquire it.

May 13

The Guardian, US secretly issued subpoena to access Guardian reporter’s phone records, Ed Pilkington, Updated May 13, 2022. Newspaper decries ‘egregious’ move by DoJ to obtain details of Stephanie Kirchgaessner as part of investigation into media leaks.

The U.S. justice department secretly issued a subpoena to gain access to details of the phone account of a Guardian reporter as part of an aggressive leak investigation into media stories about an official inquiry into the Trump administration’s child separation policy at the southern border.

Leak investigators issued the subpoena to obtain the phone number of Stephanie Kirchgaessner, the Guardian’s investigations correspondent in Washington. The move was carried out without notifying the newspaper or its reporter, as part of an attempt to ferret out the source of media articles about a review into family separation conducted by the Department of Justice’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.

It is highly unusual for US government officials to obtain a journalist’s phone details in this way, especially when no national security or classified information is involved. The move was all the more surprising in that it came from the DoJ’s inspector general’s office – the watchdog responsible for ethical oversight and whistleblower protections.

Katharine Viner, the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, decried the action as “an egregious example of infringement on press freedom and public interest journalism by the US Department of Justice”.

She added: “We will be asking the DoJ urgently for an explanation for why and how this could have occurred, and for an apology. We will also be seeking assurances that our reporter’s details will be erased from DoJ systems and will not be used for any further infringements of press freedom.”

The leak inquiry was conducted on behalf of the DoJ by the inspector general’s office of an outside government department, housing and urban development (Hud). Its investigation focused on allegations that an employee within the DoJ’s inspector general’s office had leaked sensitive information to three news outlets – the Guardian, the New York Times and NBC News.

The Guardian was the only one of the three outlets to have a subpoena issued relating to its reporter’s phone account.

The Guardian published two sensitive reports by Kirchgaessner within the timeframe of the DoJ review into child separation covered by the leak inquiry. On 23 July 2020 she revealed that the DoJ’s former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein had personally advised that migrant parents should be prosecuted, no matter how young the children accompanying them.

On 2 September 2020, Kirchgaessner reported that a senior justice department official nominated by Trump to be a federal judge had participated in the removal of a Texas prosecutor who had sounded the alarm over child separation.

On Thursday, the investigative reporter Jason Leopold released a redacted version of the HUD leak inquiry report obtained under freedom of information laws. It revealed that leak investigators had reviewed evidence of 127 phone calls totalling about six hours in length with “phone numbers identified as belonging to reporter Stephanie Kirchgaessner of the Guardian”, and an additional 126 phone calls about six hours and 20 minutes “with a phone number identified as belonging to the Guardian generally”.

The leak report also discloses that the DoJ issued an “administrative subpoena” to a telecommunications company for “subscriber information to confirm that a specific telephone number belonged to the Guardian”. It said that “basic subscriber information” had been obtained involving “names, addresses, and length of service only” and “not the contents of communications”.

Child separation was effected in 2018 under the Trump administration. Known officially as “zero tolerance,” the policy ordered federal prosecutors to act against undocumented immigrants entering the US unlawfully even when minors were present – a reversal of previous practice which had spared families from criminal proceedings in order to avoid children being separated from their parents.

The policy led to more than 3,000 children being separated from their parent or guardian, and to widespread chaos in which the location of many children became unknown. The much-delayed DoJ inspector general’s report into the practice was finally published after two years, in January 2021.

Earlier this week Politico reported that an employee of the DoJ inspector general’s office had “abruptly resigned” after coming under scrutiny from the leak investigation. See: Justice watchdog staffer resigned amid leak probe over Trump family separation report.

May 12

 

Washington Post, American journalist killed by Israeli forces in West Bank, network says, Steve Hendrix, Sufian Taha and Shira Rubin, May 12, 2022 (print ed.). The network and Palestinian officials said journalist Shireen Abu Akleh (shown above in a file photo in Jerusalem) was killed by Israeli fire. Israel said Palestinian gunmen may have been responsible.

Israeli forces killed a Palestinian American journalist for the Al Jazeera news network in the West Bank early Wednesday, according to the network and the Palestinian Health Ministry. Israel said the journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was killed in an exchange of gunfire and called for an investigation.

Abu Akleh, 51, a longtime Al Jazeera correspondent, was shot in the head while covering Israeli raids in the Jenin refugee camp, according to the network and the ministry. She was taken to a hospital before dying from her wounds.

In a statement, Al Jazeera accused Israeli forces of killing Abu Akleh “in cold blood” and said she had been “clearly wearing a press jacket that identifies her as a journalist.” Two journalists who were standing next to Abu Akleh said in interviews that the area had been relatively calm before she was shot.

May 11

Politico, Justice watchdog staffer resigned amid leak probe over Trump family separation report, Josh Gerstein, right, May 11, 2022. DOJ Inspector General ordered investigation into who disclosed report about border policy.

An employee of the Justice Department Inspector General’s office “abruptly resigned” after coming under scrutiny in an investigation of the disclosure to the media of a closely-held draft report on the Trump administration’s family separation policy, according to a statement issued Wednesday by the watchdog office and accounts from two people familiar with the matter.

An investigative summary posted online by DOJ’s Inspector General did not name the employee who quit nor specify what report triggered the leak probe, but two people familiar with the episode told POLITICO the leak inquiry focused on disclosures about a review of the origins Trump administration’s family separation policy.

Reports by NBC News and the New York Times in October 2020, about a month before the presidential election, said former Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other top Justice Department officials were “a driving force” behind a series of moves in 2018 that led to thousands of children being separated from their parents or other relatives after crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. The reports cited a draft report by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, left, that followed a two-year review of the so-called “zero tolerance” policy.

The policy, eventually abandoned by the Trump administration, resulted in adults accused of crossing the border illegally being prosecuted criminally even if accompanied by young children. During the chaos prompted by the policy, U.S. officials essentially lost track of the ties between some immigrant children and their parents, leading to extreme difficulty in reuniting them. Litigation and claims for financial damages over the policy remain pending.

The disclosures in the media in the fall of 2020 prompted concern inside the department, where officials believed the leaks were intended to influence the outcome of the election, two people familiar with the matter said. The final report was formally released by Horowitz’s office in January 2021.

According to the summary posted Wednesday, Horowitz’s office referred the potential leak to a council which oversees inspectors general across the government, which in turn assigned the investigation to an inspector general’s office outside the Justice Department.

That probe eventually centered on an unnamed employee in Horowitz’s office, which has approximately 500 investigators and other staff.

“The independent investigation reviewed the DOJ OIG employee’s phone records and found that they reflected numerous and lengthy phone conversations between the then DOJ OIG employee and reporters at the media outlets during the time period in which articles were published about the then ongoing DOJ OIG review, as well as electronic evidence that demonstrated that the then DOJ OIG employee was privy to documents referenced in the various articles,” the two-page statement said.

The summary described a broad-ranging investigation into the leak, which included asking staffers involved in the work to answer written questions about whether they’d had any interactions with the media. This request seemed to have prompted one employee to quit, the statement suggested.

“The independent investigation noted that the then DOJ OIG employee abruptly resigned from DOJ OIG shortly before the date by which the employee and other DOJ OIG employees connected to the then ongoing DOJ OIG review were asked to submit sworn answers to a questionnaire regarding the unauthorized disclosures to the media,” the summary said. “The independent investigation further noted that the then DOJ OIG employee was the only DOJ OIG employee who did not answer the questions about the unauthorized disclosures.”

While the probe found that the unnamed employee violated “federal ethics regulations and DOJ OIG policy,” the summary makes no reference to the leak being unlawful or to the matter being referred for potential prosecution. A written denial from the alleged leaker could have exposed him or her to a criminal false statement charge.

Horowitz’s office said the staffer who resigned later declined to talk with investigators. The DOJ IG and the other agency IG which conducted the leak probe lack the power to compel former employees to testify in investigations, the summary noted.

In a related development, Horowitz’s office said later Wednesday that it made “non-material revisions” to its final report on the family separation policy following a review by the Department of Veterans Affairs inspector general.

“The changes were made to the passages of the report to more closely align with the supporting evidence in our underlying work papers,” Horowitz’s office said.

Washington Post, Why do journalists in Mexico keep getting killed? Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul and Kevin Sieff, May 11, 2020 (print ed.). With the shooting deaths this week of a cameraperson and a director in Veracruz state, the number of journalists killed in Mexico this year is now up to 11. That’s more than in Ukraine, where the world’s press corps is covering a war.

Mexico has long been one of the world’s most dangerous countries to be a journalist. But 2022’s killing rampage is on pace to more than triple last year’s total. The increase has left many here wondering what has changed — how to explain the epidemic of violence against reporters, editors and photographers.

Sheila Johana García Olivera and Yesenia Mollinedo Falconi of the online news outlet El Veraz were shot Monday night while sitting in a car outside a convenience store. Neither survived. Mollinedo Falconi had received threats for her journalistic work, her brother said.

A closer look at this year’s killings suggests no single reason explains the uptick. No one criminal organization or arm of the government is responsible. Instead, the deaths point to the wide range of threats that journalists here face daily — and the impunity that allows their killers to act without fear of consequence.

 

BuzzFlash and GregPalast.com, '2,000 Mules': Belly Laughs, Belly Aches from Film’s “Proof” that Trump Won, Greg Palast, May 11, 2022. Don’t laugh. Yet.

A Black man walks from his car to the ballot drop box (as shown above). Dark music plays. The Black man puts ballots in the drop box then gets back in his car.

“This is a smoking gun! This is OJ Simpson being seen leaving the scene of the crime!”

A crime?

No less an expert than radical right radio kook Larry Elder, right, is convinced he has seen a crime.

It looks to me like a Black man putting ballots in a drop box. (In Georgia, as just about everywhere, you can drop off ballots for family members.)

In this film 2000 Mules, heavily promoted by Donald Trump (who hosted the release at Mar-al-Lago), front man Dinesh D’Souza sets out to prove the Black man is a “mule,” part of a giant criminal conspiracy to stuff ballot boxes with fraudulent votes. The proof? Well, you can see it with your own eyes! The evidence is in your face: There’s a BLACK man and he is dropping off BALLOTS in a ballot drop box. Case closed! Guilty!

OK, you can laugh now. But crying time is coming. I predict that 2000 Mules will create the platform for Trump’s loss of the election in 2024 — and Trump’s inauguration in 2025.

But for now, back to the film.

D’Souza’s “expert” tells us they tracked the Black mule. “So, in one night this person, this mule went across six counties to 27 different drops.”

Wow!

Does D’Souza have the film to prove it? Yes, of course he does, you liberal jerk! D’Souza worked with a courageous group, True the Vote, that obtained ALL the security footage of every ballot drop box in Atlanta — 4 million minutes of film and they looked at all of it!

They have the damning film — they just won’t show it

They have the film, but they … just don’t, uh, show it. Why not show us at least a couple of film clips of the 27 times this Black felon repeated his crime? Well, that’s the problem with you liberal jerks: You see a Black man with a ballot and you, Mr. Liberal, assume he’s voting, when he’s obviously committing a crime. And he does it dozens of times! Why do we have to show you the evidence? We just need Elder, the Chubby Checker of right wing nuttery, to blubber his amazement at seeing the footage on D’Souza’s computer. Case closed! Guilty!

I was so angry at this criminal voter, I wanted to bust him! Expose him. Arrest him. They have his photo, his car, his license plate number. In fact, their “expert” says these ballot mules have, “bad backgrounds, bad reputations, …violent guys.”

Whoa! So, If D’Souza identifies their “backgrounds,” they must have their names. So why don’t they show us the files? Name the names? Show us their faces? Confront them. Call the cops, the feds!

But D’Souza, left, and True the Vote didn’t bust anyone. Didn’t name a single mule — though they supposedly can identify them. They even fuzzed over the mules’ faces so we can’t see who it is. Nice of D’Souza to protect the guilty. Unless, of course, the Black men weren’t guilty. Or just guilty of Voting While Black. They don’t show us the files of their “bad reputations" because these files don't exist.

Why did the Black man with the ballots commit a crime on camera that will get him five years in prison? For the money, of course! Did D’Souza know for certain the Black man took money? Of course! D’Souza shows a film of money being handed to someone. OK, it’s a reenactment — the actor gets a credit at the end of the film. But hey, it could have happened. Case closed! Guilty!

D’Souza knows the Black man was paid by a “non-profit” group. They showed a photo of Black candidate Stacey Abrams. But he doesn’t actually say that she or her group, Fair Fight Georgia, made the payments. In fact, he doesn’t say who made the payments. Why?

And what about those “non-profits” that paid the mules — 2,000 mules casting nearly a million illegal votes — 817,765 illegal ballots (we toted up their claims) in just five cities — i.e. Black cities. D’Souza tracked the mules to the offices of these “non-profits,” even had an Arizona whistleblower say she herself gathered the ballots and paid the mules out of one office.

But the whistleblower is in shadow, unnamed…and D’Souza, oddly, conceals the name of this criminal “non-profit.” He won’t reveal the group because … well, that’s odd. When I reported investigations for BBC Television, not once did I say, “We have the proof — witnesses, film, documents — of felony crimes committed by … well, that’s our secret!”

He knows who paid hundreds of millions to the mules — but he won’t tell us.

D'Souza says, “We know that the mules got their stashes of ballots from these activist organizations.” He “knows,” but won’t say how he knows, what evidence he has. Hell, he doesn’t name even one evil organization (and he claims there are many) because… well, maybe they didn’t do it.

Why didn’t he confront this unnamed group or groups with the evidence? I do that in every report I’ve ever filmed (in fact, it’s required by British law for UK reporters). Maybe because D’Souza has no evidence. He certainly didn’t show us any evidence, zero, of a single payment to a single mule.

When the Palast team finds a crime or malfeasance or vote manipulation, we name the perps — Chevron, Katherine Harris, whomever, and I confront them.

Take a look at our last major report from Georgia. We discovered that GOP operatives challenged the right to vote of tens of thousands of Black and young Georgians on false evidence. We named the key operatives — Pam Reardon is the Republican challenger-in chief. Here’s a photo of me confronting Reardon with the evidence. We didn’t fuzz out her face. And we named and confronted the group who gave her the phony, racially poisonous purge list: True the Vote. Yep, the same characters who provided the bogus info for 2000 Mules.

Yes, there is vote theft — votes stolen from people of color and the young. We’ve got the proof and, unlike D’Souza, we will show you the evidence and name the perps.

And when we say True the Vote receives Dark Money for these voter roll hits, we name the perp: The Bradley Foundation, the uber-right-wing billionaires from Milwaukee.

Why does the Palast team, whether for the BBC or Rolling Stone or Democracy Now! always names the perps? Well, that’s kind of point of investigative reporting. We do it because we can: we have the evidence, so we show it.

D’Souza and True the Vote don’t name the perps nor the evil groups nor their funders because… they don’t have the evidence. Period.
Stuffing the drop box from 93 feet away

But Mules is slick. Real slick. With an air of science and hard statistics. They use the new tool of “geo-tracking”. They bought (as anyone can) “pings” from cell phones in five cities, trillions of pings. D’Souza shows a satellite in space, shows all kinds of flashing lights on a computer screen and the damning evidence — photos of Black men casting ballots.

They say (but don’t show us) that these Black men, inexplicably, went to drop boxes "on average 23 times”. That’s pretty damning, if true.
But it’s not true. The commercial geo-tracking services that True the Vote used can only identify a phone moving within 30 meters (93 feet) of a location. That is, if someone is jogging by a couple of drop boxes, although they are on the other side of a highway, they are “mules.” D’Souza shows dramatic fluorescent lines on a computer showing the path of two “mules” — who go by several drop boxes. Case closed! Guilty!

Now, who would go by the same boxes day after day? Maybe they aren’t “mules.” In fact, a more accurate name for the film would be “2000 Mailmen”.

The commercial geo-tracking services that True the Vote used can only identify a phone moving within 30 meters (93 feet) of a location. Now, who would go by the same boxes day after day? Maybe they aren’t “mules.” In fact, a more accurate name for the film would be “2000 Mailmen”.

With thousands of “mules,” somehow they didn’t name a single one. As a former professor of statistics and investigator for several Attorneys General, I can tell you it would be damn easy to locate a bunch of them. True the Vote has license plates, film of faces, and the list of voters whose ballots were dropped off. They could match the photos to the date stamp on the ballots.

They even had a detective hired by the Republican Party who said he saw and filmed men stuffing the ballot boxes late at night. But he didn’t show the film nor call the cops nor tag the suspects (nor did the GOP). Why not? Because it didn’t happen.

And where did these 817,765 ballots come from? A ballot cannot simply be printed and stuffed into a box: every mail-in ballot is assigned and coded to an individual voter (your vote choice is secret but not the ballot envelope nor the fact you voted). So, it would have been easy to call the voters whose ballots were supposedly stolen and used to vote without their consent to prove these were fraudulent votes. (Yes, it’s time consuming: Our Georgia investigation required 1,200 phone calls.)

Since proving ballots are stolen is easy (though time-consuming) why didn’t D’Souza prove his case? Provide a list of the names on the fraudulent ballots? Because he can’t.

D’Souza and True the Vote insist that tens of thousands of ballots in Georgia alone were stolen — yet there were no reports of ballot thefts. Voters would have found that someone cast their ballot when they tried to vote. They can’t prove a million ballots were stolen or illegally bought (“trafficked” in True the Vote’s terminology) because it didn’t happen.

D’Souza’s charge is mind-blowing. He claims that there are as many 54,000 mules that were organized and paid in at least five big cities. In Fulton County (Atlanta), he tells us 92,670 ballots were stuffed illegally into drop boxes.

That’s astonishing — because there were only 79,000 ballots cast in drop boxes in Fulton County!

And in Detroit, it was worse. “Mules” stuffed 226,590 ballots into Detroit area drop boxes — way more than the total number of all mail-in ballots — about three times the number of ballots in drop boxes.

True the Vote’s “expert” tells us he identified mules in Detroit, “That went to more than a hundred drop boxes.” That’s also amazing because there were only 30 drop boxes in all of Detroit.

And with over three-quarters of a million ballots stolen or “trafficked,” not one voter claimed that someone stole their ballot. Because, maybe, it didn’t happen. We can conclude: Walking 50 feet from a ballot box does not mean you were paid to stuff that box, Mr. Elder.

Don’t laugh. The guy next to me sure wasn’t laughing. As the credits rolled, he shouted, “I’M A VETERAN! YOU HAVE TO TELL EVERYONE TO WATCH THIS FILM!”

When I asked the shouter — his name is Steve — why D’Souza didn’t name the “non-profits” spending millions on ballot trafficking, Steve said, “Yeah, I was kind of wondering ‘bout that.” But then Steve added his own explanation: “These people [Clintons, Obama and the mule-driving “non-profits”] have an arrangement with the Devil.” I guess D’Souza did not want to upset Satan.

So, who put up the hundreds of millions of dollars of Dark Money to hire the mules and organize this national operation? D’Souza features a right wing “expert” who tells us Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros and Warren Buffet have the money to do it. But did they? Well, two out of three are Jewish. What other proof do you need, Liberal?

Am I saying there are no election crimes? Of course not. Example: Dinesh D’Souza was convicted of the felony crime of concealing election campaign contributions in 2014, served a 5 month sentence in a halfway house, was fined and given five years' probation — and was later pardoned by Trump for his service to the cause.

Why hire "mules" at all?

And two more things. First, every single drop-box ballot (and mail-in ballot) must be signed by the voter and the signature verified against the registration signature. D’Souza doesn’t tell us how over a quarter million ballot signatures were forged—yet not one forgery was caught.

Really?

And second, and most devastating: Why hire mules at all? Why in the world would these unnamed "non-profits" pay tens of millions to Black men to drive all over the county to stuff them into drop boxes, committing a felony crime on camera — when anyone can simply dump them into a mail box, no cameras, no time stamps, no evidence.

This “evidence” will allow Republican Legislatures to claim the electoral votes of those states are in question and, on January 6, 2025, those Electoral College votes will not be certified by a Republican Congress.

2,000 Mules will elect Trump in 2024

Still laughing? Prepare for the unhappy ending. This film will be the excuse for massive new vote suppression trickery all in the name of preventing “voter fraud.” In Georgia, under SB202, devised by Gov. Brian Kemp, Stacey Abrams’ likely opponent, Fulton County’s 38 drop boxes will be reduced to just eight and will be locked inside state buildings. True the Vote’s hit list of Georgia voters has expanded, without a word in the national press, to block over 300,000 ballots cast by voters of color.

Thirty-five states are purging several million voters from the rolls using a method pushed by True the Vote’s funders, the Bradleys, all to prevent chimerical fraudulent voters.

Now, jump into my time machine to 2024. Let’s say a Biden-Trump race produces the same electoral count as in 2020. But in 2024, the GOP will have the “evidence,” bogus though it may be, of “mules” stuffing ballot boxes in Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. This “evidence” will allow Republican Legislatures to claim the electoral votes of those states are in question and, on January 6, 2025, those Electoral College votes will not be certified by a Republican Congress.

At that moment, the 12th Amendment to the Constitution will kick in and, in place of the Electoral College, each state will have one vote for President. Do the math: As the majority of state delegations are Republican, a 12th Amendment procedure will insure that, on January 20, 2025, Trump will be inaugurated again.

While the band strikes up, Hail to the Thief. 

Washington Post, Analysis: ‘2000 Mules’ offers the least convincing election-fraud theory yet, Philip Bump, right, May 12, 2022. There’s one scene in particular that I think summarizes the irredeemable flaws of Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie “2000 Mules,” in which he purports to demonstrate rampant illegality surrounding the 2020 presidential election. The film has become a central part of Donald Trump’s assertions about the election, with the former president hosting a screening last week at his Mar-a-Lago resort. But, interestingly, the most revealing scene doesn’t have anything to do with the election at all.

In it, D’Souza, left, is hearing from a man named Gregg Phillips about how cellphone geotracking works. In short, your phone has various tools that allow it to know roughly where it is at any given moment, data that is often collected through apps and shared with companies that aggregate data for marketers. Phillips uses that data, which also includes time stamps, to show that only a few phones were in the vicinity of a fatal shooting in Atlanta — an incident that Phillips’s colleague Catherine Engelbrecht describes as “ebbing on cold-case status.”

“You could see, visually, that there were only a handful of unique devices that could possibly have pulled the trigger,” Phillips says. He shows a circle overlaid on a map, within which five dots of different colors are visible — dots indicating “the only potential legitimate shooters,” he says. He explains that, having done this analysis, his team turned information about those devices over to the FBI.

“Now, I read, they've arrested two suspects,” D'Souza says.

“They have,” Phillips says, somberly.

There’s a reason for this scene. Phillips and Engelbrecht’s analysis of geotracking data is the crux of D’Souza’s claims about there being an army of people who were dispatched to collect ballots before the presidential election. If data can be used to identify and arrest criminals in one case, the movie would have us believe, it can be similarly used in the case of all this alleged election fraud.

But looking at the case more closely, you see how the impression you’re meant to have is wildly misleading. The shooting led to the death of Secoriea Turner on July 4, 2020. It was far from a “cold case” — police arrested a suspect about two weeks later after he turned himself in. A second suspect was arrested in early August 2021 — not by federal law enforcement but by state officials. There is no indication that geolocation data played a role in either arrest, much less data provided by Phillips’s team.

In other words, D’Souza is elevating shaky, misrepresented, incomplete claims to bolster his rhetoric — as I said, an apt summary of the movie overall.

D’Souza declined to comment for this article.

“2000 Mules” can be broken out into three basic components. There’s the geolocation-based material that’s the heart of D’Souza’s assertions about the election. The second half of the movie is a broader effort to undergird the geolocation claims, an attempt to build a foundation of how and why a rampant ballot collection scheme might have been undertaken. And then there’s the third part, a sort of cable-news-style panel conversation with D’Souza and several other conservative and right-wing pundits. (All of those pundits, incidentally, have shows with Salem Media Group, which served as executive producer of the film.) By the end, the pundits have been convinced that rampant fraud occurred, with former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka outlining all of the evidence that had been presented “empirically” in support of the claim.

There is no such empirical evidence, by a long shot. That geolocation data from Phillips and Engelbrecht’s group, True the Vote, which also has executive-producer credits on the film, is used as a purportedly data-driven latticework on which everything else hangs. But beyond lots of harrumphing about how revealing this data is, we see very little of it.

The theory that Phillips and Engelbrecht present is that nonprofit organizations employed people to collect ballots and then drop them into drop boxes in various cities. They call this “ballot trafficking,” a term meant to connote illegality akin to the transport of narcotics. The people carrying the ballots, then, become “mules” and the nonprofit groups “stash houses.” To test this theory, they obtained a large amount of anonymized cellphone geolocation data and tried to figure out how often individual phones appeared near drop box sites or near those nonprofit groups.

By itself, this is a dubious approach. As the Associated Press pointed out in a fact check of the film, there’s no way by just using cellphone data to know whether someone visited a ballot drop box, particularly since those boxes were installed in high-traffic areas. Last month, I spoke with an expert on geolocation who made clear that the imprecision of phone geolocation would make specifying that a phone was actually near a drop box (and not, say, 10 feet from it) nearly impossible. The film makes repeated comparisons to federal law enforcement’s ability to identify people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, but even if the phone’s location is off by 20 feet, it’s still obvious when you’re inside a large building. (In one shot, the film shows geolocated data inside the Capitol — with positions surrounded by large circles of uncertainty that make this point clearly.)

In essence, we're just asked to trust that True the Vote found what it says it found. That by itself is probably not wise.

Phillips first rose to national attention in 2016 when he claimed, without any evidence, that millions of people had voted illegally in that year’s presidential election. Trump jumped on the claim, but Phillips never presented any evidence it had occurred. There was no reason to assume it had.

So we get sweeping claims about how many “mules” True the Vote identified in each city and the average number of drop boxes each visited. We’re shown one map of the travels of one “mule” throughout one city on one day, but even that is simply offered by Phillips as representing “a smoothed-out pattern of life” that we’re asked to assume is accurate. Everything else is just offered in the aggregate.

To bolster the claim, though, the movie spends a lot of time showing video from ballot drop boxes, obtained with public records requests. Phillips and Engelbrecht narrate what we're seeing, framing all of it as evidence in support of their theory.

In one bit of footage, we see a woman come and use a drop box. She puts in “a small stack” of ballots, Phillips says, “maybe three, maybe four,” and then removes latex gloves that she had been wearing and throws them away. This happened at 1 a.m., the True the Vote team says, making it more suspicious.

Except:

It’s not at all clear that the woman is putting more than one ballot in the box. There’s just one thin white rectangle that gets slipped into the box.

This was on Jan. 5, 2021, during Georgia’s runoff election, so it had nothing to do with the presidential race.

The woman is wearing gloves and a mask — suggesting that she is taking precautions against the coronavirus.

Is it hard to believe someone might wear latex gloves to access a publicly used drop box if one is worried about infection?

We are later told that the True the Vote team noticed the “mules” wearing gloves only after a late-December election-fraud indictment in Arizona — an indictment that stemmed, we are told, from fingerprints being used to catch culprits. That indictment involved the collection and submission of four ballots, and it’s not clear that fingerprints were an important part of tracking down the alleged culprits. But this additional — and hard to verify in the moment — piece of information makes the woman’s actions seem much more nefarious.

The True the Vote people claim that they identified the same woman “in a number of locations” and that she went to “dozens and dozens over the course of these two elections.” But we don’t see the map of her geolocated activity. We don’t even see a map of her cellphone going to that drop box on that night in January 2021. We don’t see video footage of her at another drop box. We’re just asked to believe that all of this occurred, without evidence.

Then there's the guy with a bike. He arrives at a drop box, removes a ballot from his backpack and puts it in the drop box.

“You also see him get sort of frustrated as he starts to leave,” Phillips claims, though there’s no obvious evidence of frustration. “Because, guess what? At this point, they had started requiring the mules, apparently, to take pictures of the stuffing of the ballots. It appears that that’s how they get paid.”

You then see the guy park his bike by the drop box and take a picture of both.

“If you’re just casting your own ballot,” Engelbrecht says, “what reason in the world would you have to come back and take a picture of the box?”

The answer is obvious. The particular drop box in this case can be easily tracked to the Ponce de Leon Library in Atlanta. If you look on Instagram, there are a number of people posting photos of themselves voting at this drop box. (For example.) There are any number of other photos people posted on social media showing themselves, say, riding a bike to drop off a ballot. Elections officials encouraged sharing voting experiences on social media in a bid to drive up turnout.

But that’s the sum total of the evidence offered against “bike guy” — that he took a picture. Again, he doesn’t appear to have multiple ballots. Again, there’s no geolocated data putting him there. It’s just this one snippet of purported sketchiness that comes down to a guy taking a picture of himself voting. Notice, too, that Phillips doesn’t purport to have any information from anywhere else that taking a photo was a requirement to get paid — he just says this is “apparently” a new requirement. (The lady with the gloves didn’t take a picture.) Phillips just layers that story on top of the video to make it seem as if the guy with the bike was part of a conspiracy and True the Vote had unpacked this complicated scheme.

At no point is there evidence presented of people getting ballots from a nonprofit group and dropping them in drop boxes. There’s one anonymized interview with a woman in Arizona who claims this happened, but there’s no geolocated or video evidence of ballot drops being made. Despite a confused scene with the pundit panel in which it’s alleged that maybe some of these ballots were submitted on behalf of dead people or people who moved, there’s no evidence of that happening. There aren’t even very many snippets of people casting more than one ballot — a practice that wasn’t itself necessarily illegal.

One segment of the movie shows a man depositing multiple ballots in a county in Georgia. But there’s a trivial — and legal — answer, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Mark Niesse reported: He was dropping off ballots for his family, which he’s allowed by law to do.

That the film does not even try to show that man making any geolocated visits to other drop boxes should by now not need to be mentioned. What appears to have happened is not that True the Vote found “mules” and then placed them at drop boxes using governmental video surveillance. Instead, the group appears to be trying to imply overlap between two large, distinct data sets — one with dots on a map and one with unusual-looking activity at drop boxes.

If there’s no proof of “mules” running around, the film’s second-half effort to explain how the system works is unimportant. (It’s mostly a mishmash of old claims about fraud and the au courant effort to cast increasing voter turnout as devious.)

But none of this is really the point. The point, instead, is that the viewers come away from the movie believing that they were right all along about the election being stolen. And so D’Souza scratches that itch by adding up the number of “mules,” the number of drop box visits and the average number of ballots deposited to determine how this network of criminality swung the election to Joe Biden.

It's useful here to be blunt: Every part of the calculus that D'Souza uses to show that Trump really won is nonsense, as he himself inadvertently makes clear.

First, it depends on True the Vote’s “mule” estimates being accurate, which for the reasons stated above should not be assumed. Second, it weirdly relies on the average number of drop box visits per “mule” instead of just a total number of visits, which one would think True the Vote could provide. Third, it assumes that those votes are invalid or would not otherwise have been cast, which is not a defensible assumption. (In fact, speaking at a legislative hearing in Wisconsin in March, Engelbrecht noted that “we’re not suggesting that the ballots that were cast were illegal ballots.”) And fourth, it relies on True the Vote’s estimate that each drop box visit included the drop of five ballots on average.

Consider that for a moment. What on Earth could that be based on? There is one scene in which True the Vote notes that a drop box in Georgia had more ballots than would have been expected based on the number of visits observed in video footage during the 24 hours prior, but there’s no attempt to understand why that might be the case. Did they see someone roll up with a giant stack of ballots? If so, why isn’t that in the movie? Even if all of the rest of this were true, there’s simply no way to know how many ballots were dropped in a drop box by a “mule.”

After declaring that Trump would have won the election based on the math above, D’Souza does something even odder: He just assumes that there were more mules than True the Vote counted and, for no explained reason, that they were averaging three instead of five ballots per drop. Suddenly, Trump wins every contested state!

And if there was a secret effort to dress chipmunks up as people and cast in-person ballots for Trump to the tune of, oh, 40 percent of turnout in each state, removing that criminal activity gives Biden a massive electoral victory! I have video of a chipmunk in my yard that I believe is carrying a ballot, so who’s to say my theory isn’t accurate? If we make up whatever numbers we want, we can do all sorts of interesting things.

At its heart, “2000 Mules” is a triumph of capitalism. There’s huge demand for proving that Trump didn’t lose in 2020, and this film provides just enough of a veneer of authority to let people collapse comfortably into that belief. That it doesn’t survive even mild external scrutiny is as irrelevant as pointing out contradictions in a religious text is to recent converts: They want to believe what they want to believe.

“Their ability to keep their side ignorant is total,” radio host Dennis Prager said during the pundit panel portion of the film. It’s an interesting commentary on how partisan belief works, certainly.

Washington Post, Russian TV, online platforms hacked with antiwar message, Mary Ilyushina and Annabelle Timsit, May 11, 2020 (print ed.). Russians using smart TVs reported seeing something atypical: A message appeared instead of the usual listing of channels. “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands,” read the message that took over their screens. “TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.”

The apparent hack, targeting ordinary Russians sitting by their televisions or looking things up on their search engines, broke through the pro-Moscow messaging Monday as Russia celebrated Victory Day, a commemoration of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II.

As Russia intensified its attacks in Ukraine’s south and east, thousands of Russian troops assembled in Moscow’s Red Square for a military parade. Addressing them, President Vladimir Putin gave a speech doubling down on his invasion of Ukraine and accusing NATO and Western countries, without evidence, of provoking Russia.

On Victory Day, Putin defends war on Ukraine as fight against ‘Nazis’

The antiwar message that appeared on the screens of Russian smart TVs also appeared on the platforms of Yandex, Russia’s IT giant. Like Google, it combines many products under one umbrella, including a search engine and a service providing TV programming schedules. On that page, the daily programs for state-run Channel One and Russia-1 were also defaced early Monday.

Russia’s equivalent of YouTube, called Rutube, was also affected, it said in a statement.

“Following the sites of various Russian ministries, which have been constantly subjected to cyberattacks over the past two months, hackers have reached RUTUBE,” Rutube said on its official Telegram channel. “Our video hosting has undergone a powerful cyberattack. At the moment, it is not possible to access the platform.”

The streaming platform later said that it had “localized the incident” and was working to restore normal service, and that the apparent hackers were unable to access its content library.

“Specialists localized the incident, and work is currently underway to ensure security,” Rutube said. “We will announce the timing of the restoration of the video service in the near future.”

Washington Post, House approves nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine, Felicia Sonmez and Andrew Jeong, May 11, 2020 (print ed.). The package of military, economic and humanitarian support is $7 billion more than the $33 billion President Biden requested. The Senate is expected to follow suit this week.

The House on Tuesday approved nearly $40 billion in additional aid for Ukraine as the country battles Russia’s brutal invasion, now in its third month.

The package of military, economic and humanitarian support, which is $7 billion more than the $33 billion President Biden requested, was approved on a bipartisan vote of 368-to-57, with the Senate expected to follow suit this week.

All House Democrats present Tuesday night voted in favor of the measure. They were joined by 149 House Republicans. Fifty-seven House Republicans voted “no.”

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: U.S. SIGINT shared with Ukraine not the first for the post-Soviet region, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 21 books and a former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, May 10-11, 2022. Russia did not complain when the U.S. passed to it top-level intelligence to enable it to target a former Soviet general.

President Biden is reportedly infuriated that U.S. national security officials have leaked to the media information that the United State shared intelligence with Ukraine that led to successful Ukrainian hits on some 12 Russian generals serving on or near the front lines of the war in Ukraine. Biden was also upset that intelligence leaks confirmed that similar U.S. intelligence helped in the successful Ukrainian sinking of the Russian Black Sea flagship, the Moskva.

In a May 6 call to his top national security officials, including Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, CIA director William Burns, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Biden said the leaks must stop. Biden was reacting as all past administrations have done when highly-classified signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations are leaked to the media. Apparently, the National Security Agency has found a rich environment of usable SIGINT in Ukraine because Russian military personnel have been relying on commercial mobile phones to discuss battlefield operations. These communications are intercepted and geo-located by NSA SIGINT satellites, aircraft, and other platforms in the region. That geo-locational data has, according to the leaked intelligence, been passed on to Ukraine to target Russian field commands, resulting in the killing of generals and other high-ranking officers.

When it comes to SIGINT, the "holy grail" of the FIVE EYES intelligence alliance of the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, every alliance leader has reacted negatively to leaks about communications intercept operations.

Washington Post, Celebrity chef Mario Batali found not guilty of sexual assault in Boston trial, Tim Carman, May 11, 2022 (print ed.). Mario Batali was found not guilty on Tuesday of charges of indecent sexual assault and battery following a two-day trial in which the celebrity chef never took the witness stand in his own defense.

The case against Batali, 61, was a #MeToo landmark: the first time a chef accused of sexual misconduct faced criminal charges in court. On Monday, the first day of the trial, Batali, shown at left on the cover of one of his cookbooks, waived his right to a jury trial, opting to leave his fate in the hands of Judge James Stanton, who on Tuesday said that evidence showed the accuser was motivated by financial gain.

Mario Batali’s accuser details alleged assault as his trial begins

The case hinged almost exclusively on the testimony of Natali Tene and the selfie photos she took with Batali on April 1, 2017, at a restaurant in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, not far from Eataly, an Italian marketplace that counted Batali among its owners.

“It’s an understatement to say that Mr. Batali did not cover himself in glory on the night in question,” Stanton said in announcing his ruling. “His conduct, his appearance and his demeanor were not befitting a public person of his stature at that time.”

But Stanton said it is the court’s job to determine how much weight to give to the testimony of witnesses. “The complaining witness has significant credibility issues,” he said. “The issues were highlighted in her testimony.”

On Monday, Tene testified that, while dining at Towne Stove and Spirits, she was caught trying to take a furtive photo of the chef who, before the #MeToo era, was a multimedia star. He wrote cookbooks, appeared on daytime television, was a regular on “Iron Chef America,” had his own cookware and was known virtually everywhere he went for his iconic footwear: orange Crocs.

After Batali motioned her over to his bar stool, Tene testified, she was prepared to apologize for snapping his picture without permission and even ready to delete it. But Batali, she said, encouraged her to take selfies with him. Off and on, over the course of three minutes or so, she testified, she snapped photos and short videos with Batali, who remained seated while she stood next to him.

May 10

Washington Post, Russian TV, online platforms hacked with antiwar message, Mary Ilyushina and Annabelle Timsit, May 10, 2020. Russians using smart TVs reported seeing something atypical: A message appeared instead of the usual listing of channels. “The blood of thousands of Ukrainians and hundreds of murdered children is on your hands,” read the message that took over their screens. “TV and the authorities are lying. No to war.”

The apparent hack, targeting ordinary Russians sitting by their televisions or looking things up on their search engines, broke through the pro-Moscow messaging Monday as Russia celebrated Victory Day, a commemoration of the Soviet Union’s role in defeating Nazi Germany in World War II.

As Russia intensified its attacks in Ukraine’s south and east, thousands of Russian troops assembled in Moscow’s Red Square for a military parade. Addressing them, President Vladimir Putin gave a speech doubling down on his invasion of Ukraine and accusing NATO and Western countries, without evidence, of provoking Russia.

On Victory Day, Putin defends war on Ukraine as fight against ‘Nazis’

The antiwar message that appeared on the screens of Russian smart TVs also appeared on the platforms of Yandex, Russia’s IT giant. Like Google, it combines many products under one umbrella, including a search engine and a service providing TV programming schedules. On that page, the daily programs for state-run Channel One and Russia-1 were also defaced early Monday.

Russia’s equivalent of YouTube, called Rutube, was also affected, it said in a statement.

“Following the sites of various Russian ministries, which have been constantly subjected to cyberattacks over the past two months, hackers have reached RUTUBE,” Rutube said on its official Telegram channel. “Our video hosting has undergone a powerful cyberattack. At the moment, it is not possible to access the platform.”

The streaming platform later said that it had “localized the incident” and was working to restore normal service, and that the apparent hackers were unable to access its content library.

“Specialists localized the incident, and work is currently underway to ensure security,” Rutube said. “We will announce the timing of the restoration of the video service in the near future.”

May 9

Washington Post, 48 million households to qualify for $30 Internet plan under new Biden program, Jacob Bogage, May 9, 2022. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and 17 other providers will offer discounts under the plan, which the White House estimates will extend to 48 million households.

Households can qualify for the subsidies, called the Affordable Connectivity Program, if their income is at or below 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines, a member of the household participates in certain federal anti-poverty initiatives — including Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, federal housing assistance, Pell Grant tuition assistance, or free or reduced-price school meals — or if the household already qualifies for an Internet provider’s low-income service program.

Consumers can check whether they qualify for discounted service at getinternet.gov.

President Biden, both during his 2020 campaign and in negotiations for the bipartisan infrastructure bill, has made Internet access a high priority, especially for rural America and low-income consumers. A 2021 study by the Pew Research Center found that though broadband, the most reliable form of Internet connectivity, access has increased among rural residents in the past decade, rural communities still lag well behind others in terms of service.

Roughly 7 in 10 adults in rural areas reported having home broadband access in 2021, Pew found; the same proportion had a desktop or laptop computer. Eight in 10 had a smartphone.

“If we didn’t know it before, we know now,” Biden said last month at a White House ceremony honoring the national teacher of the year. “High-speed Internet is essential.”

Biden’s infrastructure package reserved $65 billion to improve the nation’s broadband network. Most of that funding will go to states for projects directed by local policymakers, but a $14 billion pool was set aside for Internet subsidies.

The discount program faces early hurdles because the households it is meant to serve are not online and therefore more difficult to reach. The White House said it would partner with other federal agencies, state and city governments and charitable groups to spread the word.

New York Times, Opinion: Pamela Anderson, Amber Heard and the Limits of the Feminist Redemption Plot, Jessica Bennett, May 9, 2022. To look the part of Pamela Anderson in “Pam & Tommy,” the Hulu series, the actress Lily James sat through four hours of makeup each day and reportedly went through 50 pairs of 34DD prosthetic breasts, which had to be switched out repeatedly during filming and were at times so sweaty, they almost fell off.

The series recounts the whirlwind marriage of Ms. Anderson and her ex, the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and centers on the honeymoon sex tape that was stolen from their home and distributed to the masses. But this retelling of their story, created without their involvement, purports to be the empowering version of events — an attempt to depict Ms. Anderson’s struggle in the aftermath and “provoke a conversation about how we treat women,” as Ms. James has put it.

So if the camera seems a little too interested in lingering on those prosthetic breasts? Don’t worry — this is feminist art.

And it’s the kind of art that seems to be everywhere in Hollywood these days, part of a slate of projects that aim to “reclaim,” “redeem,” “reframe” and “reconsider” famous, beautiful, usually white and always misunderstood women from our semirecent pasts, who were at one point vilified, usually over something sexual in nature. As the logic (and marketing language) tends to go, by retelling (and consuming!) these women’s hardships through the more enlightened lens of today, we are helping women reclaim their power.

“Pam & Tommy” is not the most recent example of this genre, though it is perhaps the most controversial — in part because Ms. Anderson wanted nothing to do with it. But by the time it was announced, in 2018, there was a whole host of other successful projects like it: a biopic and documentary about Anita Hill, recounting her treatment in her sexual harassment claim against Clarence Thomas; “I, Tonya,” about the figure skater Tonya Harding, now treated as more complex than just a low-class villain; and “Lorena,” about Lorena Bobbitt, who today goes by Lorena Gallo and who we now see was not merely the woman who chopped off her husband’s penis but also a victim of domestic abuse.

We owe some of this redemption framework to Monica Lewinsky, of course, whose affair with the president was the backdrop to my teen years and whose return to the public eye I arguably helped facilitate once I was old enough to recognize its complexity. I wrote about Ms. Lewinsky in 2015, shortly before she delivered a TED Talk on public humiliation, and then again last year, when she became the subject of the FX series “Impeachment.”

So I am not immune to the appeal of this redemption arc. And yet …

At what point does the fictional depiction of that spectacle, and our viewing of it, become just as bad as watching it in the first place?

There are enough tales of wronged women in history that we could keep telling these stories forever. But are we really any better off today for having heard so many of them?

May 7

 

Washington Post, Judge dismisses Trump’s lawsuit against Twitter, Cat Zakrzewski, May 7, 2022 (print ed.). The former president accused the social network of violating the First Amendment by suspending his account after Jan. 6.

A California judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit that Donald Trump filed against Twitter, the latest blow to the former president’s high-profile battles with major tech companies over their decisions to suspend his accounts in the fallout of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The lawsuit, which Trump initially filed last year in Florida along with suits targeting Google and Facebook, was viewed as part of a broader strategy to appeal to conservatives who have long argued that social media companies unfairly censor their viewpoints. The judge’s dismissal comes after Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk announced his plans to buy Twitter, taking issue over content moderation decisions he views as limiting free speech — and raising speculation that Trump could return to the platform.

In the ruling, U.S. District Judge James Donato rejected Trump’s argument that Twitter was operating as a “state actor” when it suspended his account in January 2021, calling it not plausible. Trump had claimed that Twitter was constrained by the First Amendment’s restrictions on government limitations of free speech because it had acted in cooperation with government officials.

May 6

 

Justice Clarence Thomas (left) and Justice Samuel Alito.

Proof, Investigative Commentary:The Real Supreme Court Leak in Dobbs v. Jackson Isn’t the One You Think—and May Point Toward the Leaker’s Identity, Seth Abramson, May 6, 2022. It turns out Alito’s draft opinion on abortion may have leaked earlier than believed, and not to Politico but another—farther right—outlet. This revelation may hold the key to a historic leak probe.

Seth Abramson, shown at right, founder of Proof, 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).

May 5

 

SCOTUSblog, Analysis: How the leak might have happened, Tom Goldstein (SCOTUSblog editor and founder, and prominent litigator before the Supreme Court), May 5, 2022. Among the debates generated by the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs is whether the leaker was conservative or liberal. The leak will ultimately pale in importance to the court’s decision once it is issued; the ruling will directly affect the lives and rights of tens of millions of people. But in the meantime, the motives of the leaker are an important topic because they help explain why an institution that zealously guards its secrets suddenly seems porous.

Start from the premise that there were actually (at least) two leakers, and three leaks. The first leak was to the Wall Street Journal editorial board last week. In substance, it was that the court had voted to overrule Roe v. Wade, but that the precise outcome remains in doubt because Chief Justice John Roberts, right, is trying to persuade either Justice Brett Kavanaugh or Justice Amy Coney Barrett to a more moderate position that would uphold the Mississippi abortion restriction without formally overturning Roe.

While not formally presented as relying on a leak, the editorial transparently does. The most obvious example is that it predicts that Alito is drafting a majority opinion to overrule Roe, but gives no explanation for that prediction and none is apparent. We now know that Alito, left, did draft that opinion.

The second leak was to Politico. Likely within the past few days, a person familiar with the court’s deliberations told them that five members of the court – Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, along with Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch – originally voted to overturn Roe and that remains the current vote. In addition, the position of the chief justice is unclear. The remaining justices are dissenting.

The third leak was also to Politico. It was presumably – but not certainly – by the same person. Someone provided them with Alito’s Feb. 10 draft opinion.

Note as well what was not leaked. Politico seemingly was not told which justices had joined the Alito opinion. (The fact that five justices voted in December to overturn Roe as a general matter does not mean that all five of them necessarily would have agreed to sign on to Alito’s draft.) And Politico apparently was not provided with a subsequent draft, which ordinarily would have circulated to the court by now – in response to comments from some members of the would-be majority.

Here is what you would conclude is the state of play if you took all the leaks as both accurate and pretty complete (assumptions that, admittedly, are by no means certain). Alito’s opinion probably has been joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. Kavanaugh and Barrett have yet to join – most likely because they are waiting to consider an alternative opinion from the chief justice.

In these circumstances, which ideological side would think it benefits from leaking the opinion? It seems to me, that is the left. I can see conservatives believing that they would gain from leaking the fact that Kavanaugh had originally voted to strike down Roe. They might believe it would tend to lock him into that position. But that was accomplished by leaking that fact to both The Wall Street Journal and Politico.

The question here is who believed they would benefit from leaking the opinion itself. That document was much more likely to rally liberals than conservatives. It brought home the fact that the court was poised to overrule Roe in much more concrete terms than merely leaking the vote. The opinion is also a full-throated attack on abortion rights and – with important caveats – substantive due process rights more broadly. And as a first draft – without the benefit of later refinement – it does not yet present the critique of Roe in its most persuasive form.

It is also important to look at the leak of the opinion through the lens of the fact that someone – almost certainly a conservative – had just before leaked the court’s tentative decision and the state of the voting to The Wall Street Journal. That leak was itself an extraordinary and unethical breach of confidences and certainly caused very deep concern inside the court.

My guess is that someone on the left felt somewhat justified in releasing the opinion in response. Through the opinion, one would see what the Journal was saying Kavanaugh and Barrett were considering. That leak was a historically unprecedented violation of the deepest and most solemn trust among the justices and the court’s staff. It wounded the institution.

One small note about the identity of the leaker. There has been some speculation that turns on a supposed relationship with Josh Gerstein, the Politico legal affairs reporter who is the lead author on their story. It seems to me that the leak very likely runs instead through the other reporter with a byline on the story: Alexander Ward, who is a national security reporter. In response to questions from The Washington Post, Politico confirmed that the story was very tightly held from even its own staff. Almost surely, the leaker would have insisted on that confidentiality. I cannot think of a reason that Ward would have been on the story other than that the leaker communicated through him, not Gerstein. And Politico would have felt compelled to give Ward a byline on such a historic scoop.

May 3

San Francisco Chronicle, Opinion: No, Ron DeSantis’ battle with Disney isn’t just political grandstanding, Burt Neuborne and Erwin Chemerinsky, Updated May 3, 2022. The core principle underlying the First Amendment is that government cannot punish speech because it disagrees with its viewpoint. But that is exactly what Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have done to the Disney corporation for having dared to oppose legislation limiting discussion of gay issues in Florida’s public schools.

We think the Supreme Court was wrong in Citizens United when it granted full free speech rights to corporations like Disney. Nor are we fans of delegating government powers to profit-driven corporations. But, as long as corporations continue to function as powerful First Amendment speakers, the worst thing we could do is empower an all-powerful regulatory state to turn corporate speakers into mouthpieces for the government by punishing them for failing to toe the party-line. That’s how Vladimir Putin rules Russia.

Gov. DeSantis, right, and Florida state lawmakers have revoked a 55-year-old arrangement that allowed the Walt Disney Co. to self-govern its 25,000-acre Disney World complex. Stripping Disney of its local governmental powers was done for just one reason, and DeSantis was explicit about it: Disney CEO Bob Chapek had criticized Florida’s recently adopted law prohibiting classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in certain elementary school classrooms. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature were simply retaliating for Chapek’s criticism of the “don’t say gay” law.

It was once the law that government could condition the grant of a so-called “privilege,” like Disney’s authority to exercise delegated local government power, on any terms it wished. But over a half century ago, the Supreme Court rejected that approach and repeatedly has held that the regulatory state may not condition the continued enjoyment of a government-granted benefit on the recipient’s waiver of its First Amendment rights. Under settled First Amendment principles, the Florida Legislature could not provide that a person’s license to practice medicine or law, or their eligibility to receive welfare benefits, could be made contingent on supporting government policy.

Simply put, the government cannot condition the discretionary grant of a benefit on a recipient’s waiver of a constitutional right. The Supreme Court, applying its “unconstitutional condition” doctrine, has struck down efforts to condition government funding of public television stations on a waiver of the station’s First Amendment right to use privately raised funds to support news programs.

Florida’s effort to condition Disney’s continued exercise of local government authority on its support for the governor’s anti-gay bill is no different. DeSantis and the Florida Legislature have unconstitutionally conditioned Disney’s ability to exercise local government benefits on the company’s silence.

There is a temptation to dismiss Florida’s action as political grandstanding by a governor who wants to run for president and is seeking issues that play to his base. Going after Disney for being too supportive of gays received just the headlines DeSantis wanted.

But if DeSantis and the Florida Republicans can get away with this, there will be no stopping their power to use the machinery of government to punish and silence their critics — corporate or otherwise. If DeSantis gets away with punishing Disney for its speech, any corporation, indeed any person receiving a benefit from a government will risk losing it unless they toe the party line. The potential for government manipulation of corporate — and other — speech is enormous.

Washington Post, Christiane Northrup, once a New Age health guru, now spreads covid disinformation, Sam Kestenbaum, May 3, 2022. For much of the pandemic, there has been a tidy pattern to Christiane Northrup’s days.

A retired celebrity doctor with a New Age fandom, she would take her position at a sunny desk in coastal Maine, snap on a camera, and hold forth on spiritual topics such as chakra alignment and energy fields. With a flowery dress and glittering jewelry, she sometimes serenaded her online audience of half a million or so by plucking an enormous harp.

Then Northrup would land on a gloomier theme: covid-19. Northrup would claim that the virus was part of a plot involving Deep State brainwashing and treacherous depopulation schemes. She encouraged fans to check out QAnon, called the Centers for Disease Control a “covid death cult,” and described the vaccines as crimes against humanity.

“We are, indeed, at war,” she said in one recent dispatch. “It is good versus evil. Dark versus light.”

Last year, these apocalyptic-sounding messages put the doctor on a watchdog’s list of the top sources of falsehoods about the coronavirus vaccine for, among other things, sharing posts that falsely claimed the shot would lead to a 800% increase in chronic illnesses for children. The White House then called for her to be booted from the public square.

To those familiar with Northrup from the ’90s and 2000s, when she hosted PBS specials and became a beloved household name,(Oprah Winfrey once called her writing “a guide, a bible”) the doctor holding forth at her desk could seem radically transformed. Exiled from some circles, she found a hero’s welcome in the MAGA set and on anti-vaccine speaking tours that also featured former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Infowars host Alex Jones.

To some who knew Northrup personally, all of this came as a shock. Bill Manahan, a Minnesota doctor who befriended Northrup in the 1980s, said, “It’s like she went to the dark side.”

May 2

Investigations: Challenges To Democratic Norms

 

New York Times, Part 1: Tucker Carlson, once a failed pundit, stoked white fear to conquer cable, Nicholas Confessore, April 30, 2022. A New York Times investigative analysis in three parts of 1,100 episodes of the apocalyptic worldview of "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the top-rated 8 p.m. (Eastern Time) on Fox News.

Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.

Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.

The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.

When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.

“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.

In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful.

 

New York Times, Part 2: How Tucker Carlson reshaped Fox News — and became Trump’s heir, Nicholas Confessore, May 2, 2022 (print ed.). A New York Times investigative analysis in three parts of 1,100 episodes of the apocalyptic worldview of "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the top-rated 8 p.m. (Eastern Time) on Fox News.

Tucker Carlson had a problem.

After years in the cable wilderness, he had made a triumphant return to prime time. And his new show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” had leapfrogged to the heart of Fox News’s evening lineup just months after Donald J. Trump’s upset victory shattered the boundaries of conventional politics.

But as Mr. Trump thrashed through his first months in office, Mr. Carlson, right, found himself with an unexpected programming challenge: Fox was too pro-Trump. The new president watched his favorite network religiously, and often tweeted about what he saw there, while Fox broadcasts reliably parroted White House messaging. No one was more on message than Sean Hannity, shown above, then Fox’s highest-rated star, who frequently devoted his show to Mr. Trump’s daily battles with Washington Democrats and the media.

Newly planted in Fox’s newly vacated 8 p.m. time slot — previously held by the disgraced star Bill O’Reilly — Mr. Carlson told friends and co-workers that he needed to find a way to reach the Trump faithful, but without imitating Mr. Hannity. He didn’t want to get sucked into apologizing for Mr. Trump every day, he told one colleague, because the fickle, undisciplined new president would constantly need apologizing for.

The solution would not just propel Mr. Carlson toward the summit of cable news. It would ultimately thrust him to the forefront of the nationalist forces reshaping American conservatism. “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” the host and his producers decided, would embrace Trumpism, not Mr. Trump. The show would grasp the emotional core of Mr. Trump’s allure — white panic over the country’s changing ethnic composition — while keeping a carefully measured distance from the president himself. For years, as his television career sputtered, Mr. Carlson had adopted increasingly catastrophic views of immigration and the country’s shifting demographics. Now, as Mr. Trump took unvarnished nativism from the right-wing fringe to the Oval Office, Mr. Carlson made it the centerpiece of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

New York Times, American Nationalist: Part 3, Nicholas Confessore, April 30, 2022 (print edition upcoming). A New York Times investigative analysis in three parts of 1,100 episodes of the apocalyptic worldview of "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the top-rated 8 p.m. (Eastern Time) on Fox News.

The nightly message to audience about the audience's domestic enemies in the media and among Democratic leaders and Left activists: "They don't care what you think. They want to control what you do."

May 1

Washington Post, Russia struggles under unprecedented wave of hacking, puncturing myth of its cyber-superiority, Joseph Menn, May 1, 2022. Experts anticipated a Moscow-led cyber assault; instead, attacks by hacktivists and criminals have wreaked havoc in Russia.

 The rare front-line visit of such a high-ranking military official comes as analysts say Russian forces remain beset with logistical problems and disarray.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Ukraine and pledged U.S. support “until victory is won.” Civilians were being evacuated from Mariupol. Follow updates.

 

Proof, Investigative Commentary: The True Story of the “Ghost of Kyiv, Seth Abramson, left, May. 1, 2022. One of the most confusing and controversial news stories of Russia’s ten-week-long invasion of Ukraine is the story of a Ukrainian MiG-29 pilot whose identity—and even reality—has been hotly debated.

The Ukrainian Air Force (UAF), which is comparatively small and has comparatively old equipment, has now shot down a startling number of Russian fighter jets and attack helicopters—far more than U.S. intelligence expected would be the case, but in any case at a clip now confirmed by intelligence agencies from across the Western world. And these combat victories began very early on—even before the phrase “the Ghost of Kyiv” had been coined (let alone heard) by anybody.

Needless to say, almost none of these now-confirmed Ukrainian ground-to-air and air-to-air kills were recorded, for the obvious reason that all potential soldier-filmmakers were too busy fighting, and everyone else was too busy hiding. And it took several days for Western-media camera crews to get into position to get significant footage—or even to know where to go to get that footage—and even once they had that capacity, they were often prohibited from getting such footage either by safety concerns or the reasonable request of the Ukrainian armed forces that its positions not be broadcast.

But for all that, someone was downing a lot of Russian aircraft. That much is now clear.

To date, 189 Russian aircraft—at a bare minimum—have been downed by Ukrainians.

Were these 189 Russian aircraft downed by 189 different Ukrainian soldiers, wielding 189 different Stinger missile delivery systems and/or flying 189 different MiG-29s? No one knew, as February slipped into March and March into April.

So is it possible, given the miniscule size of Ukraine’s air force, the limited number of missions it runs daily (about ten, per major media reports) and the more-than-likely fact that many of the Russian aircraft lost so far have been jets that a single Ukrainian pilot managed, by March 13 of 2022—19 days into the war—to down enough Russian aircraft (five) to be officially named a “flying ace” under the conventions of modern warfare? Of course it’s possible. Frankly, in a certain view it doesn’t even seem unlikely.

Who Decides If—or When—the “Ghost of Kyiv” Exists?

Given the fog of war, the identity of any individual Ukrainian pilot who shot down any individual Russian jet or helicopter was always going to be a piece of news revealed to the world by the Ukrainian military—and almost certainly by members of Ukraine’s military speaking to members of Ukraine’s press corps.

It goes without saying that the Kremlin has never once been honest with the world or even its own people about the cost it is paying for Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine; and it’s equally clear there are far more Ukrainian journalists on the ground in Ukraine (particularly in the hottest hot spots for shelling and live small arms fire) than there are U.S. or other Western journalists. So if it were to come to pass that one Ukrainian were responsible for five of 189 downed Russian aircraft—a not unimaginable outcome—that intelligence was almost certain to come from a Ukrainian source and be given to, in turn, a Ukrainian source.

Indeed, given that we know which Ukrainian news sources are the most respected and have the most journalists on the ground in Ukraine, we could probably have predicted in advance that if it came to pass that one Ukrainian had been responsible for just five of the 189 downed Russian aircraft in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’d likely hear about it from the Kyiv Post.

But there were other things about a scenario of this sort that we could’ve predicted in advance:

• The Ukrainians would give any such “flying ace” a nickname—because such aces always get nicknames;
• The Ukrainians would use a nickname first created outside Ukraine if it seemed more to the Ukrainian military’s advantage to do so;
• The Ukrainians wouldn’t hesitate to issue a nickname to such a flying ace after the fact, because nicknames for such persons are often given after the fact;
• No matter what had actually happened with respect to such a Ukrainian ace, the Kremlin—and its far-right allies in the United States—would insist that it had not happened, if they felt it to be to their benefit to falsely say so;
• The young white men on 4chan and Reddit would be annoyed if they felt that the Ukrainians had used for their new ace a nickname that they (the young white men) created, as irrespective of the politics of these young men—whether they’re white supremacists, alt-right, Trumpists, old-school Republican Party adherents, libertarians, apolitical, or anarchists—they do not like the idea of “meme magic” being used by anyone but them, and (if they hail from any of the first three political philosophies above) they especially do not want Ukraine using their digital work-product to the detriment of their heroes in the Kremlin.
• And yet the core facts remained: the Ukrainian military was always going to control the identification of a Ukrainian “ace” in the first instance; it was always going to be almost impossible to confirm or deny such a claim by Ukraine’s military; Ukrainian journalists would likely be first to report such a claim being made by the Ukrainian military; and the Ukrainian military was going to use whatever name for its ace best served the purposes of the Ukrainian military, regardless of from where that name had originated.

Marina Ovsyannikova, above, a 43-year-old editor from Russia’s state-run propagandist Channel One TV network, crashed the set of Russia’s top evening newscast, brandishing an anti-war poster.

Politico Magazine, The Mysterious Case of Marina O., Zoya Sheftalovich, May 1, 2022. Her anti-war protest on live Russian TV was seen by millions. But is she a Kremlin stooge? 

In a non-descript room in a secret police station deep within a sprawling Moscow exhibition center, a Russian police officer offered Marina Ovsyannikova a cup of tea.

“For some reason, I wasn’t afraid,” Ovsyannikova told me over the phone a few days ago. “In that moment I wasn’t afraid. Now — I would think twice.”

By that point, Ovsyannikova, a 43-year-old editor from Russia’s state-run propagandist Channel One TV network had already answered the same questions for hours; she was tired, hungry and thirsty. The previous night, on March 14 at 9:30 p.m., she had crashed the set of Russia’s top evening newscast Vremya wearing a necklace in the colors of the Ukrainian and Russian flags and brandishing an anti-war poster. “Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They are lying to you here,” she had written in Russian. “No war” and “Russians against war,” she’d scrawled in English. “Stop the war, no to war, stop the war, no to war,” she shouted.

For a few moments, Ovsyannikova’s protest was beamed into homes around Moscow and central Russia. Then, the camera cut away. Ovsyannikova was detained, taken to a large police station within the state television studio complex known as Ostankino, before being moved half a mile to the secret police department within Moscow’s Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy, a large park with exhibition halls known by its acronym VDNKh, where she was held for the next 14 hours.

It was after what seemed like endless questioning, in the wee hours of the morning, that her interrogator said: “Let’s drink a cup of tea. Let’s eat some blini. Everyone’s hungry,” Ovsyannikova recounted.

As any foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin would have warned Ovsyannikova, were they still alive to do so: When a Russian security officer offers you an Earl Grey and a snack, don’t say yes. But Ovsyannikova was new to the dissident game and unprepared for what lay ahead of her.

She drank the tea.

 

Washington Post, Opinion: The real problem with Twitter under Musk may be privacy, Jacob Silverman (staff writer at the New Republic and the author of "Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection"), May 1, 2022 (print ed.). Twitter already has serious issues around the globe. Musk (shown above) is unlikely to fix them.

Washington Post, Opinion: Three steps for Elon Musk if he’s serious about free speech at Twitter, Margaret Sullivan, May 1, 2022. But first, a primer for a somewhat confused billionaire on what the First Amendment actually entails.

Washington Post, As gala returns, Biden jokes about return to near-normal, Paul Farhi, April 30, 2022. After a two-year pandemic delay, the dinner returned with a comedy routine from Trevor Noah and celebrity cameos by Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson.

Washington’s media and political elite partied like it was 2019 on Saturday at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner, the traditionally glitzy spring gala that staggered back to life after a pandemic-induced two-year hiatus.

Despite the continuing specter of the coronavirus, the event once again had all its usual trappings and excesses: a tuxedoed-and-begowned throng of insiders, a smattering of celebrities, an appearance by the president and a big-name comedian to make fun of them and it.

 

April

April 30

New York Times, How Twitter’s Board Went From Fighting Elon Musk to Accepting Him,  April 30, 2022. It’s highly unusual to move from a “poison pill” to a $44 billion deal in under two weeks. But Twitter’s board ran out of options.

Twitter’s board had reached the end of the road.

It was April 24. Ten days earlier, Elon Musk, right, the world’s richest man, had made an unsolicited bid to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. Alarmed by the out-of-the-blue proposal and uncertain if the offer was for real, the social media company had adopted a “poison pill,” a defensive maneuver to stop Mr. Musk from accumulating more of its shares.

But by that Sunday, Twitter was running out of choices. Mr. Musk had lined up financing for his offer and was needling the company with his tweets. And after hours of discussions and reviewing Twitter’s plans and finances, the questions the 11 board members were wrestling with — could the company be worth more than $54.20 a share? would any other bidder emerge? — were all leading to one dissatisfying answer: No.

Less than 24 hours later, the blockbuster $44 billion deal was announced.

“What I’ll tell you is that based on the analysis and the perception of risk, certainty and value, the board unanimously decided the offer from Elon represented the best value for our shareholders,” Bret Taylor, Twitter’s chairman, told the company’s more than 7,000 employees on Monday in a call that The New York Times listened to.

A central mystery of Mr. Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is how the company’s board went from installing a poison pill to agreeing to sell to him in just 11 days. In most megadeals, the adoption of a poison pill leads to a protracted fight. The tactic is a clear signal that a company intends to battle. Negotiations then drag out. Sometimes buyers walk away.

New York Times, Twitter Isn’t for Quitters, Jeremy W. Peters, April 30, 2022. One thing that unites conservatives and liberals? No matter how loudly they denounce the social media platform, they don’t actually leave it.

It was the moment conservative Twitter tried to cancel itself.

Major social media networks were moving aggressively to crack down on serial spreaders of false and potentially inciting information, as myths about Covid and voter fraud swirled around the 2020 election. Right-wing commentators and activists vowed en masse to delete their accounts.

They included political figures like the former White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and popular media personalities like Dan Bongino, right, who made a chest-thumping, expletive-flecked rant urging fans to follow him to the alt-social media universe of platforms — they now include Parler, Rumble, Gettr, Gab and the Trump-branded Truth Social — where he said they would be free from the “tech tyrants” of Twitter, Google and Facebook.

It didn’t take.

New York Times, How ‘Under the Banner of Heaven’ Took On Murder and the Mormon Church, Austin Considine, April 30, 2022 (print ed.). A new FX mini-series adapts the investigative book by Jon Krakauer. He and the creator, Dustin Lance Black, talked about their efforts to get at the truth.

Dustin Lance Black still gets emotional when he talks about the time he left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, around three decades ago. It was hard, he said, because he loved the church. But his Mormon father had run off to marry his own first cousin, leaving behind a wife and three children. And when his stepfather became physically violent, local church leaders circled the wagons and told his mother, who was paralyzed from polio, to leave the police out of it.

So he had questions. And eventually, doubts.

He also still recalls when he first read Under the Banner of Heaven (2003), a book of investigative journalism by Jon Krakauer that is now the basis of an FX mini-series on Hulu, which Black created. Black had come out as gay by then and was trying to make it as a young screenwriter. “Banner” shined a clarifying light into corners of church practice and history that had always been hidden to him.

“It felt so true to me and then had all of these layers that I hadn’t yet examined about my childhood faith — my family’s faith still — and how I had grown up in it,” Black, 47, said in a three-way video call earlier this month. “It was formative for me.”

Krakauer, who was also on the call, had just seen the first several episodes of Black’s series, which debuts on Thursday. His knowledge of Black’s script was minimal; he had no official role in the series. He could tell, he said, that the show’s depictions of how church leaders encouraged women to stay in abusive relationships was rooted in experience.

April 28

 

Shown above is a collage of photos portraying the career and memoir of Abraham Bolden, recruited by President John F. Kennedy from the Illinois State Police force to become the first African-American on a Secret Service presidential protection detail. Bolden's memoir, "The Echo from Dealey Plaza," documents how he was framed and convicted on corruption charges in a trial with many highly dubious procedures after he sought to describe publicly security flaws in JFK's Secret Service protections. The Justice Integrity Project, among other researchers, has for years described Bolden as victim of a frame-up who deserves a presidential pardon, wihch President Biden announced on April 26, 2022.

JFK Facts, Commentary: Biden pardons Abraham Bolden, the only Secret Service agent who sought JFK accountability, Jefferson Morley, right, April 27, 2022. The good news is that President Biden has pardoned Abraham Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service agent, who was falsely convicted on bribery charges in the 1960s.

The bad news is that initial reports emphasize Bolden was persecuted for the color of his skin, which is true enough but not the whole story.

Bolden was silenced because he raised questions about the causes of JFK’s assassination. For doing his job, he was targeted, defamed, and railroaded.

After Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, Bolden said lax procedures and heavy drinking in JFK’s detail may have contributed to the breakdown of security in Dallas. He also called attention to a possible plot against Kennedy in Chicago in early November 1963.

From British historian John Simkin:

Bolden claimed that in October, 1963, the Chicago Secret Service office received a teletype from the Federal Bureau of Investigation warning that an attempt would be made to kill President John F. Kennedy by a four-man Cuban hit squad when he visited the city on 2nd November. Armed with high-powered rifles, the men from “a dissident Cuban group”. According to investigative journalist Edwin Black, the Secret Service arrested two suspects, however, they were eventually released.

Abraham Bolden later discovered that this information was being kept from the Warren Commission. When he complained about this he was warned “to keep his mouth shut”. Bolden decided to travel to Washington where he telephoned Warren Commission Counsel J. Lee Rankin.

That’s when Bolden was arrested and charged with discussing a bribe with two known counterfeiters. He was convicted on the testimony of a witness who later recanted and spent close to four years in prison.

In fact, the Secret Service and J. Edgar Hoover, the racist FBI director, wanted to blame JFK’s death entirely on Lee Harvey Oswald–the accused assassin who was conveniently dead–and absolve their agents of any responsibility for Kennedy’s violent death. In the end, only one Secret Service agent lost his job after Kennedy’s murder, the only one who served the martyred president faithfully: Abe Bolden.

Bolden chronicled his journey from a ‘first’ to a ‘disgraced’ Secret Service agent in his 2008 memoir ‘The Echo from Dealey Plaza.’”

Nonetheless, ABC News is reporting the story without reference to JFK’s assassination.

Following his conviction in a second trial, key witnesses admitted lying at the prosecutor’s request. Bolden, of Chicago, was denied a retrial and served several years in federal prison. Bolden has maintained his innocence and wrote a book in which he argued he was targeted for speaking out against racist and unprofessional behavior in the Secret Service.

• Associated Press via ABC News, Biden pardons former Secret Service agent and 2 others

The bad faith of the Secret Service was exposed in 1995 when the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) was seeking documents about the events of 1963. The Secret Service informed the ARRB that it had just destroyed “presidential protection survey reports for some of President Kennedy’s trips in the fall of 1963.” Those records might have given credence to Bolden’s allegations. Instead they were shredded.

Major U.S. news organizations often tip-toe around inconvenient facts of the JFK story that call into question the official theory of a “lone gunman.” The full story of Bolden’s overdue pardon is one such story.

 

Washington Post, How a former NBA player and activist became a far-right media darling, David Gardner, April 28, 2022. On the last Saturday in March, Royce White stepped into a Capitol Hill townhouse and descended the steps into a basement studio. He shook hands with his host and settled into his chair in front of a microphone.

The host asked White to share some of his life story. For a few minutes, it was standard fare for an interview with a former pro athlete. White was raised by a single mother in Minneapolis, he said, before becoming a standout college basketball player and a first-round NBA draft pick. The only unusual thing about the interview at first was the setting. The show was called “War Room: Pandemic,” and its host was Stephen K. Bannon.

Until recently, White was known for his battle with the NBA over mental health policy. In 2013, he asked for accommodations for his generalized anxiety disorder, and the dispute essentially ended his career after he appeared in only a handful of games. Then, after the murder of George Floyd in his hometown of Minneapolis, White led several large-scale protests against police brutality. He was hailed as an emerging civil rights activist.

Since that summer, White, 31, has publicly rebranded himself as a far-right populist. He has embraced conspiracy theories ranging from the origins of the coronavirus to the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and satanic influences in the federal government. He has appeared on Bannon’s programs at least 25 times, and he considers the former Trump strategist — who is under indictment for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6 Commission — a “friend, a mentor and an American hero,” he said. White has, in turn, been warmly embraced by figures on the far right, from Tim Pool to Alex Jones, who appear to find his backstory useful to their causes. “Here you got a Black guy, a basketball player, in Minneapolis, that actually talks about real issues,” Bannon said. “That, I think can resonate.”

In February, White announced that he would run as a Republican in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, a Democratic stronghold held by Rep. Ilhan Omar since 2019. In his opening campaign video, he said his “problem” with Omar was “not that she’s not an American or that she’s not from Minnesota” but that “she’s in on it; she’s a globalist.” A campaign spokesman for Omar, who became a naturalized American citizen in 2000 at 17, declined to comment.

The odds against White unseating Omar are overwhelming: The district hasn’t elected a Republican since 1960. And the long-shot nature of the campaign has left some political observers in the state wondering whether his real aim is to drum up attention for a future as a political commentator. But the radical shift in White’s rhetoric has left some former teammates, coaches, friends and family stumped — and saddened.

 

National Press Club Journalism Institute, How it became normal for public officials to attack journalists (Washington Post), Edited by National Press Club Journalism Institute staff: Beth Francesco, Holly Butcher Grant, and Julie Moos, April 28, 2022.

■ Media coalition condemns LA County sheriff’s threat to investigate LA Times reporter (RCFP) / California's journalists stand with Alene Tchekmedyian (Media Guild of the West)

■ What Biden will (and won’t) say at the WHCA dinner (POLITICO) / No tests, vaccines required for Hilton WHCA dinner staff (Axios) / ‘Biden felt it was important to attend the dinner to showcase his support for the free press, adding that it stands "in stark contrast to his predecessor, who not only questioned the legitimacy of the press on a nearly daily basis but also never attended the dinner."’ (CNN) / ‘How does this dinner play in Peoria? The press sipping champagne and trading jokes with politicians feels perfectly harmless to Washington’s establishment, but it looks uncomfortably cozy outside the Beltway.’ (Washington Post)

■ ‘An audible gasp’: Quartz, once a high-flying startup, has sold to G/O Media (Nieman Lab) / Quartz will have its fourth owner in 10 years with its sale to G/O media (Poynter) / Quartz tried literally everything in just 10 years (New York) / Read the memo to Quartz staff from CEO and editor-in-chief Zach Seward (Quartz) / Read the memo to G/O staff from CEO Jim Spanfeller (via Ben Mullin)

■ Why this family foundation gives out $100,000 of unrestricted money to select freelance journalists (Poynter)

■ Is she a bully or did she just work for the New York Post? (The Cut) / A top New York Post editor settles her discrimination lawsuit against the tabloid (New York Times)

■ 'She Said': Movie about New York Times’ reporters' Harvey Weinstein exposé revealed at CinemaCon (Deadline)

■ Former ‘GMA’ and ‘World News’ anchor Charlie Gibson returning to ABC News … as a podcast host (Hollywood Reporter)

■ Was Martha Mitchell 'gaslit'? Or 'gaslighted'? Maybe neither (The Washington Post)

Press freedom

■ Indigenous journalists make way for sunshine (Center for Public Integrity)

■ ACLU says Amber Heard’s domestic violence Washington Post op-ed aimed to capitalize on ‘Aquaman’ press (Variety) / How the domestic violence column in the Washington Post that landed Johnny Depp and Amber heard in court was written (Daily Beast)

■ 'Rust' shooting victim's family outraged over set video release, demands police retract it (The Wrap)

April 26

Associated Press via ABC News, Biden pardons former Secret Service agent and 2 others, Aamer Madhani, April 26, 2022. President Joe Biden is announcing he has granted the first three pardons of his term.President Joe Biden has granted the first three pardons of his term, providing clemency to a Kennedy-era Secret Service agent convicted of federal bribery charges that he tried to sell a copy of an agency file and to two people who were convicted on drug-related charges but went on to become pillars in their communities.

The Democratic president also commuted the sentences of 75 others for nonviolent, drug-related convictions. The White House announced the clemencies Tuesday as it launched a series of job training and reentry programs for those in prison or recently released.

Many of those who received commutations have been serving their sentences on home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Several were serving lengthy sentences and would have received lesser terms had they been convicted today for the same offenses as a result of the 2018 bipartisan sentencing reform ushered into law by the Trump administration.

“America is a nation of laws and second chances, redemption, and rehabilitation,” Biden said in a statement announcing the clemencies. “Elected officials on both sides of the aisle, faith leaders, civil rights advocates, and law enforcement leaders agree that our criminal justice system can and should reflect these core values that enable safer and stronger communities.”

Those granted pardons are:

— Abraham Bolden Sr., 86, the first Black Secret Service agent to serve on a presidential detail. In 1964, Bolden, who served on President John F. Kennedy's detail, faced federal bribery charges that he attempted to sell a copy of a Secret Service file. His first trial ended in a hung jury.

Following his conviction in a second trial, key witnesses admitted lying at the prosecutor's request. Bolden, of Chicago, was denied a retrial and served several years in federal prison. Bolden has maintained his innocence and wrote a book in which he argued he was targeted for speaking out against racist and unprofessional behavior in the Secret Service.

— Betty Jo Bogans, 51, was convicted in 1998 of possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine in Texas after attempting to transport drugs for her boyfriend and his accomplice. Bogans, a single mother with no prior record, received a seven-year sentence. In the years since her release from prison, Bogans has held consistent employment, even while undergoing cancer treatment, and has raised a son.

— Dexter Jackson , 52, of Athens, Georgia, was convicted in 2002 for using his pool hall to facilitate the trafficking of marijuana. Jackson pleaded guilty and acknowledged he allowed his business to be used by marijuana dealers.

After Jackson was released from prison, he converted his business into a cellphone repair service that employs local high school students through a program that provides young adults with work experience. Jackson has built and renovated homes in his community, which has a shortage of affordable housing.

Civil rights and criminal justice reform groups have pushed the White House to commute sentences and work harder to reduce disparities in the criminal justice system. Biden’s grants of clemency also come as the administration has faced congressional scrutiny over misconduct and the treatment of inmates in the beleaguered federal Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for inmates serving sentences of home confinement.

Biden, as head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, helped shepherd through the 1994 crime bill that many criminal justice experts say contributed to harsh sentences and mass incarceration of Black people.

During his 2020 White House run, Biden vowed to reduce the number of people incarcerated in the U.S. and called for nonviolent drug offenders to be diverted to drug courts and treatment.

He also has pushed for better training for law enforcement and called for criminal justice system changes to address disparities that have led to minorities and the poor making up a disproportionate share of the nation's incarcerated population.

Biden's predecessor, Donald Trump, granted 143 pardons and clemency to 237 during his four years in office.

Trump sought the advice of prison reform advocate Alice Johnson, a Black woman whose life sentence for a nonviolent drug offense he commuted in 2018. He was also lobbied by celebrity Kim Kardashian as well as advisers inside the White House, including daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as he weighed applications for clemency.

The Republican used his pardon authority to help several political friends and allies, including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Republican operative Roger Stone and Charles Kushner, the father-in-law of Ivanka Trump.

Among Trump's final acts as president was pardoning his former chief strategist Steve Bannon and Al Pirro, the husband of Fox News host and Trump ally Jeanine Pirro.

Prosecutors alleged that Bannon, who had yet to stand trial when he was pardoned, had duped thousands of donors who believed their money would be used to fulfill Trump’s chief campaign promise to build a wall along the southern border. Instead, Bannon allegedly diverted more than $1 million, paying a salary to one campaign official and personal expenses for himself. Pirro was convicted in 2000 on tax charges.

With the slate of pardons and commutations announced Tuesday, Biden has issued more grants of clemency than any of the previous five presidents at this point in their terms, according to the White House.

In addition to the grants of clemency, Biden announced several new initiatives that are meant to help formerly incarcerated people gain employment — an issue that his administration is driving home as key to lowering crime rates and preventing recidivism.

The Labor Department is directing $140 million toward programs that offer job training, pre-apprenticeship programs, digital literacy training and pre-release and post-release career counseling and more for youth and incarcerated adults.

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year includes a trio of grant programs that the administration says promote hiring of formerly incarcerated individuals. And the Labor and Justice Departments announced on Tuesday a collaborative plan to provide $145 million over the next year on job skills training as well as individualized employment and reentry plans for people serving time in the Bureau of Prisons.

Biden said the new initiatives are vital to helping the more than 600,000 people released from prison each year get on stable ground.

"Helping those who served their time return to their families and become contributing members of their communities is one of the most effective ways to reduce recidivism and decrease crime," Biden said.

 

Washington Post, ‘Yes sir’: New texts show Hannity promising on-air Trump campaign push, Jeremy Barr, April 26, 2022. Fox News host Sean Hannity promised Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he would push an Election Day get-out-the-vote message to his radio show listeners, according to communications within a cache of more than 2,000 text messages obtained by CNN.

“NC gonna be ok?” Hannity wrote in one text to Meadows on Nov. 3, 2020, according to the CNN report published on Monday — an apparent reference to Trump’s electoral prospects in the battleground state of North Carolina.

Meadows then asked for Hannity’s help with messaging, and offered him a slogan to convey to the host’s millions of radio show listeners. “Stress every vote matters,” Meadows wrote back. “Get out and vote. On radio.”

Hannity responded in the affirmative, writing back, “Yes sir. On it,” before adding, “any place in particular we need a push.”

When Meadows suggested Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, Hannity replied, “Got it. Everywhere.” (Trump won North Carolina but lost the other three states to President Biden.)

In past years, Fox News has attempted to set some boundaries for its on-air personalities: Even opinion hosts, who could be open about their ideological views, were nonetheless expected to stop short of publicly wading into political contests.

While Hannity has long been an outspoken supporter of Trump during his presidential campaigns and presidency, the messages — which had been turned over by Meadows to the House select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 — suggest that Hannity saw himself as part of the broader pro-Trump campaign apparatus on Election Day, offering up his radio show audience to help boost Trump’s chances. (CNN wrote that Hannity was one of Meadows’ most frequent pen pals.)

Washington Post, In a city full of adjunct faculty members, many struggle to get by, Lauren Lumpkin, April 26, 2022. Part-time instructors across the region cobble together many jobs to make a living wage. Unions that represent them are gaining strength, and protests are becoming more frequent.

 

From left, Sundar Pichai of Google, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter testified remotely in March 2021 to the U.S. Congress (Photos via House Energy and Commerce Committee).

New York Times, Analysis: Buying Twitter, Elon Musk Will Face the Reality of His Free-Speech Talk, Shira Ovide, April 26, 2022. Tech’s big shots have learned again and again that free speech isn’t so simple. Our columnist considers what might happen when Mr. Musk owns Twitter.

A decade ago, Twitter executives, including the chief executive, Dick Costolo, declared that the social media site was the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” The stance meant Twitter would defend people’s ability to post whatever they wished and be heard by the world.

Since then, Twitter has been dragged into morasses over disinformation peddlers, governments’ abuse of social media to incite ethnic violence and threats by elected officials to imprison employees over tweets they didn’t like. Like Facebook, YouTube and other internet companies, Twitter was forced to morph from hard-liner on free expression to speech nanny.

Today, Twitter has pages upon pages of rules prohibiting content such as material that promotes child sexual exploitation, coordinated government propaganda, offers of counterfeit goods and tweets “wishing for someone to fall victim to a serious accident.”

The past 10 years have seen repeated confrontations between the high-minded principles of Silicon Valley’s founding generation of social media companies and the messy reality of a world in which “free speech” means different things to different people. And now Elon Musk, who on Monday struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, wades directly into that fraught history.

Successive generations of Twitter’s leaders since its founding in 2006 have learned what Mark Zuckerberg and most other internet executives have also discovered: Declaring that “the tweets must flow,” as the Twitter co-founder Biz Stone wrote in 2011, or “I believe in giving people a voice,” as Mr. Zuckerberg said in a 2019 speech, is easy to say but hard to live up to.

Soon, Mr. Musk will be the one confronting the gap between an idealized view of free speech and the zillion tough decisions that must be made to let everyone have a say.

Mr. Musk is a relative dilettante on the topic and hasn’t yet tackled the difficult trade-offs in which giving one person a voice may silence the expression of others, and in which an almost-anything-goes space for expression might be overrun with spam, nudity, propaganda from autocrats, the bullying of children and violent incitements.

If Twitter wants to pull back from moderating speech on its site, will people be less willing to hang out where they might be harassed by those who disagree with them and swamped by pitches for cryptocurrency, fake Gucci handbags or pornography?

The 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote that same year gave Silicon Valley executives, U.S. elected officials and the public a peek into what can go wrong when social media companies opt not to wade too deeply into what people say on their sites. Russian propagandists amplified the views of deeply divided Americans and Britons, further polarizing the electorate.

April 25

New York Times, Inside the Implosion of CNN+, John Koblin, Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin, April 25, 2022 (print ed.). Seen as the future of CNN, the streaming channel was suddenly killed. Its next owner, Discovery, had concerns but was constrained in guiding a competitor.

David Zaslav had been chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery for all of a few hours when he learned he had a problem.

On April 11, the day his newly merged company began trading on Nasdaq, Mr. Zaslav greeted New York employees with pasta and ice cream bars, delivering an impromptu rallying cry to his new charges. He was on his way to Washington, next stop on the coronation tour, when a call came in.

His team had just gotten its first look at data from CNN+, the much-promoted subscription streaming service started two weeks before, and the news was grim. Fewer than 10,000 viewers were watching at any given time, despite a multimillion dollar ad campaign and big hires like Chris Wallace. They were recommending a cold-eyed review.

Three days later, shortly after Mr. Zaslav appeared with Oprah Winfrey for a rah-rah company town hall, he gathered his deputies inside a low-slung stucco building in Burbank, Calif., on the Warner Bros. studio lot, and said he agreed with their conclusion: shut it down.

New York Times, Twitter Nears a Deal to Sell Itself to Elon Musk, Lauren Hirsch, Mike Isaac and Kate Conger, Updated April 25, 2022. The company’s board met with Mr. Musk to discuss his offer to take the social network private. An agreement could come as soon as Monday.

Twitter is nearing a deal to sell itself to Elon Musk, right, two people with knowledge of the situation said, a move that would unite the world’s richest man with the influential social networking service. An agreement could be announced as soon as Monday, the people said.

Twitter’s board was negotiating with Mr. Musk into the early hours of Monday over his unsolicited bid to buy the company, after he began lining up $46.5 billion in financing for the offer last week, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss confidential information. The two sides were discussing details including a timeline to close any potential deal and any fees that would be paid if an agreement were signed and then fell apart, they said.

The discussions followed a Twitter board meeting on Sunday morning to discuss Mr. Musk’s offer, the people said. Obtaining commitments for the financing was a turning point for how the board viewed Mr. Musk’s bid of $54.20 a share, enabling the company’s 11 board members to seriously consider his offer, the people said.

Twitter’s stock rose more than 5 percent in premarket trading, to about $51.50 a share.

An agreement is not yet final and may still fall apart, but what had initially seemed to be a highly improbable deal appeared to be nearing an endgame. The situation involving Twitter and Mr. Musk remains fluid and fast-moving, the people with knowledge of the situation said.

April 23

AlterNet via RawStory, Alex Jones attorney under fire for dropping pants and using the N-word during comedy routine, Meaghan Ellis, April 23, 2022. Alex Jones attorney under fire for dropping pants and using the N-word during comedy routine

The attorney for right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is at the center of controversy amid the emergence of footage from his recent comedy set. According to HuffPost, Norm Pattis is seen in the comedy set tossing around the N-word with his pants down.

In a standup routine in East Haven, Conn., on March 21, Pattis (a former editorial writer during the 1980s for the Hartford Courant in Connecticut) could be heard saying, “You just can’t say certain words, they’re off-limits. And one of those words is n****r.”

Footage of Pattis' stand-up routine surfaced this week. It featured him rambling and ranting about a number of controversial topics including the Black Lives Matter movement. At one point in the segment, he made racial slurs and homophobic remarks with his pants down to his ankles. Pattis also made outdated remarks about former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick's iconic 2016 silent protest during the national anthem.

As for his N-word portion of the segment, comedian Teddy Ren spoke with HuffPost to share details about what really transpired. Although Pattis initially danced around the offensive word, Ren notes that the entire mood of the segment changed when he actually said it.

“I wanna watch a ballgame and there’s Colin Kaepernick, ‘I’m in church,’” Pattis said of Kaepernick. “I don’t wanna hear about that, I don’t wanna hear about Black Lives Matter. You know, even the commercials are fucking political now.”

He also said, “But anyhow, the N-word, right, can I say the N-word? I guess not, I’m gonna get beat up in a parking lot, but I’m going to try. Ready? Ready?”

“Nnnniii...” Pattis teased.

Ren also explained how the segment shifted at the end. “You see, when he gets to the very end of it, there is no joke,” Ren said of Pattis’ remarks. “He just pauses, and he has a lot of charisma onstage ― never seen him drop charisma ― but in this moment he kind of seemed like he was second-guessing it."

He added, "It was like I watched his body glitch. And then he said it, and it’s not even a joke. You literally didn’t even deliver a joke. It felt like he wanted to say it because he knew I was right there.”

As the video continues to circulate, Black Lives Matter activists are pushing back with deep criticism of the attorney. Ivelisse Correa, an organizer for the local anti-racism organization, Black Lives Matter 860, shared her opinion with HuffPost.

“He can’t blame this one on Ambien,” Correa said in reference to famed comedian Roseanne Barr’s excuse at posting a racist tweet. “I’d like to know why he feels that that was appropriate in any context. This isn’t about comedy, or the spirit of being edgy. As we grow as a society, we learn that things are no longer appropriate: homophobia, sexism, racism. Those things have also fallen out of favor in comedy. So attempting to resurrect that, as someone who claims to be for civil liberties, is disgusting.”

April 22

New York Times, Hackers Claim to Target Russian Institutions in Barrage of Cyberattacks and Leaks, Kate Conger and David E. Sanger, April 22, 2022. Hackers claim to have broken into dozens of Russian institutions over the past two months, including the Kremlin’s internet censor and one of its primary intelligence services, leaking emails and internal documents to the public in an apparent hack-and-leak campaign that is remarkable in its scope.

The hacking operation comes as the Ukrainian government appears to have begun a parallel effort to punish Russia by publishing the names of supposed Russian soldiers who operated in Bucha, the site of a massacre of civilians, and agents of the F.S.B., a major Russian intelligence agency, along with identifying information like dates of birth and passport numbers. It is unclear how the Ukrainian government obtained those names or whether they were part of the hacks.

Much of the data released by the hackers and the Ukrainian government is by its nature impossible to verify. As an intelligence agency, the F.S.B. would never confirm a list of its officers. Even the groups distributing the data have warned that the files swiped from Russian institutions could contain malware, manipulated or faked information, and other tripwires.

Some of the data may also be recycled from previous leaks and presented as new, researchers have said, in an attempt to artificially increase the hackers’ credibility. Or some of it could be manufactured — something that has happened before in the ongoing cyberconflict between Russia and Ukraine, which dates back more than a decade.

New York Times, E.U. Takes Aim at Social Media’s Harms With Landmark New Law, Adam Satariano, April 22, 2022. The Digital Services Act would force Meta, Google and others to combat misinformation and restrict certain online ads. How European officials will wield it remains to be seen.

The European Union was nearing a deal on Friday on landmark legislation that would force Facebook, YouTube and other internet services to combat misinformation, disclose how their services amplify divisive content and stop targeting online ads based on a person’s ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

The law, called the Digital Services Act, is intended to address social media’s societal harms by requiring companies to more aggressively police their platforms for illicit content or risk billions of dollars in fines. Tech companies would be compelled to set up new policies and procedures to remove flagged hate speech, terrorist propaganda and other material defined as illegal by countries within the European Union.

The law aims to end an era of self-regulation in which tech companies set their own policies about what content could stay up or be taken down. It stands out from other regulatory attempts by addressing online speech, an area that is largely off limits in the United States because of First Amendment protections. Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, would face yearly audits for “systemic risks” linked to their businesses, while Amazon would confront new rules to stop the sale of illegal products.

The Digital Services Act is part of a one-two punch by the European Union to address the societal and economic effects of the tech giants. Last month, the 27-nation bloc agreed to a different sweeping law, the Digital Markets Act, to counter what regulators see as anticompetitive behavior by the biggest tech firms, including their grip over app stores, online advertising and internet shopping.

New York Times, Analysis: As Europe Approves New Tech Laws, the U.S. Falls Further Behind, Cecilia Kang, April 22, 2022. Federal privacy bills, security legislation and antitrust laws to address the power of the tech giants have all failed to advance in Congress, despite hand wringing and shows of bipartisan support.

In just the last few years, Europe has seen a landmark law for online privacy take effect, approved sweeping regulations to curb the dominance of the tech giants and on Friday was nearing a deal on new legislation to protect its citizens from harmful online content.

For those keeping score, that’s Europe: three. United States: zero.

The United States may be the birthplace of the iPhone and the most widely used search engine and social network, and it could also bring the world into the so-called metaverse. But global leadership on tech regulations is taking place more than 3,000 miles from Washington, by European leaders representing 27 nations with 24 languages, who have nonetheless been able to agree on basic online protections for their 450 million or so citizens.

In the United States, Congress has not passed a single piece of comprehensive regulation to protect internet consumers and to rein in the power of its technology giants.

It’s not for lack of trying. Over 25 years, dozens of federal privacy bills have been proposed and then ultimately dropped without bipartisan support. With every major hack of a bank or retailer, lawmakers have introduced data breach and security bills, all of which have withered on the vine. A flurry of speech bills have sunk into the quicksand of partisan disagreements over freedoms of expression. And antitrust bills to curtail the power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, have sat in limbo amid fierce lobbying opposition.

April 21

 

"Stop the Steal" organizer Ali Alexander, center, and his co-organizer, Infowars radio host, Alex Jones, to his right.

New York Times, Alex Jones Reaches Out to Justice Dept. About Jan. 6 Interview, Alan Feuer, Adam Goldman and Katie Benner, April 21, 2022 (print ed.). The effort by the Trump ally to get an immunity deal is the latest sign of progress in the investigation, which recently brought on a well-regarded prosecutor. The federal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election appears to be gaining traction, with the Justice Department having brought in a well-regarded new prosecutor to help run the inquiry and a high-profile witness seeking a deal to provide information.

Alex Jones, the host of the conspiracy-driven media outlet Infowars and a key player in the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” movement, is in discussions with the Justice Department about an agreement to detail his role in the rally near the White House last Jan. 6 that preceded the attack on the Capitol.

Through his lawyer, Mr. Jones said he has given the government a formal letter conveying “his desire to speak to federal prosecutors about Jan. 6.”

The lawyer, Norm Pattis, maintained that Mr. Jones had not engaged in any “criminal wrongdoing” that day when — chanting slogans about 1776 — he helped lead a crowd of Trump supporters in a march to the Capitol as violence was erupting.
As a condition of being interviewed by federal investigators, Mr. Jones, who is known for his rants about the “Deep State” and its supposed control over national affairs, has requested immunity from prosecution.

“He distrusts the government,” Mr. Pattis said.

While convincing federal prosecutors to grant him immunity could be an uphill climb for Mr. Jones, his discussions with the Justice Department suggest that the investigation into the postelection period could be gathering momentum.

Two weeks ago, another prominent Stop the Steal organizer, Ali Alexander, a close associate of Mr. Jones, revealed that he had received a subpoena from a federal grand jury that is seeking information on a broad swath of people — rally planners, members of Congress and others close to former President Donald J. Trump — connected to political events that took place in the run-up to Jan. 6. Mr. Alexander, who marched with Mr. Jones to the Capitol that day, has said that he intends to comply with the subpoena.

Several months ago, the department quietly took another significant step, adding Thomas Windom, a career federal prosecutor from Maryland, to help in the expanded Jan. 6 investigation, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Politico, Justice Department, Sandy Hook families question Infowars bankruptcy, Josh Gerstein, April 21, 2022. A federal judge is asked to postpone Friday's hearing on an effort by the right-wing provocateur Alex Jones to ward off creditors.

The Justice Department and attorneys for families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting are questioning the legitimacy of attempts by right-wing talk show host Alex Jones to put several businesses in his media empire into bankruptcy just as a trial was set to open in Texas, where he faced the possibility of being ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages.

Both the families and a Justice Department office asked a federal bankruptcy judge in Houston to put off an initial, emergency hearing scheduled for Friday morning to address Chapter 11 filings earlier this week by three entities linked to Jones’ Infowars brand: InfoW, IW Health and Prison Planet TV.

The requests to delay the hearing said that the bankruptcy filings seemed designed to halt long-standing defamation litigation in Texas and Connecticut over Jones’ bizarre claims that the 20 children and six adults killed in the shocking 2012 elementary school shooting had somehow staged their own deaths and that their families were “crisis actors.”

The Justice Department’s Office of the U.S. Trustee told Judge Christopher Lopez the structure of Jones’ filing “may demonstrate these cases are an abuse of the bankruptcy system.” The government submission questioned why Jones had not filed for personal bankruptcy and why another business he controls, Free Speech Systems, was not included in the filings earlier this week.

Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families made similar arguments that Jones is making an “illegitimate” attempt to dodge or delay the financial consequences of his false claims about the 2012 attack.

Washington Post, Investigation: Meet the woman behind Libs of TikTok, secretly fueling the right’s outrage machine, machine, Taylor Lorenz, April 21, 2022 (print ed.). A popular Twitter account has morphed into a social media phenomenon, spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and shaping public discourse.

In just one year, the Twitter account has helped steer the outrage machine at the center of right-wing messaging and legislation.

On March 8, a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok posted a video of a woman teaching sex education to children in Kentucky, calling the woman in the video a “predator.” The next evening, the same clip was featured on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, prompting the host to ask, “When did our public schools, any schools, become what are essentially grooming centers for gender identity radicals?”

Libs of TikTok reposts a steady stream of TikTok videos and social media posts, primarily from LGBTQ+ people, often including incendiary framing designed to generate outrage. Videos shared from the account quickly find their way to the most influential names in right-wing media. The account has emerged as a powerful force on the Internet, shaping right-wing media, impacting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and influencing millions by posting viral videos aimed at inciting outrage among the right.

The anonymous account’s impact is deep and far-reaching. Its content is amplified by high-profile media figures, politicians and right-wing influencers. Its tweets reach millions, with influence spreading far beyond its more than 648,000 Twitter followers. Libs of TikTok has become an agenda-setter in right-wing online discourse, and the content it surfaces shows a direct correlation with the recent push in legislation and rhetoric directly targeting the LGBTQ+ community.

“Libs of TikTok is basically acting as a wire service for the broader right-wing media ecosystem,” said Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director for Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group. “It’s been shaping public policy in a real way, and affecting teachers’ ability to feel safe in their classrooms.”

The account has been promoted by podcast host Joe Rogan, right, and it’s been featured in the New York Post, the Federalist, the Post Millennial and a slew of other right-wing news sites. Meghan McCain has retweeted it. The online influencer Glenn Greenwald has amplified it to his 1.8 million Twitter followers while calling himself the account’s “Godfather.”

Last Thursday, the woman behind the account appeared anonymously on Tucker Carlson’s show to complain about being temporarily suspended for violating Twitter’s community guidelines. Fox News often creates news packages around the content that Libs of TikTok has surfaced.

“The role I’ve seen this account playing is finding new characters for right-wing propaganda,” said Gillian Branstetter, a media strategist for the ACLU. “It’s relying on the endless stream of content from TikTok and the Internet to cast any individual trans person as a new villain in their story.”

Throughout its increasingly popular posts and despite numerous media appearances, the account has remained anonymous. But the identity of the operator of Libs of TikTok is traceable through a complex online history and reveals someone who has been plugged into right-wing discourse for two years and is now helping to drive it.
An account in search of a voice — and a big break from Joe Rogan

Chaya Raichik had been working as a real estate salesperson in Brooklyn when, in early November 2020, she created the account that would eventually become Libs of TikTok.

Under her first handle @shaya69830552, she minimized covid, cast doubt on the election results and promoted a dubious story about a child sex trafficking ring. On Nov. 23, 2020, Raichik changed handles, this time going by @shaya_ray and identifying herself publicly as a real estate investor in Brooklyn. She began doubling down on election fraud conspiracies using QAnon-related language. Early that December, she joked about launching a clothing line titled “voter fraud is real.”

 

Washington Post, Disney to lose tax status in Fla. as lawmakers side with governor in rift over teaching of LGBTQ issues, Lori Rozsa, April 21, 2022. Florida’s Republican-led state legislature on Thursday passed a bill sought by Gov. Ron DeSantis to cancel Walt Disney World’s special tax district in Florida.

The speedy approval of the bill — it was filed three days ago, during a special session that was called for a different reason — was decried by state Democrats. Sen. Tina Polsky (D) called it “an enormous decision based on spite and revenge governance.”

The House did not debate the bill after Democrats held a sit-in to protest a map that DeSantis had ordered which redraws Florida’s congressional districts and cuts the number of minority access districts in half. House speaker Chris Sprowls (R) said that if representatives couldn’t be “civil,” he would cancel the debate and go straight to the vote, which he did.

DeSantis (R) has been feuding with the Walt Disney Company for weeks, ever since CEO Bob Chapek issued a statement criticizing a parental rights law that DeSantis championed and paused donations to Florida politicians. That law prohibits discussions about gender-related issues in public school classes up to third grade, and potentially through high school.

The Disney law will dissolve the entertainment giant’s Reedy Creek Improvement District, which was created in 1967 after Walt Disney bought 40 square miles of land in Central Florida to build the Magic Kingdom. Disney lobbyists said the project was too massive for local governments to handle, so legislators gave Disney the authority to run the development as a quasi-governmental agency.

The law doesn’t take effect until June 2023, giving local governments near Disney 14 months to decide how to manage and pay for the huge property’s public services, such as road maintenance and sewage treatment.

Washington Post, GOP’s cozy ties with Big Business unravel as DeSantis goes after Disney, Todd C. Frankel, April 21, 2022. Many Republican leaders are threatening to punish companies, alleging that these firms should be more supportive of a conservative agenda. Six years ago, then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence scrambled to change a “religious freedom” bill he had just signed into law because corporate America objected.

Apple and Salesforce opposed the bill, which seemed to allow businesses to discriminate against gay men and lesbians. Eli Lilly, a big employer in the state, called it “bad for Indiana and for business.” Indiana’s Chamber of Commerce said the law was “entirely unnecessary.”

Legislators listened. The Republican-controlled statehouse quickly revised the bill to clarify that it could not be used to deny service based on sexual orientation. Pence signed it. And a fight between two longtime allies — companies and Republicans — was over.

But Pence’s capitulation can feel like a postcard from a distant era as growing numbers of state and federal Republican leaders today seem eager to clash with the country’s biggest corporations over bills on similar hot-button issues.

DeSantis proposes dissolving special tax status for Disney World

Last year, the GOP attacked entities such as Delta Air Lines and Major League Baseball for standing against Georgia’s restrictive voting law. Citigroup was threatened for taking action seen as opposing Texas’s recent abortion law. And Disney’s complaints about Florida’s new law limiting classroom discussion of sexual identity has led to Republicans targeting the Magic Kingdom’s perks. On Thursday, the GOP-controlled Florida legislature passed a bill that would eliminate Disney’s special district status, sending it to the governor. The implications of this major change remain unclear.

Despite the onslaught, companies are not backing down — goaded by heightened expectations from customers and employees. Citigroup did not rescind its offer to help its Texas workers obtain out-of-state abortion services after the new restrictive law there, despite the threat from a state GOP representative to block the financial company from underwriting municipal bonds.

The result is fresh cracks in the once-sturdy relationship between companies and a business-friendly GOP.

This strange new state of play is starkest in the clash between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican with presidential ambitions, and the Walt Disney Co., a theme park and entertainment giant with 80,000 workers in the Sunshine State alone. There is little normal about Florida’s governor going after the state’s most powerful company.

The formally titled Parental Rights in Education bill, signed by DeSantis earlier this month, was instantly polarizing.

DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw labeled it the “Anti-Grooming Bill.”

Disney was hit for not doing enough to stop the legislation and protect its LGBTQ workers. Disney executives apologized. They promised to halt contributions to Florida politicians while they reexamined priorities. Then the company said the bill “should never have passed and should never have been signed into law” and promised to push for its repeal.

Even after signing the bill, DeSantis kept taking shots at Disney. He said the company had “crossed the line.”

 

Washington Post, CNN’s new streaming service, CNN Plus, is already set to shut down, about a month after launch, Jeremy Barr, April 21, 2022. Less than a month after CNN launched with great fanfare a $100 million streaming service that represented its bet on the future of news consumption, new parent company Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to shut it down at the end of April.

CNN Plus offered a dozen new shows from veteran CNN stars and newly hired marquee talents, such as former Fox News anchor Chris Wallace, that could be watched live or on-demand, as well as a substantial library of original documentaries, such as the food-and-travel programs hosted by Stanley Tucci and the late Anthony Bourdain.

Yet the service got off to a slow start, as the cable-news giant found difficulty convincing enough customers to pay the $5.99 monthly cost. On Thursday, new CNN chief executive Chris Licht stunned employees with the announcement it would shutter next week.

“While today’s decision is incredibly difficult, it is the right one for the long-term success of CNN,” Licht wrote in a memo to staff obtained by The Washington Post, adding that it would allow the company to “refocus resources” on CNN’s journalism.

A veteran producer described the announcement’s impact as “just complete shock across the network.” The producer, who was not authorized to comment and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that many CNN employees expected “some sort of reimagining” of the service but not a complete shutdown.

The service seemed to be in jeopardy almost from the beginning, but particularly after Discovery Inc. formally took control of the CNN brand on April 11.

The network has not released any data on the number of people who have subscribed, but early media reports suggested that the number was lower than expected considering the overall cost of the project. Besides Wallace, right, CNN Plus was building new shows around several other talents hired away from prominent news organizations, including Kasie Hunt of MSNBC and Audie Cornish of NPR.

Washington Post, Elon Musk says he’s lined up $46.5B for his proposed Twitter purchase, Faiz Siddiqui, Aaron Gregg and Douglas MacMillan, April 21, 2022. In an SEC filing, the Tesla CEO also says he is considering a tender offer to acquire all outstanding shares of the social media platform.

Elon Musk, right, says he has secured $46.5 billion in financing to acquire Twitter, signaling the Tesla CEO is serious about his bid to acquire to the social media firm — and intends to back it up with his personal fortune.

The Tesla CEO’s offer, made public in a filing Thursday, draws on a combination of loans and equity financing, but questions remain about how he will structure the deal and how Twitter’s board will respond. Still, it suggests Musk is willing to risk some of the lucrative Tesla shares that have made him the world’s richest person to acquire the platform he has described as a modern-day town square.

“It signals an increasing level of seriousness,” said Donna Hitscherich, a member of the finance faculty at Columbia Business School. “You’re ratcheting up the resolve with the hopes that at one point the other side will come to the table.”

In the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Musk listed three sources for the offer. The first two would be loans from investment bank Morgan Stanley, worth $13 billion and $12.5 billion respectively. The third source is described as an equity commitment of $21 billion from Musk himself.

But it leaves him responsible for delivering $21 billion in cash on his own while providing no details on how he will come up with the money. Musk is ranked by Bloomberg as the richest man in the world ― with a net worth of $249 billion as of Wednesday. Much of his wealth is tied up in Tesla and the rocket building company SpaceX, which he also helms as CEO.

Meanwhile, some Tesla investors have bristled at Musk’s proposal because it distracts from his responsibilities as CEO and potentially takes momentum away from the world’s most valuable automaker.

April 20

 

Washington Post, DeSantis proposes dissolving special tax status for Disney World, Lori Rozsa, April 20, 2022 (print ed.). Florida’s governor, shown above in a file photo, is seeking to undo a 55-year-old compact that helped create the Magic Kingdom.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is following through on his promise to try and cancel a 1967 deal between the state and the Walt Disney Co. that could leave the company on the hook for millions of dollars a year in local taxes — and with less autonomy over its property.

On Tuesday, DeSantis announced that lawmakers in Tallahassee for a special legislative session would take up the issue. The proposal follows weeks of public attacks on Disney by the governor, who has criticized the company for opposing a new Florida law that limits how educators discuss LGBTQ issues in the classroom.

Legislators “will be considering the Congressional map, but they also will be considering termination of all special districts that were enacted in Florida prior to 1968, and that includes the Reedy Creek Improvement District,” DeSantis said at a news conference in The Villages, a retirement community north of Disney.

A proclamation signed by DeSantis states that “it is necessary to review such independent special districts to ensure that they are appropriately serving the public interest.”

It is unclear what impact the proposal would have on Disney World’s operations. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

The bill to eliminate the special district passed GOP-majority state Senate and House committees Tuesday afternoon. Democrats called it an act of retaliation by a powerful governor that could have unintended consequences.

“If this isn’t the grandest form of bullying that I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is,” state Sen. Janet Cruz (D) said. “I have this vision of a mousetrap that we’ve created, and I see us leaning on the neck of the mouse for 12 months, just to step on Mickey’s neck.”

But the bill’s supporters pushed back. Sen. Jennifer Bradley said the legislation, which specifies Disney without naming it, “is not an attempt to villainize” the company but to reassess its legal authority after more than a half-century.

“They are not governed by a different set of rules as everyone else. They make their own rules,” said Bradley, the bill’s sponsor in the Senate. “Those are incredibly broad powers that have been brought to light.”

Bill sponsor Rep. Randy Fine (R) tweeted soon after DeSantis’s announcement that “Disney is a guest in Florida. Today, we remind them.”

The Reedy Creek Improvement District is the official name of the 25,000-acre property that Walt Disney negotiated to buy in Central Florida in the mid-1960s. Disney sought as much control as possible over the land, and its lobbyists worked with state legislators to create the special taxing district. It is one of 1,800 special districts in Florida and allows Disney to oversee its property — which spans two counties and about 40 square miles — as a quasi-governmental agency, building roads and collecting taxes.

Republican sponsors of the legislation couldn’t answer questions Tuesday about whether the measure would leave local governments responsible for billions of dollars in infrastructure and other responsibilities in the district that Disney now pays for on its own.

The creation of Disney World helped launch the thriving Central Florida theme park industry, which draws an estimated 70 million tourists a year. About 20 million people visit Disney World annually, making it the most-visited theme park in the world.

Democrats have long been critical of the sway Disney holds over lawmakers. The company has donated millions to politicians in Florida, mostly members of the GOP, including DeSantis. But they say unraveling the company’s authority over its vast properties should be done more carefully.

Washington Post, Elon Musk’s talk of a Twitter takeover masks Tesla’s troubles in China, Faiz Siddiqui, April 20, 2022. Some are concerned the Tesla CEO may be stretching himself too thin. The world is distracted by Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid for Twitter. That may be serving the Tesla CEO’s purposes well.

Tesla’s Shanghai “Gigafactory,” where it makes some of its electric sedans and crossover SUVs, has been shuttered for weeks as a result of China’s “zero covid” policy, something the company is expected to address on its earnings call when it reports first quarter results later Wednesday. Tesla has also come under fire for no longer including a standard charging cable with its cars, a move that hints at possible supply chain woes — and amounts to what analysts are calling a backdoor price increase.

Meanwhile, Musk, right, has been consumed in recent weeks with a surprise push to take over the social media platform he uses for company announcements and communicating with his more than 82 million followers.

Analysts and investors have expressed concern that Musk is stretched too thin — not only by the demands of Tesla, which has opened multiple new factories in recent weeks, but other responsibilities as CEO of rocket builder SpaceX and several smaller companies. If he succeeds in his bid to buy Twitter, Musk will have a historic, and largely unprecedented, catalogue of tech companies under his helm even after questioning last year how long he could keep up with overflowing demands.

Musk praised Tesla’s performance despite the challenges in a tweet this month.

“This was an *exceptionally* difficult quarter due to supply chain interruptions & China zero Covid policy,” he wrote. “Outstanding work by Tesla team & key suppliers saved the day.”

Tesla said at the time that it delivered more than 300,000 vehicles in the quarter, the first of 2022, positioning its numbers as a strong result “despite ongoing supply chain challenges and factory shutdowns.”

Analysts expect Tesla to report strong first quarter numbers, but those will largely be a footnote as the company faces questions over how the China closure will affect its year. Tesla has called the Shanghai factory its main export hub, making it a critical site for the carmaker that is largely credited with ushering in the era of electric vehicles.

Over the course of a decade, Tesla went from a niche automaker delivering tens of thousands of vehicles to more than 936,000 in 2021. Along the way, it has faced profitability concerns, regulatory fights and production challenges that posed massive hurdles for Musk.

New York Times, Elon Musk Races to Secure Financing for a Twitter Bid, Lauren Hirsch, April 20, 2022 (print ed.). The world’s richest man is trying to shore up debt financing, including potentially taking out a loan against his shares of Tesla, so he can buy Twitter.

Morgan Stanley, the investment bank working with Mr. Musk on the potential deal, has been calling banks and other potential investors to shore up financing for the offer, four people with knowledge of the situation said. Mr. Musk is first focused on raising debt and has not yet begun to seek equity financing for his bid, one of the people said.

Mr. Musk is evaluating various packages of debt, including more senior debt known as preferred debt and a loan against his shares of Tesla, the electric carmaker that he runs, two of the people said. Apollo Global Management, an alternative asset manager, is among the parties considering offering debt financing in a bid for Twitter. The equity he needs is likely to be sizable.

Mr. Musk is aiming to pull together a fully funded offer as soon as this week, one of the people said, though that timeline is far from certain. The people with knowledge of the discussions were not authorized to speak publicly because the details are confidential and in flux.

It is unclear if Mr. Musk’s efforts will be successful, but they go toward addressing a key question about his Twitter bid. Last week, Mr. Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, made an unsolicited offer for the social media company, saying that he wanted to take it private and that he wanted people to be able to speak more freely on the service. But his offer was regarded skeptically by Wall Street because he did not include details about how he would come up with the money for the deal.

 

Stella Moris and son Gabriel, right, and Max leave Belmarsh prison in 2021 after visiting her partner and their father, Julian Assange. His two children could lose their father for the rest of their lives [Source: irishexaminer.com].

New York Times, British Court Brings Julian Assange One Step Closer to Extradition, Megan Specia, April 20, 2022. The court formally ordered the extradition of the WikiLeaks founder to the United States, but it still needs approval from a British cabinet minister and his defense can appeal to her directly.

The order to extradite Mr. Assange, who is being sought by the United States in connection with charges under the Espionage Act, must be signed by the British home secretary, Priti Patel. Mr. Assange has four weeks to appeal to her directly, and he also has the right to take his case to the English High Court after she issues her decision.

Wednesday’s court decision, delivered in a brief hearing that saw Mr. Assange dial in by video call from a prison in London, was the latest blow to his attempts to fend off his extradition. Protesters, as they have done throughout his legal battle, gathered outside the courtroom in central London.

Britain’s Supreme Court ruled last month that Mr. Assange could not appeal an earlier decision that paved the way for his extradition, bouncing the decision back to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court, which made the decision on Wednesday.

Ms. Patel will now decide whether to order the extradition or refuse the request, but Mr. Assange’s defense team also is entitled to make submissions to her before her final decision is made. His legal team has until May 18 to do so. The Home Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Assange was charged in the United States under the Espionage Act in connection with obtaining and publishing classified government documents about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on WikiLeaks in 2010. Those files were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former military intelligence analyst.

Mr. Assange has waged a prolonged legal battle against his extradition following his arrest in London in 2019, after he spent seven years holed up inside the Ecuadorean Embassy in an effort to avoid detention.

His defenders have sought to present the case as a matter of press freedom, and his extradition to the United States could raise major issues about First Amendment rights, experts say.

“The extradition of Julian Assange would also be devastating for press freedom and for the public, who have a right to know what their governments are doing in their name,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general.

Then-Republican Presidential nominee Donald J. Trump attends a church service in Detroit on Sept. 3 during the 2016 campaign with his aide Omarosa Manigault Newman (Reuters photo by Carlo Alegri). Her book became a tell-all No. 1 national best-seller.

CNBC, Trump campaign must pay $1.3M in legal fees to ‘Apprentice’ star Omarosa Manigault Newman in White House book lawsuit, Dan Mangan, April 20 2022. The presidential campaign of Donald Trump has been ordered by an arbitrator to pay $1.3 million in legal fees to Omarosa Manigault Newman in connection with a dispute over a book about her tenure as a White House advisor, her lawyer said.

The awarding of legal feels comes nearly seven months after the arbitrator ruled in Manigault Newman’s favor that a confidentiality agreement she signed while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign was invalid under New York law.

Manigault Newman first gained notoriety for her role as a villain-esque contestant on the first season of Trump’s former reality television show “The Apprentice.”

An arbitrator ordered Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to pay $1.3 million in legal fees to Omarosa Manigault Newman, the former “Apprentice” star whom the campaign unsuccessfully sued over a book about her tenure as a White House advisor, her lawyer said Wednesday.

The award comes nearly seven months after the arbitrator ruled in Manigault Newman’s favor that a confidentiality agreement she signed while working on Trump’s 2016 campaign was invalid under New York law.

The campaign in 2018 had filed a complaint with the American Arbitration Association in New York against her claiming that she violated that nondisclosure agreement with a scathing tell-all book titled Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.

Manigault Newman’s lawyer John Phillips, in a statement, said the decision was the “largest known attorney fee award against a Political Campaign or President we can find and hopefully will send a message that weaponized litigation will not be tolerated and empower other lawyers to stand up and fight for the whistleblower and vocal critic against the oppressive machine.”

Washington Post, Johnny Depp takes stand, says Amber Heard’s abuse allegations are untrue, ‘heinous,’ Emily Yahr and Sonia Rao, April 20, 2022. Johnny Depp took the stand Tuesday in his defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife Amber Heard, telling a Fairfax County jury that he was appearing before it because of the actress’s “heinous” and “disturbing” allegations of abuse and that he wanted everyone to know the claims were “not based in any species of truth.”

Though Depp acknowledged there were arguments between them, he said, “Never did I, myself, reach the point of striking Ms. Heard in any way, nor have I ever struck any woman in my life.”

Heard and Depp were married in February 2015 after dating for more than three years. In May 2016, Heard filed for divorce and a restraining order, alleging that Depp had physically abused her. They settled their divorce months later. The actor is suing Heard for $50 million for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote in The Washington Post calling herself a survivor of domestic abuse, which Depp says caused further damage and irreparably destroyed his reputation and career. Heard countersued him for $100 million for defamation after his lawyer called her claims a hoax.

Depp’s attorneys filed the suit in Virginia because The Post’s printing presses and online servers are in Fairfax County. (The Post is not a defendant in the case.) The state is also known for weaker anti-defamation laws.

He spoke in front of the jury and about 100 spectators in the courtroom; the testimony was also streamed online. A murmur rippled through the crowd when his attorney called “John C. Depp” to the stand. Depp said that back in 2016, Heard’s accusations “permeated” the entertainment industry, and, after being picked up in the media and on social media, became assumed as fact.

“Since I knew there was no truth to it whatsoever, I felt it my responsibility to stand up not only for myself . . . but stand up for my children, who at the time were 14 and 16,” Depp said, referring to his children Jack and Lily-Rose, whom he shares with his ex-partner of 14 years, Vanessa Paradis. He spoke about a People magazine cover at the time that showed Heard’s bruised face and said the story kept multiplying from there.

“It was my responsibility, I felt, to not only attempt to clear my name for the sake of — for many reasons, but I wanted to clear my children of this horrid thing that they were having to read about their father, which was untrue,” he said.

Heard’s lawyers have repeatedly pointed to Depp’s history of alcohol and drug use, saying that his substance issues are what ruined his career and that he’s an “obsessed ex-husband hellbent on revenge.” Depp said that Heard has “grossly embellished” his “quote-unquote substance abuse,” and that she’s using the secrets of his past against him. Depp said he first tried “nerve pills” at age 11 when he saw they calmed down his mother, and tried every drug imaginable by age 15.

• Washington Post, What to know about Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s defamation trial

Washington Post, Netflix loses 200,000 subscribers after Ukraine-linked Russia pullout, Andrew Jeong, April 20, 2022. For the first time in a decade, the streaming service said that it had lost more paying viewers than it added, even as its revenue grew, pushing its stock price down by more than 20 percent in after-hours trading. For the first time in a decade, Netflix said Tuesday, the streaming service lost more paying customers than it added after a net drop of 200,000 subscribers it attributed to its pullout from Russia.

Even though revenue grew, the announcement pushed its stock price down by more than 20 percent in after-hours trading. In a letter to shareholders, Netflix attributed the net loss in the January-March period to its decision last month to suspend services in Russia in protest of the Kremlin’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine.

It lost 700,000 viewers in Russia, although it added 500,000 elsewhere globally.

The drop comes amid a larger trend of shrinking viewership, with the streaming service projecting that it will lose a further 2 million subscribers in the next three-month quarter ending in June.

It still said revenue would grow to almost $8 billion in that period, a 10 percent increase from the same time last year. The company also retains a paying audience of over 220 million, more than double what it had five years ago.

April 19

 

Washington Post, Commanders deny allegations of financial misdeeds in letter to FTC, Nicki Jhabvala and Mark Maske, April 19, 2022. The Washington Commanders sent an 18-page letter to the chair of the Federal Trade Commission on Monday that described the allegations of financial improprieties made by a former team employee and detailed by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform as “baseless” and asserted that “no investigation is warranted.”

The rebuttal claims the committee’s letter, which was sent to the FTC on Tuesday, “relies solely on the uncorroborated, false testimony of a single disgruntled former employee,” referring to former vice president of sales and customer service Jason Friedman, who worked for the team for 24 years.

In an interview with the committee and through shared emails and documents, Friedman alleged that Washington engaged in a long-running practice of withholding refundable deposits from season ticket holders and hiding money that was supposed to be shared among NFL owners. The team described the committee’s letter as “one-sided” and “uncorroborated” and included declarations from four former executives — team counsel David Donovan, chief operating officer Mitch Gershman, director of finance Paul Szczenski and senior vice president Michael Dillow — as well as documents and text exchanges to dispute Friedman’s claims.

Congress details allegations of Commanders’ ‘unlawful’ conduct to FTC

“We are confident that, had this referral not come from a Congressional Committee, the FTC would exercise its discretion to decline to open an investigation based on the uncorroborated and implausible allegations of a single disgruntled former employee, especially one with such notable impairments to his credibility as set forth below,” read the team’s letter, which was signed by attorney Jordan Siev of Reed Smith LLP. “We respectfully suggest that the FTC should not be influenced by the patina of credibility created by a congressional referral when the actual investigation pursued by the Committee in question was conducted in such a one-sided, deficient, and partisan fashion.”

The letter was addressed to FTC chair Lina M. Khan and copied to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), the Oversight Committee’s chairwoman; Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), the chairman of the subcommittee on economic and consumer policy; Republican leaders of the committee; NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell; and attorneys general Jason S. Miyares (R) of Virginia, Brian E. Frosh (D) of Maryland and Karl A. Racine (D) of D.C.; among others.

Throughout the letter and its 17 accompanying exhibits, the team describes Friedman as an “untrustworthy” former employee who was fired for “professional misconduct” in October 2020 and later pleaded to be rehired. The letter said Friedman “repeatedly berated his staff, including minority women” and “created a culture of fear.” Included in the exhibits are emails purported to be sent from Friedman that include derogatory and misogynistic language.

Szczenski described Friedman’s claims as “speculative, uninformed guesswork” and said he “had virtually no visibility into the Team’s accounting function. He was not present at meetings of the accounting team or included in [their] communications except in very limited circumstances when it involved his department,” according to the letter.

Friedman’s attorneys, Lisa Banks and Debra Katz, said in a statement Monday that Friedman “stands by his testimony, which was truthful and based on his experiences with the team.” The attorneys previously have said that Friedman has “contractual constraints” that prohibit him from speaking publicly about his allegations regarding the team.

 

Washington Post, Opinion: Why Carlson wants men to aim lasers at their private parts, Dana Milbank, right, April 19, 2022 (print ed.). With the pandemic fading (at least for now), there are fewer occasions to swallow ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine or to inject oneself with bleach.

So what’s a Trump-loving, conspiracy-obsessed Fox News-viewing guy to do?

Tucker Carlson, above, has the answer: He should stand naked and spread-eagle on top of a large rock at twilight and gaze heavenward as a red laser illuminates his genitals.

“One of the biggest stories of our lifetimes is the total collapse of testosterone levels in American men … completely changing the way people are at the most fundamental level,” Carlson says in introducing the trailer for his latest “documentary.” After showing the teaser, Carlson brings in his expert “fitness professional” Andrew McGovern.

McGovern recommends that you “expose yourself to red-light therapy and the Joovv” — a brand of red light — “that we were using in the documentary.”

“Which is testicle tanning,” Carlson explains.

“It’s testicle tanning,” McGovern agrees, “but it’s also full-body red-light therapy.”

Carlson, the most-watched Fox News host, sums it up: “So, obviously, half the viewers are now like, ‘What? Testicle tanning — that’s crazy.’ But my view is, okay, testosterone levels have crashed and nobody says anything about it. That’s crazy.”

No, this is what’s crazy.

Washington Post, Elon Musk wants a free speech utopia. Technologists clap back, Elizabeth Dwoskin, April 19, 2022 (print ed.). Musk’s vision of the Internet is outdated and doesn’t take into account the real world, they say.

Elon Musk’s vision for Twitter is a public town square where there are few restrictions on what people can or can’t say on the Internet.

But the utopian ideal envisioned by the Tesla CEO, right, ceased to exist long ago and doesn’t take into account what’s happening in the real world, tech executives, Twitter employees and Silicon Valley insiders say. As Musk seeks a $43 billion hostile takeover bid for Twitter, critics say his ambition for what the platform should be — a largely unpoliced space rid of censorship — is naive, would hurt the company’s growth prospects and would render the platform unsafe.

Twitter, Facebook and other social networks have spent billions of dollars and employed armies of people to create and enforce policies to reduce hate speech, misinformation and other toxic communication that degrades public discourse. In doing so, they’ve provoked the ire not only of politicians on the right, who claim these actions amount to censorship, but also people on the left, who say tech companies’ enforcement is both too limited and biased.

“What Musk seemingly fails to recognize is that to truly have free speech today, you need moderation,” said Katie Harbath, a former Facebook public policy director and CEO of consultancy Anchor Change. “Otherwise just those who bully and harass will be left as they will drive others away.”

She added that content moderation and responsible platform design done right can actually allow for more speech.

Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, who co-founded the social media company 16 years ago, said in a tweet about Musk’s potential takeover bid: “I don’t believe any individual or institutions should own social media, or more generally media companies. It should be an open and verifiable protocol. Everything is a step toward that.”

Twitter declined to comment. Musk didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.

Musk, a prolific Twitter user himself with more than 80 million followers, has touted the benefits of free speech in the lead up to his hostile takeover bid unveiled in a Securities and Exchange filing last week. Following the disclosure, he conducted a poll asking on Twitter whether taking the company private at $54.20 a share should be up to shareholders and not the board. During a TED conference in Vancouver Thursday, he touted the merits of free speech on the Internet.

“I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” Musk said during the TED interview. “Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s just really important that people have the, both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.”

Musk, who has previously referred to himself as a free speech maximalist, also said he hoped to make available to the public the company’s algorithm, helping people understand how content surfaces on the platform. He also said that platforms should police speech in accordance with U.S. laws, a comment that was widely interpreted to mean that he was advocating for limited content moderation because speech in the United States short of direct calls for violence is largely protected by the First Amendment.

New York Times, Joe Kahn Is Named Executive Editor of The New York Times, Michael M. Grynbaum and Jim Windolf, April 19, 2022. Mr. Kahn, 57, above, who helped steer The New York Times into the digital era, will succeed Dean Baquet in the top newsroom job.

Joe Kahn, an award-winning China correspondent who rose to lead the international desk of The New York Times, and then as managing editor helped steer the newspaper into the digital era, has been selected to be The Times’s next executive editor, the top newsroom job.

Mr. Kahn, 57, currently the No. 2-ranking editor at The Times, will take on one of the most powerful positions in American media and the global news business. He is to succeed Dean Baquet, whose eight-year tenure is expected to conclude in June.

The announcement was made on Tuesday by the publisher of The Times, A.G. Sulzberger.

“For many people, especially those who have worked alongside Joe — a brilliant journalist and a brave and principled leader — this announcement will come as no surprise,” Mr. Sulzberger wrote in a memo to the Times staff. “Joe brings impeccable news judgment, a sophisticated understanding of the forces shaping the world and a long track record of helping journalists produce their most ambitious and courageous work.”

In elevating Mr. Kahn, Mr. Sulzberger chose a veteran journalist steeped in the values of traditional newspaper reporting and editing to lead an institution undergoing enormous change. After decades devoted to the “daily miracle” of the print edition, The Times is focused on a digital future and competing for audiences around the world.

April 18

 

New York Times, Alex Jones’s Infowars Files for Bankruptcy, Derrick Bryson Taylor, April 18, 2022. Three companies affiliated with the far-right broadcaster and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, above, among them the media outlet Infowars, filed for Chapter 11 protection on Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, according to court documents.

Infowars is facing multiple defamation lawsuits from families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which Mr. Jones has claimed was a hoax. Two other companies connected to Mr. Jones, IWHealth and Prison Planet TV, also filed for bankruptcy protection on Sunday.

Last September, Mr. Jones lost two defamation lawsuits filed in Texas by victims’ families because he failed to provide requested information to the court. Months later, in a case representing the families of eight others killed in the shooting, a Connecticut judge ruled that Mr. Jones was liable by default because he had refused to turn over documents ordered by the courts, including financial records. The rulings delivered sweeping victories to the families.

Mr. Jones for years spread bogus theories that the shooting that killed 20 first graders and six educators in Newtown, Conn., was part of a government-led plot to confiscate Americans’ firearms and that the victims’ families were actors in the scheme.

Because of the falsehoods, families of the victims have found themselves routinely accosted by those who believe those false claims. Among those are the parents of Noah Pozner, who have moved nearly 10 times since the shooting, and live in hiding.

The Sandy Hook families maintain that Mr. Jones profited from spreading lies about their relatives’ murders. Mr. Jones has disputed that, while for years failing to produce sufficient records to bolster his claims.

Last month, a Connecticut judge found the radio host in contempt for failing to sit for a deposition and ordered that he be fined $25,000 for the first weekday he fails to appear for testimony, with the fine rising by $25,000 every day thereafter that he did not appear.

In trials scheduled to begin this month in Texas, juries will determine how much Mr. Jones must pay the families in damages. The Connecticut case is the last scheduled trial, set to begin on Sept. 1.

In its court filings, Infowars said that it had up to 49 creditors, as much as $50,000 in estimated assets and up to $10 million in estimated liabilities. The two other companies said they also had up to 49 creditors, with IWHealth stating it had up to $1 million in assets while Prison Planet TV said it had up to $50,000.

April 17

Washington Post, Analysis: Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter underscores the risks of social media ownership, Joseph Menn, Cat Zakrzewski and Craig Timberg, April 17, 2022. After years of struggling to get Facebook to confront its problems, experts worry about the impact of a Twitter owned by one individual.

Social media industry safety professionals and outside experts who’ve spent years trying to slow the empowerment of tyrants and violent mobs by Facebook and other platforms are aghast that a second major company might come under the control of just one person — especially one complaining that Twitter places too many limits on what can be posted on its site.

In tweets and a TED conversation that followed his surprise bid last week to take Twitter private, billionaire Elon Musk has decried decisions to bar some users as censorship and said moderation that blunts the spread of legal but offending content as going too far.

“If it’s a gray area, let the tweet exist,” Musk said Thursday.

Such comments alarm those whose experience has been that unfettered speech makes social media platforms unusable and that lightly controlled speech favors those who can direct thousands to make versions of the same point, which is then amplified by algorithms designed to maximize engagement and thereby advertising dollars.

“This is a disaster, and it’s not only about Elon Musk, but he kind of puts it on steroids,” said Shoshana Zuboff, a retired Harvard Business School professor and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,”which says that the money coming from the collection of data about human behavior is the lifeblood of a new and thus far nearly unregulated era.

Zuboff’s work argues that Facebook, Twitter and others extract as much data about users as possible and then attempt to maximize their time on the site because that earns them money. But platforms, she argues, aren’t neutral — in driving users’ online interests, they alter not only discussions but also beliefs and even physical actions, encouraging people to do what they otherwise would not, such as joining real-world protests.

Putting so much power in the hands of one company is bad enough — but putting it in the hands of one person, as is largely the case with Facebook’s controlling shareholder, Mark Zuckerberg, and would be the case with a Musk-owned Twitter — would be, she says, incompatible with democracy.

April 15

Washington Post, Ukraine is scanning faces of dead Russians, then contacting the mothers, Drew Harwell, April 15, 2022. Ukrainian officials say the use of facial recognition software could help end the brutal war. But some experts call it ‘classic psychological warfare’ that sets a gruesome precedent.

Ukrainian officials have run more than 8,600 facial recognition searches on dead or captured Russian soldiers in the 50 days since Moscow’s invasion began, using the scans to identify bodies and contact hundreds of their families in what may be one of the most gruesome applications of the technology to date.

The country’s IT Army, a volunteer force of hackers and activists that takes its direction from the Ukrainian government, says it has used those identifications to inform the families of the deaths of 582 Russians, including by sending them photos of the abandoned corpses.

The Ukrainians champion the use of face-scanning software from the U.S. tech firm Clearview AI as a brutal but effective way to stir up dissent inside Russia, discourage other fighters and hasten an end to a devastating war.

But some military and technology analysts worry that the strategy could backfire, inflaming anger over a shock campaign directed at mothers who may be thousands of miles from the drivers of the Kremlin’s war machine.

The West’s solidarity with Ukraine makes it tempting to support such a radical act designed to capitalize on family grief, said Stephanie Hare, a surveillance researcher in London. But contacting soldiers’ parents, she said, is “classic psychological warfare” and could set a dangerous new standard for future conflicts.

“If it were Russian soldiers doing this with Ukrainian mothers, we might say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s barbaric,’ ” she said. “And is it actually working? Or is it making them say: ‘Look at these lawless, cruel Ukrainians, doing this to our boys?’ ”

Clearview AI’s chief executive, Hoan Ton-That, told The Washington Post that more than 340 officials across five Ukrainian government agencies now can use its tool to run facial recognition searches whenever they want, free of charge.

Washington Post, Twitter adopts ‘poison pill’ intended to thwart Elon Musk’s takeover bid, Faiz Siddiqui, April 15, 2022. The plan signals that Twitter does not look favorably at Musk’s bid.

Twitter is rebuffing Elon Musk’s hostile takeover bid, the company announced Friday, adopting a plan known as a “poison pill” that would seek to thwart the Tesla CEO from becoming the owner of the social media network.

The plan, known as a “shareholder rights plan” seeks to insulate shareholders against Musk’s efforts as the largest individual shareholder to amass an exponentially bigger stake in Twitter.

“The Rights Plan will reduce the likelihood that any entity, person or group gains control of Twitter through open market accumulation without paying all shareholders an appropriate control premium or without providing the Board sufficient time to make informed judgments and take actions that are in the best interests of shareholders,” Twitter said in a news release.

Musk, right, disclosed earlier this month that he had amassed a more than 9 percent stake in Twitter, and he launched a takeover bid to take the company private valued at roughly $43 billion Thursday.

The poison pill plan would effectively allow shareholders other than Musk to buy additional stock at a discounted price, flooding the market with shares that would then trade at a premium. That would make it difficult for a prospective owner to amass a higher stake without spending significantly more money.

The ”poison pill” would be triggered if Musk crossed a threshold of 15 percent ownership in Twitter.

New York Times, Opinion: The Law That Shaped the Internet Presents a Question for Elon Musk, Peter Coy, April 15, 2022. "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

Those are “the 26 words that created the internet,” says Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the United States Naval Academy, who wrote a book with that title that came out in 2019. The fruitful words come from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That brief passage fueled the growth of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by protecting them from lawsuits over content posted by users of their platforms.

Nearly three decades later, conservatives and liberals are equally unhappy with Section 230, but for opposite reasons, says Mary Anne Franks, a professor at University of Miami School of Law.

Liberals, for the most part, don’t like those 26 words because they feel they have permitted the platforms to host and even promote hate speech, unfounded conspiracy theories, racism and other objectionable content that attracts eyeballs and makes money.

Conservatives and libertarians, for the most part, dislike the next section, which protects the platforms when they take down objectionable material. It says the platforms can’t be held civilly liable if “in good faith” they remove content they deem “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” The conservatives and libertarians argue that platforms such as Twitter are using Section 230 to suppress their freedom of expression. (You can read the whole section here.)

Now comes Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, with an offer to buy Twitter at a valuation of about $43 billion. (The company on Friday moved to make it more difficult for any single investor to amass a large stake.)

It’s difficult to know anything for sure about Musk, but if he does buy Twitter it’s a good bet he’ll reduce content moderation. “I think it’s very important for there to be an inclusive arena for free speech,” Musk said Thursday at a TED conference. He might also end the “permanent” suspension of former President Donald Trump, which was imposed after the invasion of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But no matter how smart and rich he is, Musk can’t rid the web of the problems that Section 230 was meant to address. It would be crazy, and counterproductive, for Musk to end all content moderation. Twitter would soon fill up with not-quite-illegal sexual material, deceptive sales pitches, trolls and other garbage that would drive away users and wreck Twitter’s market and consumer value.

No platform can reasonably promise unadulterated free speech. Trump’s faltering Truth Social platform, which claims to be a “big tent,” threatens to ban users whose contributions are, borrowing from Section 230, “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable.” (“Otherwise objectionable” is a capacious phrase.)

Washington Post, Perspective: Elon Musk’s road to Twitter is paved with broken promises, Geoffrey A. Fowler, April 15, 2022. Musk says he’ll remake Twitter and save free speech. But his track record is a mix of wild successes and many unfulfilled pledges.

Elon Musk wants to use his billions to remake Twitter as a “platform for free speech around the globe.” He says he’ll stop it from censoring speech, ban annoying bots and make tweets editable.

But as Earth’s richest person adds the social media industry to his conquests, keep one thing in mind: Musk’s promises often need an edit button of their own.

His track record is a mix of wild successes and many, many, many broken promises.

I’ve lived it: In 2019, my family leased a Tesla Model 3 and paid thousands of dollars extra for its “full self-driving” capability. When we returned the lease a few months ago, we still hadn’t received it. (There was no refund, either — we asked.)

It’s the fundamental paradox of Musk: He’s both our Thomas Edison and that kid in school who made up fantastical stories about what he did on summer vacation. Last fall, Musk actually announced plans for a humanoid robot at an event by using a real human dancing in a robot suit. He says so many zany things that some of his critics, who are often financially invested in his failure, catalogue them on sites including Elon’s Broken Promises and Elon Musk Today.

OpEdNews, Commentary: Why Elon Musk has blocked me on Twitter (and now owns the joint), Robert Reich, right, Professor at the University of California, Chairman of Common Cause and former U.S. Secretary of Labor, April 15, 2022. This isn't about freedom of speech. It's about power.

Years ago, pundits assumed the Internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naïve that assumption was.

At least America responded to Trump's lies. Trump had 88 million Twitter followers before Twitter took him off its platform -- just two days after the attack on the U.S. Capitol which he provoked, in part, with his tweets. (Trump's social media accounts were also suspended on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, and TikTok.)

Twitter's move was necessary to protect American democracy. But Elon Musk -- the richest man in the world, with 80 million Twitter followers -- wasn't pleased about it. Musk tweeted that U.S. tech companies shouldn't be acting "as the de facto arbiter of free speech."

I would have posted that tweet for you right here, if I had access to it. But ever since I posted a tweet two years ago criticizing Musk for how he treated his Tesla workers, he has blocked me -- so I can't view or post criticisms of his tweets to his 80 million Twitter followers. Seems like an odd move for someone who describes himself as a "free speech absolutist."

It's power that compelled Musk to buy $2.64 billion of Twitter stock, making him the largest shareholder, with a 9.2 percent stake in the company. Last week, Twitter announced that Musk will be joining the company's board of directors. After the announcement, Musk promised "to make significant improvements" to the platform. (He even changed his investment designation to clarify that he's not simply a "passive" investor but one who intends to impact the way the company is run.) Yesterday evening, though, it was announced that -- contrary to last week's announcement -- Musk would not be joining Twitter's board. No reason was given but this is typical for Musk.

It's likely part of a bargaining Kabuki dance. Musk wouldn't have plopped down $2.64 billion for nothing. He probably wants more control. If he is not on Twitter's board, Musk is not bound by the "standstill" agreement in which he pledged to buy no more than 14.9 percent of Twitter's stock. Musk now has no restrictions on how much of Twitter's stock he can buy. I predict he buys more and takes an even more active role trying to influence the platform.

By the way, what "improvements" does Musk have in mind for Twitter? Would he use his additional influence over the platform to prevent users with tens of millions of followers from blocking people who criticize them? I doubt it.

Would Musk pressure Twitter to let Trump back on? I fear he would.

Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an "uncontrolled" Internet. That vision is dangerous rubbish. There's no such animal, and won't be. Someone has to decide on the algorithms in every platform -- how they're designed, how they evolve, what they reveal and what they hide. Musk has enough power and money to quietly give himselfthis sort of control over Twitter. He talks about freedom of speech but his real power is freedom of reach - reaching 80 million twitter followers without accountability to anyone (including critics like me) - and enough money to buy himself a seat on Twitter's board.

Musk has never believed that power comes with responsibility. He's been unperturbed when his tweets cause real suffering. During his long and storied history with Twitter he has threatened journalists and stolen memes. In March 2020 he tweeted that children were "essentially immune" to Covid. He's pushed cryptocurrencies that he's invested in. When a college student started a Twitter account to track Musk's private plane, Musk tried and failed to buy him off, before blocking him.

The Securities and Exchange Commission went after Musk after he tweeted that he had funding to take Tesla private, a clear violation of the law. Musk paid a fine and agreed to let lawyers vet future sensitive tweets, but he has tried to reverse this requirement. He has also been openly contemptuous of the SEC, tweeting at one point that the "E" stands for "Elon's." (You can guess what the "S" and "C" stand for.) By the way, how does the SEC go after Musk's ability to tweet now that he owns Twitter?

Billionaires like Musk have shown time and again they consider themselves above the law. And to a large extent, they are. Musk has enough wealth that legal penalties are no more than slaps on his wrist, and enough power to control one of the most important ways the public now receives news. Think about it: After years of posting tweets that skirt the law, Musk was given a seat on Twitter's board (and is probably now negotiating for even more clout).

Musk says he wants to "free" the Internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now, when it's often impossible to discover who is making the decisions about how algorithms are designed, who's filling social media with lies, who's poisoning our minds with pseudo-science and propaganda, and who's deciding which versions of events go viral and which stay under wraps.

Make no mistake: This is not about freedom. It's about power. In Musk's vision of Twitter and the Internet, he'd be the wizard behind the curtain - projecting on the world's screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone. In reality, that world would be dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn't be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science, or the common good. That's Musk's dream. And Trump's. And Putin's. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.

New York Times, How Russian Media Uses Fox News to Make Its Case, Stuart A. Thompson, April 15, 2022. Russia’s state media has seized on the network’s prime-time segments, opinion pieces and online comments section to paint a critical portrait of the U.S.

As Western leaders introduced sanctions against Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, said seizing personal property from Russian oligarchs went too far.

“No American government had ever done anything like that before,” he said.

While the segment was aimed at Fox News’s conservative audience, it found another audience in Russia. The argument was parroted beat by beat by RIA Novosti, a Russian state news agency, which wrote that “the average U.S. citizen is simply horrified by what is happening.”

In the U.S., Biden has been accused of destroying the country with anti-Russian sanctions

The narratives advanced by the Kremlin and by parts of conservative American media have converged in recent months, reinforcing and feeding each other. Along the way, Russian media has increasingly seized on Fox News’s prime-time segments, its opinion pieces and even the network’s active online comments section — all of which often find fault with the Biden administration — to paint a critical portrait of the United States and depict America’s foreign policy as a threat to Russia’s interests.

Mr. Carlson was a frequent reference for Russian media, but other Fox News personalities — and the occasional news update from the network — were also included.

April 14

Associated Press, Elon Musk accused of breaking law while buying Twitter stock, Michael Liedtke, April 15, 2022 (print ed.). Elon Musk’s huge Twitter investment took a new twist Tuesday with the filing of a lawsuit alleging that the colorful billionaire illegally delayed disclosing his stake in the social media company so he could buy more shares at lower prices.

The complaint in New York federal court accuses Musk, right, of violating a regulatory deadline to reveal he had accumulated a stake of at least 5%. Instead, according to the complaint, Musk didn’t disclose his position in Twitter until he’d almost doubled his stake to more than 9%. That strategy, the lawsuit alleges, hurt less wealthy investors who sold shares in the San Francisco company in the nearly two weeks before Musk acknowledged holding a major stake.

Musk’s regulatory filings show that he bought a little more than 620,000 shares at $36.83 apiece on Jan. 31 and then continued to accumulate more shares on nearly every single trading day through April 1. Musk, best known as CEO of the electric car maker Tesla, held 73.1 million Twitter shares as of the most recent count Monday. That represents a 9.1% stake in Twitter.

The lawsuit alleges that by March 14, Musk’s stake in Twitter had reached a 5% threshold that required him to publicly disclose his holdings under U.S. securities law by March 24. Musk didn’t make the required disclosure until April 4.

That revelation caused Twitter’s stock to soar 27% from its April 1 close to nearly $50 by the end of April 4′s trading, depriving investors who sold shares before Musk’s improperly delayed disclosure the chance to realize significant gains, according to the lawsuit filed on behalf of an investor named Marc Bain Rasella. Musk, meanwhile, was able to continue to buy shares that traded in prices ranging from $37.69 to $40.96.

The lawsuit is seeking to be certified as a class action representing Twitter shareholders who sold shares between March 24 and April 4, a process that could take a year or more.

Musk spent about $2.6 billion on Twitter stock — a fraction of his estimated wealth of $265 billion, the largest individual fortune in the world. In a regulatory filing Monday, Musk disclosed he may increase his stake after backing out of an agreement reached last week to join Twitter’s board of directors.

Jacob Walker, one of the lawyers that filed the lawsuit against Musk, told The Associated Press that he hadn’t reached out to the Securities and Exchange Commission about Musk’s alleged violations about the disclosure of his Twitter stake. “I assume the SEC is well aware of what he did,” Walker said.

The SEC and Musk have been wrangling in court since 2018 when Musk and Tesla agreed to pay a $40 million fine t o settle allegations that he used his Twitter account to mislead investors about a potential buyout of the electric car company that never materialized. As part of that deal, Musk was supposed to obtain legal approval for his tweets about information that could affect Tesla’s stock price — a provision that regulators contend he has occasionally violated and that he now argues unfairly muzzles him.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment posted on Twitter, where he often shares his opinion and thoughts. Alex Spiro, a New York lawyer representing Musk in his ongoing dispute with the SEC, also didn’t immediately respond to a query from The Associated Press.

Washington Post, Elon Musk launches hostile takeover bid of Twitter, Aaron Gregg, April 14, 2022. The Tesla CEO, who recently became the social media company’s largest shareholder, is offering $54.20 per share.

Elon Musk, right, has launched a hostile takeover bid of Twitter — promising to unlock its “extraordinary potential” as a private company — in the latest twist in a stunning multiweek saga.

In a securities filing dated Wednesday, the billionaire tech CEO proposed $54.20 a share for the social media giant, calling it his “best and final offer. If it is not accepted, he added, “I would need to reconsider my position as a shareholder.”

In a letter addressed to Twitter Chairman Bret Taylor, Musk said he invested in the company because of its “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe." Free speech is a “societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he added.

“However, since making my investment I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.”

Twitter confirmed Thursday in an unsigned news release that it had received an “unsolicited, non-binding proposal” from Musk. “The Twitter Board of Directors will carefully review the proposal to determine the course of action that it believes is in the best interest of the Company and all Twitter stockholders.”

The move comes after a wild two weeks between Musk and Twitter, which was full of head fakes and at least one lawsuit.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board after all

The company’s share price closed Wednesday near $46 per share but it was up 10 percent in premarket trading Thursday morning. If Musk decided to unload his shares, it could send the company’s stock price sharply lower.

Musk recently disclosed he’d acquired a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, suddenly becoming its largest shareholder. While he is a prolific Twitter user with more than 80 million followers, Musk also is a frequent critic: In late March, he suggested in a tweet that he was considering launching his own social media company.

On April 5, Twitter surprised employees and investors by announcing that Musk would join the board of directors. Days later, however, Twitter chief executive Parag Agrawal announced that Musk had backed out.

“There will be distractions ahead, but our goals and priorities remain unchanged,” Agrawal wrote. “The decisions we make and how we execute remain unchanged. The decisions we make and how we execute is in our hands, no one else’s. Let’s tune out the noise, and stay focused on the work and what we’re building.”

Joining the board would have “handcuffed” him from fully acquiring the company, noted CFRA equity researcher Angelo Zino in an email to The Post.

Board membership also would bestow Musk with certain fiduciary responsibilities, such as requiring him to act in the best interests of the company.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary (WMR), Destroying nations through propaganda: a history, Wayne Madsen, left, April 13-14, 2022. President Biden justifiably accused Russia of carrying out genocide against Ukraine. Russia's actions to date have fulfilled one of the definitions of genocide: the systematic destruction of an entire nation and its people.

Aspirant czar Vladimir Putin claims he wants to "protect" Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine. Putin's military attacks on the country have been indiscriminate in their targeting: Ukrainians, Russians, Russian-speaking Ukrainians, Belorusians, Crimean Tatars, Pontic Greeks, Jews, Moldovans, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, Romani, Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Gagauz, and Poles have been killed by Russian forces.

Putin and the rhetoric of Russian neo-fascism he has embraced do not recognize a separate Ukrainian nation. That recognition was even extended by Joseph Stalin even though he, too, sought to destroy the Ukrainian nation. Stalin employed an enforced famine, an event known in Ukraine as the Holodomor, which killed as many as 5 million people. The Holodomor is considered an act of genocide in the same vein as Adolf Hitler's extermination of Ukraine's Jewish population. Putin's name can now be added to the list of the genocidal tyrants of modern Ukrainian history: Stalin, Hitler, and Putin.

Putin's propaganda as seen on Russian television and other media relies on the same type of fabulism used by Hitler and other fascist leaders.

Fascist propaganda has come a long way since the 1930s and 40s. It is now available on a 24x7 basis on Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, and hundreds of largely obscure podcasts on the web. The treaties signed in 1945 by the Allies with the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy, and Japan did not end the struggle against fascism. They were merely temporary ceasefires. The war continues to this day and hour in Ukraine, France, and a select committee room in the U.S. House of Representatives.

April 13

New York Times, Substack’s Growth Spurt Brings Growing Pains, Tiffany Hsu, April 13, 2022. The publishing platform’s founders want Substack to be an “alternate universe on the internet.” But it faces copycat rivals, an exodus by writers and a need to move beyond newsletters.

But now, Substack finds itself no longer a wunderkind but a company facing a host of challenges. Depending on whom you talk to, those challenges are either standard start-up growing pains or threats to the company’s future.

Tech giants, news outlets and other companies have released competing newsletter platforms in the past year. Consumers who loaded up on newsletters during the pandemic began to scale back. And many popular writers left, such as the associate English professor Grace Lavery and the climate journalists Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt, often complaining about the company’s moderation policy or the pressure to constantly deliver.

“Substack is at a pivot point where it needs to think about what it’s going to be when it grows up,” said Nikki Usher, an associate journalism professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The good news for the company, five years old this summer, is that it is still growing. Paid subscriptions to its hundreds of thousands of newsletters exploded to more than one million late last year from 50,000 in mid-2019. (The company won’t disclose the number of free subscribers.) A hiring spree hopes to net more than a dozen engineers, product managers and other specialists. Executives hope to eventually take the company — which has raised more than $82 million and is said to be valued at $650 million — public.

But to maintain that growth, Substack executives say, the company must offer more than newsletters.

Consortium News, Twitter Wars—My Personal Experience in Twitter’s Ongoing Assault on Free Speech, Scott Ritter, April 13, 2022. At some point, the U.S. people, and those they elect to higher office need to bring Twitter in line with the ideals and values Americans collectively espouse when it comes to free speech and online identity protection.

Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Washington Post, Opinion: We see how Dan Snyder treats customers. Who would build him a stadium? Sally Jenkins, right, April 13, 2022. Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder has denied allegations of financial impropriety.

What governor, mayor or legislator could stand on a dais with Washington Commanders owner Daniel Snyder for a stadium ribbon-cutting ceremony and assure constituents that they will get fair returns and not be fleeced? Only the crookedest pol at this point. There can be no stadium funds — no tax-free bonds, not so much as a discount on sewer lines — until Snyder has turned over every sticky page of his ledgers. What’s needed is a forensic accounting.

Cheating fellow NFL owners. Preying financially on unsuspecting fans. These are just two of the allegations in Tuesday’s letter from the House Committee on Oversight and Reform to the Federal Trade Commission requesting an investigation of “potentially unlawful business practices” under Snyder. The contents of the letter are at once stunning and unsurprising. Unsurprising, given that Snyder always seems to find new tar pits. Stunning, in the level of detail contained in the letter’s 20 pages and the seriousness of the accusations: A former executive alleges the flagship franchise of the nation’s capital kept two sets of books, played shell games with revenue and pocketed refunds (and interest) owed to ticket buyers, all of which could amount to fraud if verified. And if it’s true, it should be verifiable.

Of course, there can be no new stadium deal under these circumstances. For that matter, not one cent of public money or favor should go to any NFL owner until the league comes clean and stops acting as a protection racket for Snyder’s sordidness. According to the committee’s letter, the NFL has met its inquiry into pervasive workplace misconduct in Snyder’s building with “obstruction” and sought to “withhold key documents and information.”

In short, the NFL has demonstrated it doesn’t care about the women who work within it. If the league does nothing with these latest allegations, it shows it doesn’t.

 

National Press Club Journalism Institute, Photographer's first aid helped save Brooklyn subway shooting victims (Journal-isms), Edited by National Press Club Journalism Institute staff: Beth Francesco, Holly Butcher Grant, and Julie Moos, April 13, 2022. 

YouTube removes account tied to Brooklyn subway shooting suspect (BloombergQuint) / WATCH: Crowd cheers ‘hero’ security camera installer who tipped police to location of subway shooting suspect (Mediaite) / ‘Zack Dahnan, the 21-year old security camera installer who first spotted the suspected subway shooter in the East Village, is holding an impromptu press conference on 1st Avenue.’ (Jack Offenhartz)

■ First migrant bus from Texas arrives in DC, drops them blocks from Capitol ‘in front of the building that houses Fox News, NBC News, and C-SPAN’ (New York Post)

Press Freedom

■ Trial date set in defamation suit against Fox News over US election claims (Reuters)

■ Media organizations sue Gov. Youngkin for allegedly violating FOIA law (Washington Post)

■ Ethics complaint filed after reporter barred from Mississippi House GOP Caucus meeting (Mississippi Today)

■ US asked Israel for help locating American journalist Austin Tice (Axios)

■ Romanian journalists call for action after facing threats, intimidation (POLITICO)

April 12

 

Washington Post, Newspapers keep eliminating print days. They say it’s for the best, Elahe Izadi, April 12, 2022. Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, is cutting back on printed papers and pointing readers to e-editions. After more than 100 years of publication, Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal has stopped printing on Mondays, when it instead offers readers a digital version of the newspaper.

“Your first thought is, as our aunt would have said, ‘Oh, good grief,’ ” Auburn said. “It’s a change, and for some of us, the paper has been a part of our lives.”

For more than two decades, industry sages have been predicting the death of the printed newspaper. Now, a growing number of local publishers are cutting back on their print editions, pointing to rising costs and arguing consumers will prefer the immediacy and convenience of online news.

 

Britney Spears and her father and former conservator, James Spears (Associated Press file photos).

New York Times, Britney Spears, Out of Conservatorship, Says ‘I Am Having a Baby,’ Julia Jacobs, April 12, 2022 (print ed.). During her successful effort to end her conservatorship, the performer had complained that the team appointed to supervise her had blocked her from having additional children.

Months after Britney Spears was released from the conservatorship that she said was restricting her from having a third child, the pop star announced Monday in an Instagram post that she is pregnant.

In explosive testimony last year, Ms. Spears called the conservatorship that had governed her life for 13 years “abusive,” saying the people who managed it had refused to let her get her IUD removed so she could try to have another child.

“I want to be able to get married and have a baby,” Ms. Spears said last June. “I was told right now in the conservatorship I am not able to get married or have a baby.”

The singer’s assertion about her birth control device was among the most stunning in her speech, during which she said she had been drugged and compelled to work against her will. Reproductive rights advocates condemned the situation as a violation of her rights.

April 11

New York Times, Elon Musk will no longer join Twitter’s board of directors, the company said, Mike Isaac, Updated April 11, 2022. The announcement reverses a decision last week, when Twitter said Mr. Musk would become a board member after amassing a 9.2 percent stake in the company.

Elon Musk, right, the world’s wealthiest man and the biggest shareholder of Twitter, will no longer join the social media service’s board of directors, the company said late Sunday.

The move capped a whirlwind week at Twitter that had been set off by Mr. Musk, 50. On Tuesday, Twitter announced that the billionaire would be appointed to its 11-person board for a term that expires in 2024. The invitation to join the board followed Mr. Musk’s accumulating a 9.2 percent stake in the company, making him its largest shareholder.

But Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief executive, tweeted late Sunday that the situation had changed. On Saturday morning, Mr. Musk — who is a heavy Twitter user with more than 81 million followers — told the company he would no longer become a board member, Mr. Agrawal said.

“We have and will always value input from our shareholders, whether they are on our board or not” Mr. Agrawal said in his tweet about the news. “Elon is our biggest shareholder and we will remain open to his input.”

No reason was given for the reversal. But Mr. Musk had been tweeting erratically throughout the weekend, polling his followers with barbed questions about the future of the social media company.

In one post on Saturday, Mr. Musk asked, “Is Twitter dying?”

No reason was given for the reversal. But Mr. Musk had been tweeting erratically throughout the weekend, polling his followers with barbed questions about the future of the social media company.

In one post on Saturday, Mr. Musk asked, “Is Twitter dying?”

In another, he suggested turning Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters into a homeless shelter because “no one shows up anyway.” He also rattled off a stream of critiques of the company’s products, at one point suggesting that Twitter remove ads from the service entirely. (Most of Twitter’s revenue comes from ads.)

Under corporate governance principles, board members are required to act in the best fiduciary interest of a company and its shareholders, which Mr. Agrawal pointed out in his tweet on Sunday evening. He also said that Twitter’s board had been “clear about the risks” of Mr. Musk’s deciding to join as a director.

By not joining Twitter’s board, Mr. Musk will also no longer be bound by a previous agreement he had signed with the company. Under a “standstill” agreement last week, he had pledged not to purchase more than 14.9 percent of Twitter’s stock and not to take over the company. That suggests Mr. Musk could now keep adding to his stake in the company.

A spokesman for Twitter declined to comment beyond Mr. Agrawal’s post. In a tweet on Sunday night, Mr. Musk did not directly address the situation with Twitter’s board but posted an emoji of a hand over a face.

• Washington Post, Elon Musk is now the largest Twitter shareholder, setting up a showdown, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui and Taylor Telford, April 5, 2022. His 9.2 percent stake in the company sets up a confrontation with advocates for restricting harmful accounts.

National Press Club Journalism Institute,  DC’s Gridiron COVID outbreak tally hits 72 as cases tick up nationwide (Ars Technica), Edited by National Press Club Journalism Institute staff: Beth Francesco, Holly Butcher Grant, and Julie Moos, April 11, 2022.  White House Correspondents' Association adds vaccine requirement to attend annual dinner (The Hill) / The elite D.C. social scene sees a rash of covid cases, but parties on (Washington Post)

■ CNN reporter in Shanghai: 'I can't go outside' (The Hill)

■ 'David Zaslav visited the CNN newsroom and told them to think of CNN as a "reputation asset" and not a profit center' (Claire Atkinson) / Earlier: Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav to meet skittish CNN anchors after merger (New York Post)

■ CBS News, Norah O'Donnell make new long-term deal official (Hollywood Reporter) / Rachel Maddow is returning to MSNBC. But how long will she stay? (Los Angeles Times)

■ Russian journalist who protested Ukraine war on live TV finds new job (Newsweek)

■ As climate change intensifies extreme weather events, local newspapers see a bright future in meteorology (Nieman Journalism Lab)

■ From homeless to housing reporter: How living in a car for a year helped shape one journalist’s trajectory. (Slate)

■ ICYMI: The New York Times would really like its reporters to stop scrolling and get off Twitter - at least once in a while (Nieman Lab) / Researchers paid Fox viewers to watch CNN for one month. Here's what they found (CNN) / National Portrait Gallery exhibition looks at Watergate 50 years later (Washington Post)

Press Freedom

■ Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard: Dueling defamation claims go to trial over Washington Post op-ed (Hollywood Reporter) / How to watch the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial online (The Wrap)

■ Hong Kong police arrest veteran journalist for alleged sedition (WTVB)

■ Journalist Aasif Sultan granted bail, then re-arrested under preventative detention law (CPJ)

 April 10

Washington Post, Opinion: The media is failing the public on the good news about jobs, Margaret Sullivan, right, April 10, 2022. The job market is great right now. If people think it’s the opposite, some part of the blame falls on us.

But if you ask regular Americans about the jobs climate, a surprising number of them seem to think the opposite is true. One recent poll found that more respondents have it completely backward: 37 percent of the public assumes that jobs were actually lost over the past year; only 28 percent realized, correctly, there had been a gain. Among Republicans, the false belief is worse; nearly half believe jobs were lost.

This lack of knowledge matters. Political fortunes rise and fall in part on the health of the job market. As the Clinton 1992 campaign staff kept reminding themselves when gauging how to communicate with voters, “it’s the economy, stupid.”

Washington Post, Lachlan Murdoch, once the ambivalent Fox heir, makes his views clear, Sarah Ellison and Josh Dawsey, April 10, 2022. The News Corp. co-chair, Rupert’s eldest son, left no mystery about his conservative politics in a fiery speech.

Lachlan Murdoch’s first major media moment was also his first public humiliation.

It was 2005, and the oldest son of Rupert Murdoch was on the cover of New York magazine as “The Boy Who Wouldn’t Be King.” The dishy piece outlined how the elder media mogul had undercut his anticipated successor by siding instead with a beloved top executive, Fox News co-founder Roger Ailes, on key programming decisions.

Licking his wounds, Lachlan, then 34 (and shown at left in a 2013 photo), abruptly resigned his role in the family-controlled news empire and fled New York with his wife and child for their native Australia, which he referred to as their “spiritual home.”

It was a move that cemented a public image of the tanned, tattooed surfer as an ambivalent heir. And even as he made his way back to family business, nearly a decade later, and rose again through the ranks, the image remained of a passive Gen-Xer who kept his politics quiet and his ambitions subservient to those of the swaggering conservative billionaire dad who aspired to influence power at the highest global levels.

The unemployment rate is at an encouragingly low point. Less than 4 percent of the labor force is actively seeking work. And the latest monthly Labor Department report showed another healthy spike in the number of new jobs — they’ve been steadily on the rise for many months in a row.

Until last week.

April 8

New York Times, Hollywood Gets a New Giant, John Koblin, April 8, 2022. The megamerger of Discovery and WarnerMedia, expected to close as soon as Friday, would put many of the biggest names in movies, TV and news under one roof.

Discovery, the medium-size media company that began as a small cable network in 1985, is on the brink of something once unthinkable: assuming ownership of a fabled Hollywood company that controls Batman, Harry Potter, “Sex and the City,” “Game of Thrones,” CNN and March Madness.

Discovery Inc. and WarnerMedia are expected to complete their megamerger as soon as Friday afternoon, adding a new behemoth to the entertainment industry. The two companies will combine television, movie and news operations that draw revenue of nearly $50 billion, forming one of the biggest media companies in the country.

The decision by AT&T, WarnerMedia’s parent company, to spin off its entertainment division and merge it with Discovery — in a deal announced in May — will be felt throughout the media world in the months to come. It could push smaller competitors to hunt for deals to beef up in size. And it means that rivals like Netflix, Disney, Amazon and Apple now have a new ferocious competitor for streaming dominance.

The job of making the merged company a success falls to David Zaslav, the garrulous 62-year-old veteran cable TV executive who has been running Discovery for 15 years. He will take over as chief executive of the new company, which will be called Warner Bros. Discovery in a nod to the Hollywood studio started nearly a century ago.

April 7

New York Times, Eric Boehlert, Media Critic and Writer, Dies at 57, Katie Robertson, Updated April 7, 2022. “He was fearless and brilliant in his investigation of hypocrisies and double standards in the media, and his contribution was priceless,” his family said in a statement.

Eric Boehlert, a veteran journalist who was a fierce critic of right-wing misinformation and hypocrisy in the news media, died on Monday in New Jersey. He was 57.

Mr. Boehlert, right, was struck by a New Jersey Transit train while riding his bicycle near the Watchung Avenue station in Montclair. His death was confirmed by his wife, Tracy Breslin.

A frequent commentator on television and radio, as well as a prolific writer, Mr. Boehlert never shied away from searing critiques of what he saw as bias in the mainstream press and the circular impact of media on politics.

After more than a decade as a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a left-leaning media monitoring group, Mr. Boehlert had in recent years started his own newsletter, Press Run, as a vehicle for his commentary.

“I’m devastated for his family and friends and will miss his critical work to counteract misinformation and media bias,” Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.

Born in Utica, N.Y., Mr. Boehlert spent some of his childhood in Indiana before his family moved to Guilford, Conn. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Early in his career, Mr. Boehlert covered the music industry at Billboard and Rolling Stone, before becoming a staff writer at Salon. In 2006, he joined Media Matters.

“His passing is a real loss for truth and will leave a void in the broader media landscape,” the group wrote in a statement posted on Twitter on Wednesday.

Mr. Boehlert was the author of two nonfiction books: Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush, published in 2006, and Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, published in 2009.

After a stint as a media writer for the website Daily Kos, Mr. Boehlert started Press Run in 2020, which he described as “an unfiltered, passionate and proudly progressive critique of the political press in the age of Trump.”

Ms. Breslin said Mr. Boehlert was an avid athlete and cyclist.

“Eric was brilliant and funny and kind,” she said. “He was an amazing father to Jane and Ben, present their entire lives.” Their daughter, Jane Boehlert, remembered him as “a magnificent father, an incredible person.”

“We already miss him deeply,” she said.

In Mr. Boehlert’s last article on Press Run, published the day he died, he questioned journalists’ coverage of the Biden administration, saying the news media was playing down the president’s achievements. (Editor's Note: The Justice Integrity Project had excerpted here that column, Why is the press rooting against Biden? , among a number of others as apt commentary.)

“The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden?”

A statement from Mr. Boehlert’s family, provided to The New York Times by Richard Abate, Mr. Boehlert’s literary agent, described him as “a fierce defender of democracy, social justice and truth in media.”

“He was fearless and brilliant in his investigation of hypocrisies and double standards in the media, and his contribution was priceless,” the family said. “Eric was filled with vibrant enthusiasms and interests in life as a loving husband, father, sibling, uncle and friend.”

April 6

 

National Press Club, News Leaders Statement on Death of Documentarian in Mariupol, Staff Report, April 6, 2022. Following is a statement by Jen Judson, President of the National Press Club and Gil Klein, President of the National Press Club Journalism Institute on the killing of Lithuanian documentarian Mantas Kvedaravicius, shown above, in Ukraine Sunday.

“With the death of Lithuanian documentarian Mantas Kvedaravicius last weekend we count 10 journalists killed during Russia’s war on Ukraine – a staggering number. Kvedaravicius was reportedly killed while trying to leave Mariupol. This tragic incident further emphasizes that Russia is firing upon civilians as they attempt to evacuate cities. Deliberate targeting of civilians – including journalists – is a war crime.”

“Kvedaravicius’s work, ‘Mariupolis,’ was recognized at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016 and in 2011 he received an award from Amnesty International for his film on the war in Chechnya: ‘Barzakh.’” We will know less about what happened in Ukraine because of the tragic loss of this talented documentarian.”

Founded in 1908, the National Press Club is the world’s leading professional organization for journalists. The Club has 3,000 members representing nearly every major news organization and is a leading voice for press freedom in the United States and around the world.

About the National Press Club Journalism Institute

The National Press Club Journalism Institute, the Club’s non-profit affiliate, promotes an engaged global citizenry through an independent and free press and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement.

New York Times, You’re Still Being Tracked on the Internet, Just in a Different Way, Brian X. Chen and Daisuke Wakabayashi, April 6, 2022. Apple and Google are pushing privacy changes, but a shift in digital tracking is giving some platforms a bigger advertising advantage.

The internet industry shuddered last year when Apple introduced privacy measures for the iPhone that threatened to upend online tracking and cripple digital advertising. Google pledged similar privacy actions.

But in less than a year, another type of internet tracking has started taking over. And it is having the unintended effect of reinforcing the power of some of tech’s biggest titans.

The shift suggests that gathering people’s online data for targeted advertising is not going away. That has implications for how companies make money online and how the internet operates. It also underlines the advantages built up by some of the largest digital platforms.

“They’ve entrenched their own power,” Eric Seufert, a media strategist and the author of Mobile Dev Memo, a blog about mobile advertising, said of Apple and Google.

For years, digital businesses relied on what is known as “third party” tracking. Companies such as Facebook and Google deployed technology to trail people everywhere they went online. If someone scrolled through Instagram and then browsed an online shoe store, marketers could use that information to target footwear ads to that person and reap a sale.

But that kind of invasive tracking is being scaled back or blocked by Apple and Google to protect people’s privacy. Last April, Apple introduced a feature so iPhones users could choose not to be followed by different apps. Google also announced a plan to disable the tracking tech in its Chrome web browser by 2023 and said it was working to limit data sharing on Android phones.

Now tracking has shifted to what is known as “first party” tracking. With this method, people are not being trailed from app to app or site to site. But companies are still gathering information on what people are doing on their specific site or app, with users’ consent. This kind of tracking, which companies have practiced for years, is growing.

In other words, Google is accumulating data on its own users’ search queries, location data and contact information. Pinterest is doing the same with its users on its site and app, while TikTok is gathering information on the people who are on its app.

 

Florida Bulldog, Private eye slams ruling worth over $350K to Miami author Julie K. Brown who wrote book about Jeffrey Epstein drama, Noreen Marcus, April 6, 2022. A case about who did what to produce a sensational book rehashing the story of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein entered a new phase in a new forum, Miami-Dade Circuit Court.

An arbitrator rejected private detective Mike Fisten’s $350,000 claim for his work on Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown’s book about the rich serial pedophile.

Jailed in New York for sex trafficking, Epstein, right, apparently committed suicide by hanging himself in August 2019.

Brown and Fisten, a former Miami-Dade County police detective, contracted to split a $1 million publisher’s advance 50-50. Instead, she gave him $150,000 and kept $850,000.

Arbitrator David Lichter agreed with Brown, shown above during an interview on MSNBC, that Fisten breached their contract by failing to perform investigative tasks that were supposed to generate material for the book. Published last year, it expands upon and updates Brown’s award-winning 2018 newspaper series, also called “Perversion of Justice.”

Lichter wrote in his Dec. 30 ruling that Fisten contributed no more than a “negligible” 4.3 per cent of the book’s contents. He criticized as “improper messaging” Fisten’s list of completed tasks and disputed many of them.

After a hearing, Lichter found Brown more credible, though “some of her actions were less than laudatory.” He didn’t elaborate, but he referenced the confidential testimony of lawyer Bradley Edwards, who represents many Epstein victims and was a source for Brown.

Still, Fisten’s “credibility was damaged far more substantially [than Brown’s] and in far more significant ways,” Lichter concluded in his 34-page ruling.

Later he ordered Fisten to pay $58,570 in attorney fees as punishment for discovery violations and for breaching a confidentiality clause by speaking out publicly about the case.

Brown’s lawyer, Steven Peretz, sent Florida Bulldog a statement that says the arbitration award “represents a complete vindication for Ms. Brown.” He noted that Lichter “also awarded substantial attorney fees to Ms. Brown as a sanction against Mr. Fisten for his conduct during the case.”

“We will be moving forward to have the award confirmed in court and we expect the court will readily do so given the arbitrator’s comprehensive and detailed ruling,” Peretz wrote.

Fisten called the ruling “biased and negligent.” He wrote in an email that Brown “made numerous misstatements” in her testimony. “It is for these and many other reasons that we feel we will prevail in our appeal.”

Peretz, when asked about Lichter’s assertion that some of his client’s actions were “less than laudatory,” wrote this: “The arbitrator was unclear about what actions he was referring to … so I cannot comment on that point.”

Florida Bulldog asked Edwards to share his testimony about Brown, the testimony Lichter cited in his ruling.

“Other than being called as a witness and asked questions by both parties, I don’t know enough about the dispute to comment,” he wrote. Edwards said he hasn’t read the arbitration ruling and hasn’t worked with Fisten, once his valued lead investigator, for a decade.

On March 31 Fisten filed a motion in Miami-Dade Circuit Court to vacate the Dec. 30 arbitration award, which both parties had treated as confidential. Lichter’s ruling is an exhibit attached to the motion, making it a public record.

In the motion, Fisten’s lawyer, Andrew Kassier, previews his upcoming appeal. It will be based on Lichter’s “evident partiality” toward Brown and his “misconduct” directed at Fisten. Also, Lichter “refused to hear evidence material to the controversy.” Kassier provides no details.

Fisten has tried to focus public attention on Brown.

Chiefly, she takes credit for single-handedly identifying more than 60 Epstein victims and persuading four of them to do on-camera interviews for the Miami Herald series. But Fisten insists he tracked down almost all the victims, who later became plaintiffs and witnesses, while working as Edwards’s investigator.

In Edwards’s own book, Relentless Pursuit / My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, published in 2020, he writes about meeting Brown in 2017 after she approached him asking for help. At that point he’d already spoken to more than 50 victims, he wrote.

“I had accumulated all of the evidence in these cases and done all of the work,” Edwards wrote. “Unable to imagine the scope of that decade-long task or how voluminous the materials were and how complicated piecing it together was, Julie, like other reporters, wanted to start with my just spoon-feeding her everything and making it simple.”

He wouldn’t do that because he wanted her to appreciate the complexities, Edwards wrote. Instead, he made a list of documents for her to review –- and she persevered. “She followed the road map and stayed on course.”

Edwards praises Brown in his acknowledgements: “Thank you for having the courage to finally publish what other major publications would not. You made the public listen when all other journalists were scared.”

But he’s more fulsome in his praise of Fisten: “No good investigation can be done alone. While I had numerous investigators along the way, you were in the trenches with me during crucial times.

“In addition to game-planning with me, tracking down witnesses, and coordinating surveillance on Epstein, you also guarded my house and my family when things got hairy, for which I am forever grateful,” Edwards wrote.

Fisten isn’t the only one to raise questions and concerns about how Brown pursued and told the Epstein story.

Two victims are suing her for defamation in Miami-Dade Circuit Court. Haley Robson alleges that Brown threatened her when she declined to be interviewed for the Epstein book, then made good on the threat by falsely portraying her as a member of Epstein’s inner circle.

The other plaintiff, Courtney Wild, left, claims Brown falsely stated in her book that after Epstein raped Wild when she was underage, she had sex with him.

Wild’s lawyer, Jeffrey Gutchess, wrote that she suffered abuse by Epstein but never had sex with him. The lawsuit seeks significant money damages and a public apology from Brown.

Wild has been a leader among the Epstein victims, battling for years to undo his shady 2008 plea deal and make him answer to sex-trafficking charges. Wild also pushed for a victims’ compensation fund.

“Brown has sought to take credit away from the victims,” her lawsuit states. “Knowing Ms. Wild had spearheaded each of these major achievements, and not Ms. Brown as she claimed in her book, Ms. Brown sought to debase and defame Ms. Wild,” Gutchess wrote.

April 5

Washington Post, Elon Musk is now the largest Twitter shareholder, setting up a showdown, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Faiz Siddiqui and Taylor Telford, April 5, 2022. His 9.2 percent stake in the company sets up a confrontation with advocates for restricting harmful accounts.

Elon Musk, right, became the largest shareholder of Twitter on Monday, setting the platform up for a potential political showdown over its efforts to limit harmful content, efforts the firebrand Tesla chief executive has indicated that he sees hastening a turn toward censorship.

His surprise investment, which comes days after questioning the company’s commitment to free speech and suggesting he might start his own social platform, sent Twitter stock soaring. While it was not immediately clear what role Musk plans to play, analysts speculated he may try for an activist restructuring that could change the way Twitter polices its platform as well as who it banishes.

Some inside Twitter worry Musk may push Twitter in a libertarian direction, away from blocking or restricting accounts that cause social harm, according to people familiar with internal conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive matters.

Just days after Twitter banned former president Donald Trump in the wake of the Capitol insurrection, Musk wrote on Twitter that “a lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech.”

Some Twitter employees and experts fear Musk’s involvement could also push the company further into chaos after years of investor activism and the sudden departure of former chief executive Jack Dorsey. The company is already at a critical juncture ahead of the 2022 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, when it will have to police related misinformation that could help sway votes.

Musk has a 9.2 percent stake in the social media company, which was disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing and sent shares up 27 percent. His stake, worth nearly $2.9 billion based on the closing price of Twitter on Monday, now dwarfs that of Dorsey, who owns a 2.3 percent stake. Musk tweeted, “Oh hi lol,” greeting users of the social media app where he makes many of his most erratic pronouncements, including news about Tesla, where he heads the company. Musk seemed to realize the potential of his influence almost immediately. By Monday evening, he launched a Twitter poll asking users whether they would like an edit button — a longtime bone of contention among users and the app’s leadership.

 

Washington Post, Trump’s Truth Social in trouble as financial, technical woes mount, Drew Harwell and Josh Dawsey, April 5, 2022. The former president has fumed about the app’s glacial rollout and has been reluctant to post there until it’s a proven success. Three top executives have resigned.

Here’s a truth former president Donald Trump doesn’t want to hear: His social network, Truth Social, is falling apart.

The app — a Twitter look-alike where posts are called “truths” — has seen its downloads plunge so low that it has fallen off the App Store charts. The company is losing investors, executives and attention. And though his adult sons just joined, Trump himself hasn’t posted there in weeks.

Devin Nunes, left, the former member of Congress from California who gave up the seat that he held for 19 years to run the company, had said the app would be “fully operational” by the end of March. But it has been hamstrung by technical issues, including a waiting list that has blocked hundreds of thousands of potential users during its crucial first weeks online.

Trump has privately fumed about the app’s slow rollout and has mused about joining other platforms such as Gettr, one of its biggest competitors, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Spurred by the former president’s frustration, Nunes has worked to install his own people atop the troubled company, leading to the resignations of its chiefs of technology, product development and legal affairs, according to the people familiar with the turmoil. The departures were first reported by Reuters and Politico.

They said Nunes has regularly traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., to brief the former president and discuss the platform’s issues. Trump is holding out hope that the platform will eventually be lucrative, but he has been reluctant to post on it because “it is not ready for prime time,” a close adviser said.

He has, however, continued to pay attention to Twitter, which he has repeatedly criticized as irrelevant since the site banned him last year. He still reviews tweets from politicians and members of the media from time to time, two of the people said.

Truth Social was planned to be the flagship product of the Trump Media & Technology Group, a start-up that Trump’s advisers said would become a “media powerhouse” encompassing online video, entertainment and news.

 

Washington Post, Opinion: Hey, Tucker Carlson, are you still rooting for Russia over Ukraine? Max Boot, right, April 5, 2022. Only someone born yesterday would be remotely surprised by the atrocities revealed in Bucha, Ukraine. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has been committing war crimes since the day he took office. That makes it all the more sinister and enraging that he retains an influential rooting section of right-wing voters in the United States.

The Pew Research Center finds that the number of Republicans expressing confidence in the Russian tyrant has, mercifully, declined from 37 percent in 2006 to just 7 percent today. But some of the loudest and most influential voices in the MAGA movement still refuse to support Ukraine or stop pushing Russian propaganda. Many take an anti-anti Putin stance by criticizing the Ukrainians for resisting the invasion, insisting that the United States has no stake in the conflict, and focusing their ire on “neocons” and “globalists” (which, to my ears, sounds a lot like “Jews”) who are supposedly trying to drag the United States into a war with Russia.

Here, for example, is a manifesto issued on March 31 by isolationists of the left and right — including Sohrab Ahmari, Michael Anton, Glenn Greenwald and Christopher Rufo — blaming “leading interventionists in the United States and Europe,” rather than Putin, for “goading the West into an abyss of war and suffering.”

Here is what Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) said a few weeks ago: “Remember that Zelensky is a thug. Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.” Here is the Daily Wire’s Candace Owens on March 17: “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people.”

Here is Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on March 15: “NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them.” Here is Ohio Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance on Feb. 19: “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”

The worst offenders are also the most influential: former president Donald Trump and Fox “News” host Tucker Carlson, right. Hey, Tucker, are you still rooting for Russia over Ukraine — as you said you were in 2019? Do you still think there’s no reason to “hate Putin” because he isn’t shipping “every middle-class job in your town to Russia” or “teaching your kids to embrace racial discrimination” — as you said on Feb. 22? Hey, Trump, do you still regard Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as an act of “genius,” and do you still view Putin as a “very savvy” guy who “loves his country” — as you said on Feb. 22?

More broadly, will the pro-Putin wing of the GOP stay loyal to the Butcher of Bucha as more evidence of his crimes emerges? The early indications are not promising.

 

Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder (File photo).

Washington Post, Commanders deny withholding revenue. Lawyer claims evidence presented, Liz Clarke, Nicki Jhabvala and Mark Maske, April 5, 2022 (print ed.). Dueling statements issued Monday provide some clarity on allegations made to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

Acrimony over allegations of financial improprieties within the Washington Commanders’ front office escalated Monday with dueling statements from the team and the attorney of the former employee who made the claim to members of Congress.

In their statement, the Commanders identified the essence of the allegations The Washington Post reported March 31 that were being investigated by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

“There has been absolutely no withholding of ticket revenue at any time by the Commanders,” the team’s three-sentence statement read. “Those revenues are subject to independent audits by multiple parties. Anyone who offered testimony suggesting a withholding of revenue has committed perjury, plain and simple.”

Lawyer Lisa Banks, who represents more than 40 former team employees including Jason Friedman, a former vice president of ticketing who worked for the team for more than 20 years, countered with a statement defending her client and noting that he provided the panel with evidence to support the allegations.

The Commanders’ statement “defamed my client, Jason Friedman, who came forward at the request of the Congressional Oversight Committee and testified truthfully, with evidence,” Banks wrote. “Unfortunately, Mr. Friedman is unable to defend himself publicly due to contractual constraints that prevent him from speaking freely. He would be happy to recount his testimony if [team owner] Dan Snyder and the Washington Commanders allow him to do so. I will await their response.”

The House Oversight Committee launched its investigation of Washington in October, dissatisfied with the lack of transparency in the NFL-sponsored investigation into reports of pervasive sexual harassment and toxicity in the team’s workplace.

While the panel’s focus remains on the Commanders’ workplace culture and the NFL’s response, it now is looking into Friedman’s allegations of financial improprieties.

• NBC News, If allegations of withholding payments from league are true, Daniel Snyder likely will be done, Mike Florio

Page Six, Nicolle Wallace marries MSNBC contributor Michael Schmidt, Francesca Bacardi, April 4, 2022. The MSNBC anchor and Schmidt married on Saturday in an intimate ceremony surrounded by immediate family, a spokesperson for the network confirmed to Page Six.

Page Six broke the news in March 2019 that Wallace, 50, and the New York Times writer, 38, began dating. The two met on the set of her show, as he appears as a frequent guest and commentator.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was around Wallace so frequently at the time that the pair disclosed their relationship to network chiefs, who were fine with it, relatively quickly. The network head honchos were also understanding when “Morning Joe” co-anchors Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough coupled up.

April 4

OpEdNews, Opinion: The Three Big Lies of 2022: Two Concern the Pandemic, Steven Jonas, rightl, April 4, 2022. "Three Big Lies," you might ask? "I thought that there was only one." "Well yes," I would say. "There is indeed only one REALLY Big Lie, which is going to have very serious long-term POLITICAL consequences for the United States."

As is well-known, it is indeed the Trumpian Big Lie that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from him, the persistence of which and the belief in it of many people is currently helping the Republican Party lead the nation down the road to fascism. (While this formulation was seen infrequently in political commentary just a few years ago, it is no, unfortunately, becoming commonplace.) And note that I said that it is the Republican Party, not the "Trumpublican Party" as I have referred to it over the past couple of years, that is leading this endeavour.

The Republican strategy is targeted voter suppression (and it is always targeted towards specific population groups, not just aimed at fixing a somewhat creaky system over all). It leads the way in all Republican strategy and tactics, with Trump having little if any active role to play in either the strategy or the tactics other than acting as a cheerleader. Thus, it is clear that it is the Party as a whole that is pulling the nation, or at least significant chunks of it geographically and ideologically, in that direction. Which of course is why I have taken to labelling it the Republo-fascist Party. While it is very important to note that it was Trump himself who began developing the Big Lie message of the "rigged election," actually back in 2016, it is the Republo-fascists that have taken it over for their own, broader, purposes. That is Big Lie No. 1.

Following Big Lie No. 1 of the "stolen election" come the Two Big Lies of the Pandemic, to which the bulk of the rest of this column is devoted. As it happens, they relate closely to the first and to the propaganda that the Republicans are using to drive the nation to fascism. The first of the Two Big Lies of the Pandemic is that the word "Mandate" in the (Democratic) government's program for dealing with the Pandemic and bringing it under control means forcing everybody and anybody to be vaccinated, whether they want to be or not. The second is that any national program for vaccination is comparable to the Nazi Holocaust. This latter one has not been as widely used as the false "mandates" one, but it is gaining in popularity as part of the anti-vaxx propaganda movement. It has been widely promoted by such prominent anti-vaxxers as Bobby Kennedy Jr. (self-styled-in-this-context) Left.

Dr. Steven Jonas, right, MD, MPH, MS, a professor emeritus of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook Medicine (NY) and author / co-author / editor / co-editor of over 35 books. He has been published also on many current affairs news sites. His own political website,stevenjonaspolitics.com, will eventually archive the close to 1,000 political columns he has published since 2004.

He was also a career triathlete (36 seasons, 256 multi-sport races), who is now retired from the sport.

His latest book is Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Punto Press Publishing, (Brewster, NY, 2016). It is available on Kindle from Amazon, and also in hardcover from Amazon. In 1996, he published a ‘future history’ of the United States entitled The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel (Third Edition published by Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, and also available on Amazon.

 
Press Run, Why is the press rooting against Biden? Eric Boehlert, right, April 4, 2022. Burying great news. Like clockwork, the first Friday of the month brought another blockbuster jobs report. The U.S. economy under President Joe Biden added another 400,000-plus new jobs in March, it was announced last week.

Biden is currently on pace, during his first two full years in office, to oversee the creation of 10 million new jobs and an unemployment rate tumbling all the way down to 3 percent. That would be an unprecedented accomplishment in U.S. history. Context: In four years in office, Trump lost three million jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover.

Yet the press shrugs off the good news, determined to keep Biden pinned down. “The reality is that one strong jobs report does not snap the administration out of its current circumstances,” Politico stressed Friday afternoon. How about 11 straight strong job reports, would that do the trick? Because the U.S. economy under Biden has been adding more than 400,000 jobs per month for 11 straight months.

The glaring disconnect between reality and how the press depicts White House accomplishments means a key question lingers: Why is the press rooting against Biden? Is the press either hoping for a Trump return to the White House, or at least committed to keeping Biden down so the 2024 rematch will be close and ‘entertaining’ for the press to cover? Is that why the Ginni Thomas insurrection story was politely marched off the stage after just a few days of coverage last week by the same news outlets that are now in year three of their dogged Hunter Biden reporting? (“ABC This Week” included 19 references to Hunter Biden yesterday.)

Just look at the relentlessly dour economic coverage. For the press, inflation remains the dominant, bad-news-for-Dems economic story. Even on Friday, the day the stellar jobs report was released, “inflation” was mentioned on cable news nearly as often as “jobs,” according to TVeyes.com.

The home-run report itself was often depicted as a mixed bag. These were some of the glass-half-empty headlines that appeared in the wake of the latest runaway numbers:

• “America’s Job Market Is On Fire. Here’s Why It Doesn’t Feel Like It” (CNN)
• “Booming Job Growth Is a Double-Edged Sword For Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Why a Great Jobs Report Can’t Save Joe Biden” (CNN)
• “Unemployment Hits Pandemic Low in March, But Uncertainty Looms Ahead” (Washington Post)
• “Biden Gets a Strong Jobs Report, But a Sour Mood Still Prevails” (Washington Post)

April 3

 

New York Times, The Latest Covid Misinformation Star Says He Invented the Vaccines, Davey Alba, April 3, 2022. Dr. Robert Malone (shown above in a screenshot from right-wing strategist Steve Bannon's radio show "War Room," says he helped invent mRNA vaccines and has been wronged for decades. Now he’s spreading unfounded claims about the vaccines and the virus.

Dr. Malone spent decades working in academic centers and with start-ups seeking to bring new medical treatments to market and to combat the Zika and Ebola outbreaks. But in recent months, as the coronavirus pandemic has persisted, he has taken up an entirely different role: spreading misinformation about the virus and vaccines on conservative programs.

In many of his appearances, Dr. Malone questions the severity of the coronavirus, which has now killed nearly one million people in the United States, and the safety of the coronavirus vaccines, which have been widely found to be safe and effective at preventing serious illness and death. His statements in late December on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” one of the most popular podcasts in the country, with 11 million listeners per episode on average, were at the center of the uproar over Mr. Rogan’s role in spreading bad information about the virus.

Dr. Malone also routinely sells himself on the shows as the inventor of mRNA vaccines, the technology used by Pfizer and Moderna for their Covid-19 shots, and says he doesn’t get the credit he deserves for their development. While he was involved in some early research into the technology, his role in its creation was minimal at best, say half a dozen Covid experts and researchers, including three who worked closely with Dr. Malone.

In spreading these exaggerations and unfounded claims, Dr. Malone joins medical professionals and scientists, like Dr. Joseph Mercola, left, and Dr. Judy Mikovits, right, whose profiles have grown during the pandemic as they spread misinformation about mask-wearing and convoluted conspiracy theories about virus experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But unlike many of them, Dr. Malone is quite new to the right-wing media world, first appearing regularly on podcasts last June. Even two years into the pandemic, new misinformation stars are being minted. And in today’s media echo chamber — powered by social media algorithms and a tightknit network of politicians and influencers promoting debunked claims — they can quickly catapult to stardom.

In addition to his regular appearances on conservative shows, Dr. Malone has more than 134,000 subscribers to his Substack newsletter. About 8,000 pay the $5 monthly cost, he said, which would amount to at least $31,200 in monthly revenue. And mentions of him on social media, on cable television and in print and online news outlets have soared — to more than 300,000 so far this year, according to Zignal, a media research firm.

The coronavirus pandemic has “given rise to a class of influencers who build conspiracy theories and recruit as many people into them as possible,” said Emerson T. Brooking, a resident senior fellow for the Atlantic Council who studies digital platforms. “These influencers usually have a special claim to expertise and a veneer of credibility.”

“And almost without exception, these influencers feel that they have been wronged by mainstream society in some way,” Mr. Brooking added.

Dr. Malone earned a medical degree from Northwestern University in 1991, and for the next decade taught pathology at the University of California, Davis, and the University of Maryland. He then turned to biotech start-ups and consulting. His résumé says he was “instrumental” in securing early-stage approval for research on the Ebola vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Merck in the mid-2010s. He also worked on repurposing drugs to treat Zika.

In extended interviews at his home over two days, Dr. Malone said he was repeatedly not recognized for his contributions over the course of his career, his voice low and grave as he recounted perceived slights by the institutions he had worked for.

 

NBC News, If allegations of withholding payments from league are true, Daniel Snyder likely will be done, Mike Florio, April 3, 2022. Saturday night’s bombshell could indeed be the last straw for the NFL and Daniel Snyder, above.

A.J. Perez of FrontOfficeSports.com reported last night that Congress is exploring whether the Washington Commanders withheld money that should have been surrendered to the league’s visiting-team pool. As a league source with knowledge of the dynamics among owners told PFT, this would become Snyder’s “death knell” as an owner, if it’s proven to be true.

There also would be an effort to force Snyder to make his payments, whether through the court system or an internal arbitration.

NFL teams don’t keep all of their ticket revenue, and they don’t directly share any of the money from each given game with the opponent. Instead, 40 percent of the gate from every game goes into a league-wide pool that goes in equal portions to all teams. (Home teams deduct 15 percent of the total ticket revenue for expenses, making it basically a 66-34 percent share of the gross and a 60-40 split of the net.)

So, if this is true, Snyder got 1/32nd of the 40-percent payments generated by the other 31 teams — and he failed to pony up all of the 40-percent chunk that should have gone to his partners.

His partners have protected him when it comes to the investigation regarding workplace misconduct because, indirectly, they are protecting themselves from having similar allegations threaten the hold on their franchises. If it can be proven that he has been picking his partners’ pockets, his partners quite likely will be kicking his ass out of the house.

April 2

 

Ukrainian photographer and documentary maker Maks Levin in Kyiv on May 5, 2019 (Photo by Genya Savilov of AFP via Getty Images).

HuffPost, Missing Ukrainian Photojournalist Maks Levin Found Dead In Combat Zone, Hilary Hanson, April 2, 2022. Maksim "Maks" Levin was a photographer and videographer who worked with a number of news organizations in Ukraine and internationally.

Ukrainian photojournalist and filmmaker Maksim “Maks” Levin has been found dead after going missing last month.

Levin’s body was found in the village of Huta Mezhyhirska in the Vyshhorod district ― an area that’s been shelled heavily by Russian forces ― where he had been reporting on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office said in a statement that Levin was killed by gunshots fired by members of the Russian military, The Associated Press reported. An investigation into his death is underway.

The Kyiv-born Levin, 40, is survived by his wife and four sons. He had worked with numerous Ukrainian media outlets as well international news organizations, including The Associated Press, Reuters and the BBC.

“Maks has provided compelling photos and video from Ukraine to Reuters since 2013,” Reuters global visuals managing editor John Pullman said in a statement. “His death is a huge loss to the world of journalism.”

 

Washington Post, Huawei’s CFO promoted to a top post months after U.S. extradition deal, Eva Dou, April 2, 2022. Meng, above, daughter of Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei, is now one of three rotating chairs who helm the tech giant for six-month intervals.

Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies has promoted chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou to a key role just half a year after the end of her U.S. extradition fight, setting up a potential family succession at one of China’s most important companies.

The promotion makes 50-year-old Meng, daughter of Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, one of three rotating chairs who helm Huawei for six-month intervals. Ren, 77, remains chief executive.

Ren had long said his children would not succeed him at Huawei. Meng, who spent most of her Huawei career in the finance department, was widely seen as lacking the engineering expertise that would allow Huawei’s employees to accept her as their leader. But her lengthy house arrest in Canada has raised her popularity within the company and across China.

Meng entered the international spotlight in December 2018, when she was detained in Canada at the request of U.S. authorities. Her detention sparked a global standoff after China jailed two Canadian nationals on vague charges, in what Western officials said was an example of “hostage diplomacy.” Meng remained in house arrest in Vancouver for almost three years battling extradition to the United States.

She returned to China in September after cutting a deal with the U.S. Justice Department in which she acknowledged helping to conceal the company’s direct dealings in Iran, which violated U.S. sanctions. While Meng admitted illegal conduct, she did not have to plead guilty as part of a deferred prosecution agreement.

 

Press Run, Commentary: CNN gives Herschel Walker a pass, Eric Boehlert, right, April 2, 2022. One of the disturbing consequences of the press spending so many years refusing to call Trump a liar is that the tepid media trend now extends to the rest of the GOP at a time when key players have learned that they can make anything up and the press won’t say so.

CNN on Friday posted a revealing story (above) about how Herschel Walker, Trump’s pick to be Georgia’s next U.S. Senator, spent years telling crowds that he graduated in the top 1% of his class from the University of Georgia, where he was a star running back in the 1980’s.In truth, Walker never graduated from college. The ridiculous part: CNN gently claimed Walker was guilty of “overstating his academic achievements.”

Question: If a high-profile Democratic candidate fabricated his/her bio this aggressively, do you the think the press would treat it so politely?

CNN, Investigation: GOP Senate candidate Herschel Walker has been overstating his academic achievements for years, Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck,  April 1, 2022. For years, Herschel Walker, shown above in a screenshot from HillTV.com, has told the same inspiring story: that he graduated in the top 1% of his class at the University of Georgia. He's told the story, according to a review of his speeches by CNN's KFile, during motivational speeches over the years and as recently as 2017. The only problem: it's not true.

Walker, who is a candidate in the Republican primary race for US Senate in Georgia, acknowledged in December that he did not graduate from Georgia after the Atlanta-Journal Constitution first reported that the false claim was listed on his campaign website.

But a CNN KFile review found that Walker himself has been repeating the claim for years. Walker's comments in 2017, and others made over the years, show the former football star repeatedly misrepresented his academic credentials.

"And all of sudden I started going to the library, getting books, standing in front of a mirror reading to myself," Walker said in a 2017 motivational speech. "So that Herschel that all the kids said was retarded become valedictorian of his class. Graduated University of Georgia in the top 1% of his class."

Walker also made the claim in another interview in 2017.

"I also was in the top 1% of my graduating class of college," Walker told Sirius XM radio.

Walker did not graduate from Georgia, where he was a star running back after entering as a prized high school recruit. A profile of Walker from 1982 in the Christian-Science Monitor and an article in The New York Times said he maintained a B average at the school. Walker himself told The Chicago Tribune in 1985 he maintained a 3.0 before his grades dropped. He left to play professional football before graduating and, though having repeatedly said he was returning to obtain his degree, he never received a diploma.

The Walker campaign did not provide proof of Walker's claims when asked by CNN, but they defended his record as a professional athlete. Walker is endorsed by former President Donald Trump and is expected to be the Republican nominee to run against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock in November.

The claim was removed from his website between December and January, according to screenshots from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

That was not the only claim about Walker's education that was adjusted on his website at the time. After a review of the revised site, CNN's KFile found another little-noticed claim was removed that said Walker graduated valedictorian of his high school. The website now says that Walker graduated "top of his class." The claim still remains on the Heisman Winners page for Walker.

While Walker was a top student at his high school and the president of the Beta Club -- he maintained an "A" average to be in the school's Beta Club -- CNN's KFile found no evidence he was the class valedictorian.

Walker has mentioned in numerous speeches over the years, including in the 2017 speech where he claimed to have graduated in the top 1% of his college class, and in his 2008 autobiography that he was class valedictorian at Johnson County High School. The street where Johnson County High School resides was officially renamed "Herschel Walker Drive" in 2017 in honor of Walker's football achievements.

April 1

 

Press Run, Commentary: The media's Hunter Biden debacle, Whitewater II, Eric Boehlert, right, April 1, 2022. Eagerly deploying newsroom resources to the perpetually overblown Hunter Biden story — just as Trump and Fox News kick off a new smear campaign — CNN, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post gladly did the GOP’s bidding this week. Signing off on the idea that the Hunter Biden story remains a scandal simply because Republicans say so, the press has adopted a Whitewater-like obsession with the perpetual dead-end story.

One White House reporter on Thursday, doing his best Fox News impression, asked if President Joe Biden would take the extraordinary step of pardoning Hunter (shown above) — who is not accused of any crime.

Producing remarkably similar articles that were published nearly simultaneously this week, the CNN.com, Journal, and Post efforts all swung and missed. On paper, there’s no reason why they would pick the exact same moment to churn out nearly 7,000 words of Biden reporting. Especially since none of the investigations dug up any startling revelations about his business dealings from the previous decade.

• • Washington Post, Investigation: Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company, Matt Viser, Tom Hamburger and Craig Timberg, March 31, 2022 (print ed.). A Washington Post review confirms key details and offers new documentation of Biden family interactions with Chinese executives.
  • Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis: The truth about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian ‘bio labs,’ Glenn Kessler

The copycat nature of the reports raises questions about who the unnamed sources for these stories were, and if there was a coordinated effort by Republican operatives to push simultaneous Hunter updates.

It’s also telling that the hand-delivered leaks arrived the same time we’re learning even more about the Trump White House’s criminality. Specifically, the administration’s clear lawbreaking surrounding the January 6th coup attempt.

This was the big ah-ha moment from the Post piece: “The new documents illustrate the ways in which his family profited from relationships built over Joe Biden’s decades in public service.”

And?

The press can’t provide an answer to the “and” — they can’t find anything illegal or shocking — so they pretend that the business deals themselves are newsworthy and that Hunter’s career requires years of media digging. Meanwhile, the recent revelation about a Supreme Court Justice’s wife strategizing with the Trump White House to overturn an election has evaporated from most newsrooms in less than one week.

After years of media focus there’s nothing to suggest Joe Biden was involved in his son’s business dealings or profited from them in any way, or that the senior Biden ever did anything remotely unethical in connection with Hunter’s career.

The son has never run for office, never served in the government, never lobbied to change U.S. policy, and never acted as an advisor to his father in any way.

The fact is, he remains under investigation for matters related to tax payments and his foreign work, and there is a chance he could be indicted. Although, as the New York Times recently reported, Biden recently paid off “a significant tax liability,” which “could make it harder for prosecutors to win a conviction or a long sentence for tax-related offenses.”

It’s a relatively small stakes tax case that has produced a ridiculous amount of breathless Beltway coverage, much to the delight of the GOP. Context: 11 Trump associates who worked directly with the president have been indicted on criminal charges.

The press relentlessly pursues the Hunter story because they insist there’s the appearance of conflict of interest given the family connections. But Hunter began making overseas energy deals just as his father was leaving office in 2016 after eight years serving with President Barack Obama. If Hunter wanted to cash in on his father’s vice presidency, why did he wait until the end of his father’s vice presidency?

Still, the media fixation continues.

“I’m so glad our colleagues are still doing strong reporting on this story,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins cheered last week. “Hunter Biden’s scummy business dealings shouldn’t be swept under the rug any more than anyone else’s.”

Swept under the rug? Good grief. Since 2017, “Hunter Biden” has appeared in more than 800 articles and columns published by the Times, according to Nexis.

 

New York Times, Seven Decades Later, the 1950 Census Bares Its Secrets, Michael Wines, Updated April 1, 2022. Federal law kept the answers on the census forms secret for 72 years. The forms went online Friday, a bonanza for historians and the merely curious.

At 12:01 a.m. on Friday, precisely 72 years after enumerators began knocking on the doors of some 46 million American houses and apartments, the federal government made public what they learned: the ages, incomes, addresses, ancestry and a trove of other facts about the 150.7 million people who were counted in the 1950 census.

Those millions of census forms, painstakingly filled out by hand in ink, were posted online by the National Archives and Records Administration, which by law has kept them private until now. The records, searchable by name and address, offer an intimate look at a nation on the cusp of the modern era — for the merely curious, a glimpse of the life parents or grandparents led, but for historians and genealogists, a once-in-a-decade bonanza of secrets unveiled.

“This is the Super Bowl and the Olympics combined, and it’s only every 10 years — it’s awesome stuff,” Matt Menashes, the executive director of the National Genealogical Society, said in an interview. “What’s so great about these points of data is that it helps you paint a picture — not just relationships, but what society was like.”

The last release of similar data was in 2012, when the National Archives made details of the 1940 census public. The government has imposed a 72-year ban on the release of census records since 1952, when the Census Bureau turned over to the National Archives all the data it had collected since the first census in 1790.

Trump Administration White House Photographer Shealah Craighead (Photo by Doug Mills of the New York Times).

New York Times, She Took the White House Photos. Trump Moved to Take the Profit, Eric Lipton and Maggie Haberman, Updated April 1, 2022. The former chief White House photographer made plans to publish a book of Trump photos. The former president had other plans.

As President Donald J. Trump’s tenure came to an end, the chief White House photographer, who had traveled the world with him and spent countless hours inside the White House snapping pictures, notified Mr. Trump’s aides that she intended to publish a book collecting some of her most memorable images.

This was hardly a radical idea: Official photographers from every White House since President Ronald Reagan’s have published their own books. Barack Obama and George W. Bush were so supportive that they wrote forewords for them.

But like so much else involving Mr. Trump, the plan by his chief photographer, Shealah Craighead, did not follow this bipartisan norm.

First, aides to Mr. Trump asked her for a cut of her book advance payment, in exchange for his writing a foreword and helping promote the book, according to former associates of Mr. Trump.

Then Mr. Trump’s team asked Ms. Craighead to hold off on her book project to allow the former president to take Ms. Craighead’s photos and those of other White House staff photographers and publish his own book, which is now selling for as much as $230 a copy.

That the profits from Ms. Craighead’s labor are now going into Mr. Trump’s pocket has left several of Mr. Trump’s former aides upset — but not exactly surprised.

“Shea’s a very talented photographer and this was really all of her hard work,” said Stephanie Grisham, who served as the White House press secretary for Mr. Trump and wrote her own book, referring to Ms. Craighead by her nickname. “I just keep thinking: What a shame that he is actually now profiting off of it. But then again, this is the guy who is hawking caps and all kinds of stuff right now to raise money for himself.”

Eric Draper, who was the chief White House photographer during Mr. Bush’s tenure, said the move was disrespectful to Ms. Craighead.

“It’s a slap in the face,” Mr. Draper said, adding that he had spoken with Ms. Craighead last year about her plan to do her own book. “I would be disappointed if I were in her shoes.”

The 317-page book Mr. Trump published in December, titled Our Journey Together, includes no photo credits. It does not mention any of the photographers who took the images until the last page, where he briefly offered a “grateful acknowledgment” to “all the phenomenal White House photographers,” listing them by name, including Ms. Craighead, whose pictures make up much of the book.

There is no legal prohibition on Mr. Trump assembling and publishing photographs that a White House staff member took during his tenure; under federal law, those photographs are considered in the public domain and not subject to copyright. There is a public Flickr account, now managed by the National Archives, that has 14,995 photos from the Trump White House, a third of them listing Ms. Craighead as the photographer.

New York Times, Jen Psaki is said to be in talks to join MSNBC, John Koblin, April 1, 2022. Ms. Psaki joined President Biden’s administration as his first press secretary. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, is in advanced talks with MSNBC to join the network after she leaves the Biden administration, according to two people familiar with the negotiations.

Ms. Psaki could leave the White House as soon as next month, one of the people said.

While the details of her role are still being discussed, the negotiations have centered on an arrangement in which she could host shows both for MSNBC and for Peacock, the streaming platform of MSNBC’s parent, NBCUniversal. Ms. Psaki could also make regular appearances on other MSNBC shows as well as on NBC News, the people said.

Though a deal is not yet finalized and could still fall apart, Ms. Psaki is now only talking with NBCUniversal officials, the two people said. CNN had also been pursuing bringing Ms. Psaki aboard, one of them said.

Washington Post, A Jan. 6 pastor divides his Tennessee community with extremist views, Annie Gowen, April 1, 2022 (print ed.). The pastor promised his followers that this church service would be like no other, and the event on a cold Sunday in March did not disappoint.

“Devil, your foot soldiers are coming out tonight, they’re coming all the way out. We will expel them,” Pastor Greg Locke howled from the stage in a crowded white tent. “You gotta leave, Devil,” he shouted, “you gotta get out!”

Wielding a microphone as he paced the stage, his wife Tai at his side, Locke called out “spirits” of anger, rage, bitterness, lust and envy.

“Spirit of molestation, spirit of abuse, get out right now!” Locke commanded.

“Every spirit of homosexuality, lesbianism, come out, come out,” his wife ordered. “Transgenderism, gender dysphoria, come out.”

“We rebuke it, we rebuke it!” Locke yelled.

The tent slowly took on a spirit of its own. Worshipers began writhing as if in pain, others waved their hands in the air in benediction. “Amens” began to mix with the guttural sound of growling, moaning and praying in tongues.

“If you’ve had the covid-19 shot, I’m telling you you’ve got poison in your veins,” Locke thundered. “We call out the covid-19 vaccine out right now. Keep that demonic spirit out of you right now in the name of Jesus!”

Some fell to the ground, pawing at cedar chips, or wretched into silver vomit buckets that had been set at the end of each row of white folding chairs.

To those unfamiliar with charismatic worship style, the scene might be easily dismissed or mocked. Yet Locke, 45, head of the Global Vision Bible Church, boasts millions of followers, many of them online, gaining national attention during the coronavirus crisis when he kept his church open and defied the mask mandates of the “fake pandemic.”

But to his critics, he is spreading a dangerous message of hate that is taking root in some conservative churches. His rising prominence also comes as many mainstream faith leaders and experts on extremism grow increasingly concerned about the spread of White Christian nationalism, the belief that patriotism and love of America are explicitly intertwined with White evangelical Christianity.

Locke is an “ambassador” of a movement where he and other pastors around the country appear at rallies and tent revivals preaching Donald Trump’s fraudulent claims that the election was stolen as a new holy war, according to Amanda Tyler, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, an organization dedicated to religious freedom.

“If someone is convinced that God has preordained an election result for a messiah-like candidate and is told over and over that the election was stolen, that erodes trust in elections and democracy,” Tyler said.

Locke, in an interview, was defiant that he is not a Christian nationalist, but he makes no apologies for bringing politics into the pulpit. He was on the steps of the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and has continued to preach the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Locke and his ministry have divided this quiet town on the outskirts of Nashville with many residents distressed at the thousands who flock here to hear him and the attention he attracts, most recently with a book burning where he and followers threw copies of the “Harry Potter” and “Twilight” series and Disney villain merchandise into a giant bonfire. He has declared he now wants to “deliver” people from demonic influences and witchcraft.

Washington Post, Turmoil at CBS News over Trump aide Mick Mulvaney’s punditry gig, Jeremy Barr, April 1, 2022 (print ed.). Mulvaney’s punditry gig
A network executive said they want to hire more Republicans to gain ‘access’ ahead of a ‘likely’ Democratic midterm wipeout.

CBS News’s decision to hire former Trump administration official Mick Mulvaney as a paid on-air contributor is drawing backlash within the company because of his history of bashing the press and promoting the former president’s fact-free claims.

But a top network executive seemed to lay the groundwork for the decision in a staff meeting earlier this month, when he said the network needed to hire more Republicans to prepare for a “likely” Democratic midterm wipeout.

“If you look at some of the people that we’ve been hiring on a contributor basis, being able to make sure that we are getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms,” CBS News’s co-president Neeraj Khemlani told the staff of the network’s morning show, according to a recording of his comments obtained by The Washington Post. “A lot of the people that we’re bringing in are helping us in terms of access to that side of the equation.”

Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, Ohio), Court rejects appeals by Oberlin College, Gibson's Bakery from 2019 civil trial, Dave O'Brien, April 1, 2022. The 9th District Court of Appeals in Akron on Thursday rejected appeals by both Oberlin College and Gibson's Bakery over the results of a 2019 civil trial.

The court unanimously upheld all of Lorain County Common Pleas Judge John Miraldi's rulings in the bakery's long-running civil case against the college, stemming from student protests regarding alleged racist behavior by the business on West College Street in Oberlin in November 2016.

A jury awarded the bakery and its owners, the late David and Allyn W. "Grandpa" Gibson, more than $44 million in damages in June 2019.

Miraldi lowered that to $25 million to conform with state law, but he also awarded more than $6.2 million in fees to the Gibsons' attorneys. The monetary award has been stayed pending the appeals process.

In a 50-page ruling on the dueling appeals filed by the college and the Gibsons, Judges Donna Carr, Jennifer Hensal and Betty Sutton overruled three arguments made by the college and one by the bakery.

The court said Miraldi was right to deny the college's request for a new trial and that his rulings on the amount of damages and attorney fees owed the Gibsons were appropriate.

The Gibsons also appealed the damages award, saying it didn't sufficiently punish the college for its behavior. The appeals court also rejected that argument.

Through the trial and a more than two-year appeals process and the deaths of both David and Grandpa Gibson, the Gibson family persevered, attorney Lee Plakas said.

"The Gibsons fought the good fight, as the family has done for over 130 years," he said Thursday. "Somewhere high above us, Grandpa and Dave Gibson are smiling to know that the truth still matters."

The unanimous appeals court decision "shows that the judges recognized the importance of the case on both a regional and national level and methodically and insightfully dissected the evidence and the record which supported the verdict," Plakas said. "I was very impressed with the judges' command of and reference to specific evidentiary portions of the very large record that confirmed, even to the judges, that in fact truth does still matter."

In a statement provided to The Chronicle-Telegram on Thursday, Oberlin College said it was "obviously disappointed that the appeals court affirmed the judgment in its ruling earlier today."

"We are reviewing the Court’s opinion carefully as we evaluate our options and determine next steps," it said. "In the meantime, we recognize that the issues raised by this case have been challenging, not only for the parties involved in the lawsuit, but for the entire Oberlin community. We remain committed to strengthening the partnership between the college, the city of Oberlin and its residents, and the downtown business community. We will continue in that important work while remaining focused on our core educational mission."

The ruling

The appeals court noted the "significant local and national media attention" around the case, and how much of the outside focus "has been on an individual’s First Amendment right to protest and voice opinions in opposition to events occurring around them locally, nationally and globally."

The appeals court did not take those arguments into consideration, Carr wrote.

The appeals court "must emphasize, however, that the sole focus of this appeal is on the separate conduct of Oberlin and (former Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith) Raimondo that allegedly caused damage to the Gibsons, not on the First Amendment rights of individuals to voice opinions or protest," she wrote.

Oberlin College, and media rights and free speech groups that filed briefs on its behalf, argued that a finding of defamation "could have a chilling effect on students' rights to free speech at colleges and universities across the country."

Miraldi agreed, but that wasn't the issue at hand, the appeals court said. Instead, "the Gibsons' libel claim focused solely on whether Oberlin had disseminated false, written statements of fact that caused the Gibsons significant harm," the appeals court found.

In one of three "assignments of error," Oberlin College argued that Miraldi improperly denied its request to dismiss the case in its favor or overturn the jury's verdict.

It argued that the Gibsons failed to prove that the college libeled them or the bakery and that any alleged libel was constitutionally protected opinion.

Students protesting the arrest of three of their number gathered outside the bakery for two days in November 2016. They passed out flyers saying the bakery had a long history of racist discrimination and profiling.

Raimondo also was there and the appeals court said testimony at the trial was that she and other college employees actively passed out flyers and assisted students who were protesting.

Allegations that bakery employee Allyn D. Gibson — the son and grandson of the owners — "assaulted" a student for shoplifting in an incident that was the catalyst for the student protests were on the flyers. The allegation was repeated in an Oberlin College Student Senate resolution that was posted on campus.

The college argued the flyer and senate resolution were simply opinions, "but it has focused its arguments throughout this case on statements alleging merely that the Gibsons were racists," Carr wrote. "Despite Oberlin’s arguments to the contrary, the potentially libelous statements in this case include much more than calling the Gibsons 'racists.'"

In fact, Miraldi found "that both the flyer and the Senate Resolution were not statements of constitutionally protected opinion but were defamatory," Carr wrote, and that he focused "on the statements about the Gibsons and their bakery having a history of racial profiling and discrimination toward students and residents and the statements about an 'assault' of a student by an owner or owners of the bakery."

Miraldi "found that allegations of an assault, if untrue, were defamatory per se and Oberlin has not raised a timely or proper challenge to that ruling by the trial court," Carr wrote.

A "reasonable reader" of the flyer and resolution could be led to believe that the Gibsons "had a verifiable history of racially profiling shoplifters on that basis for years," even though no such testimony was offered or allowed in court.

And "a reasonable person could conclude that Oberlin (College) took actions to directly publish and/or assist in publishing the flier," Carr wrote.

The Gibsons called multiple witnesses to testify that they had never experienced racism while working at or patronizing the store, while Oberlin College employees who tried to testify they had heard reports or rumors of racial profiling or discrimination had their testimony rejected as hearsay.

The college "did not call witnesses to testify about their personal experiences with the Gibsons. Instead, the defendants sought to have Oberlin administrators testify about 'what Oberlin heard' about the Gibsons from community members," Carr wrote. "Oberlin’s excluded evidence was hearsay, while the Gibsons' evidence on this issue was not."

Oberlin College also argued the Gibsons had no claim against Raimondo for interfering with the business relationship between the bakery and the college, but the appeals court rejected that argument.

David Gibson and Allyn W. "Grandpa" Gibson were required to prove at trial that Oberlin College intended to cause, knew or should have known that it would cause serious emotional distress, and that its conduct was "extreme and outrageous, going beyond all bounds of decency and considered intolerable in a civilized society" causing "psychic injury" or "mental anguish beyond what a reasonable person would be expected to endure," according to the law.

The appeals court said any statements of alleged libel were not protected by the First Amendment. The Gibsons were not public figures, for whom the rules are different when it comes to allegations of libel, the court ruled.

The Gibsons presented evidence that when the college learned "that the student allegations of assault and racial profiling might be false," it started doing business with the bakery again but refused to correct the statements in the flyer or the Student Senate resolution.

"The Gibsons also presented evidence that they had been continually taunted and harassed for many months, that their business and property had been vandalized, and that Grandpa Gibson had broken his back after an encounter with someone he believed was trying to harass him or break into his apartment," Carr wrote, adding that the appeals court "cannot conclude that reasonable minds could only conclude that this conduct failed to rise to the level of extreme and outrageous."

Oberlin College had also requested a new trial, a request Miraldi denied. In its appeal, it argued Miraldi gave the jury bad instructions about libel, improperly excluded evidence and should have reduced compensatory damages.

The appeals court disagreed, saying Miraldi properly instructed the jury.

Oberlin College failed to cite any legal authority to support different jury instructions, didn't give Miraldi grounds for its objection and forfeited its right to raise the issue in a motion for a new trial or on appeal, Carr wrote.

Miraldi also properly kept testimony about the shoplifting incident that led to the protest out of the civil trial, the appeals court ruled.

The jury originally awarded the Gibsons more than $11 million in compensatory damages and $33 million in punitive damages, for a total of $44 million that Miraldi reduced to $25 million under Ohio law.

It was up to Oberlin College to demonstrate that Miraldi made mistakes in his rulings on capping monetary damages — which the appeals court ruled it did not.

The appeals court "will not make an argument for Oberlin" on that matter, Carr wrote.

The Gibsons' argument that punitive monetary damages didn't go far enough toward punishing Oberlin College for damaging their reputation and the reputation of the bakery was flawed because the family didn't establish a constitutional right to "a particular degree of punitive damages."

The Ohio Supreme Court has held that defendants subject to punitive damages also have a right to fairness "which requires that they receive notice of the severity of the penalty the state may impose for their conduct," Carr wrote.

The Gibsons "failed to establish" that caps on punitive damages "infringed on their constitutional rights," she wrote.

The five-week trial in 2019 was extended by a sixth week for arguing motions, involved 33 witnesses, 32 depositions taken by the college, and 33 motions by the college that the Gibsons and their lawyers had to respond to, according to the bakery's attorneys.

The Gibsons' attorneys spent 14,417 hours on the case, at an average hourly rate of $290, according to testimony in the case, and Miraldi ordered the college to pay them more than $6.2 million in fees.

His calculation also was based on the skills of the attorneys involved, the time and labor involved and the difficulty of the issues in the case, he said, and the appeals court agreed.

Plakas said David Gibson, who died in November 2019 after battling cancer, had worried the college would wait him and his father out until they died. Grandpa Gibson died Feb. 12.

March 30

Washington Post, Investigation: Facebook paid GOP firm to malign TikTok, Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell, The firm, Targeted Victory, pushed local operatives across the country to boost messages calling TikTok a threat to American children. “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger,'" one campaign director said.

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

Targeted Victory needs to “get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using,” a director for the firm wrote in a February email.

Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.

“Bonus point if we can fit this into a broader message that the current bills/proposals aren’t where [state attorneys general] or members of Congress should be focused,” a Targeted Victory staffer wrote.

The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine

The emails, which have not been previously reported, show the extent to which Meta and its partners will use opposition-research tactics on the Chinese-owned, multibillion-dollar rival that has become one of the most downloaded apps in the world, often outranking even Meta’s popular Facebook and Instagram apps. In an internal report last year leaked by the whistleblower Frances Haugen, Facebook researchers said teens were spending “2-3X more time” on TikTok than Instagram, and that Facebook’s popularity among young people had plummeted.

Targeted Victory declined to respond to questions about the campaign, saying only that it has represented Meta for several years and is “proud of the work we have done.”

In one email, a Targeted Victory director asked for ideas on local political reporters who could serve as a “back channel” for anti-TikTok messages, saying the firm “would definitely want it to be hands off.”

In other emails, Targeted Victory urged partners to push stories to local media tying TikTok to dangerous teen trends in an effort to show the app’s purported harms. “Any local examples of bad TikTok trends/stories in your markets?” a Targeted Victory staffer asked.

“Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids,’” the staffer wrote.

Press Run, Commentary: Are only Dems guilty of "gaffes?" Eric Boehlert, right, March 30, 2022. Most of President Joe Biden’s historic foreign policy speech given over the weekend was washed away by the press.

For days, journalists fixated not on how the Poland address marked a fundamental change in the West’s relationship with Russia, but on a nine-word ad-lib that Biden added to the text, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” in reference to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Journalists rushed in to claim the “gaffe” had produced “shock waves” around the world. (It did not.)

Swinging into theater criticism mode and searching for a conflict narrative, the press obsessed over the semantics story, portraying Biden as “undisciplined” and creating a monster “distraction” — an “unforced error” — as the war in Ukraine drags on.

Biden doubled down, saying that he was expressing his “moral outrage” over the mass killing that Putin had unleashed. He confirmed his comment came from the heart and did not represent a policy change for the U.S., which is not trying to change the regime in Moscow.

Still, journalists refused to drop the weird gotcha coverage. They hit Biden on Monday with 14 separate questions at a press briefing (“It sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia”), pretending the story was still shrouded in confusion. Meanwhile, the press didn’t ask a single question about the state of the Ukraine war.

The media theatrics were especially galling since the previous president spent four years struggling to string together coherent sentences, garbling his way through a presidency.

Famous for being a habitual liar, as well as boasting often impossible-to-follow syntax that left people scratching their heads trying to make sense of his oddball pronouncements, Trump obliterated the idea that an occasional gaffe ought to define a politician, and the press stopped caring about his nonstop missteps. (To this day, Trump thinks "stealth" fighter planes are invisible to the human eye.)

Biden’s nine-word comment about Putin? That was Katie bar the door for the media — “gaffe” was mentioned on cable news over 100 times with regards to the Biden-Putin story, according to TVeyes.

It certainly appears the breathless pursuit of “gaffes” is a sport the press plays only with Democrats. “You will notice that the use of "gaffe" almost disappeared during Trump's term as president because most of what he said was a gaffe— or would have been under a previous president,” noted New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.

How many news articles and television reports did you see in 2020 about Trump "gaffes" and how they might stand in the way of his re-election bid?

Probably the same number as I did, which was basically zero. Even though Trump was urging people to inject bleach into their veins.

The press for years has been overly interested in Biden “gaffe” coverage. The president famously grew up with a severe stutter, which he overcame but sometimes finds himself at a temporary loss for words. The press likes to lean into that to generate news, and especially during the 2020 campaign. One Hill headline read, “Do Biden's Gaffes Make Him Unelectable?” Mediaite labeled it an "insane gaffe" when Biden at a rally mistakenly referred to Super Tuesday as Super Thursday, before quickly catching his mistake. That doesn't seem "insane."

Biden ended up getting more votes for president than any candidate in U.S. history, confirming that voters don’t care about Democratic “gaffes.”

 

New York Times, Joan Joyce, a Sensation in Softball and More, Is Dead at 81, William McDonald, Updated March 30, 2022. Her pitching feats — including striking out Ted Williams — were legend. And her prowess in basketball, volleyball and golf as well spoke to her all-around athletic greatness.

On a warm August night in 1961, Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter” who had finished his Hall of Fame baseball career the year before as the last hitter to bat .400 in a single season, strode to the plate before an overflow crowd at Municipal Stadium in Waterbury, Conn., to face a young softball pitching phenom by the name of Joan Joyce.

The occasion was a charity fund-raising exhibition. Williams was in his Boston Red Sox uniform, No. 9. Joyce stood on the mound 40 feet away (regulation in women’s softball, as opposed to 60 feet 6 inches in major-league baseball), clad in the red-and-white jersey and shorts she wore as the premier pitcher for the Raybestos Brakettes, one of the top teams in the women’s game, with its home field 30 miles to the south in suburban Stratford, Conn.

It was one of several such exhibitions in which Williams and Joyce faced off in the early 1960s, but the one in Waterbury — Joyce’s hometown, where the fans were chanting “Joanie, Joanie Joanie!” — proved to be the most memorable. It would become an oft-told tale in the lore that enveloped Joyce over her long career as, many would say, the most dominant player in the history of women’s fast-pitch softball and — given her prowess in basketball, volleyball and golf as well — as one of the greatest female athletes of her generation.

New York Times, Bruce Willis to Step Away From Acting After Aphasia Diagnosis, Maya Salam, March 30, 2022. His ex-wife, Demi Moore, announced online that the actor was recently diagnosed with a disorder that affects the ability to understand or express speech.

On Wednesday, Demi Moore announced on Instagram that her ex-husband Bruce Willis, the prolific action-movie star, had recently been diagnosed with aphasia — a disorder that affects the brain’s language center and a person’s ability to understand or express speech — and that he would be stepping away from acting.

“To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” Moore’s post reads. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”

“We are moving through this as a strong family unit, and wanted to bring his fans in because we know how much he means to you, as you do to him,” it continued. “As Bruce always says, ‘Live it up,’ and together we plan to do just that.”

The post is signed “Emma, Demi, Rumer, Scout, Tallulah, Mabel & Evelyn” — referring to Emma Heming Willis, Willis’s wife, and his children. Moore is the mother of Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, and Heming Willis is mother to Mabel and Evelyn.

Associated Press via HuffPost, Sandy Hook Families Reject Alex Jones Settlement Offer Of $120,000 Per Plaintiff, Staff Report, March 30, 2022. A trial is planned to determine how much he should pay the plaintiffs.

Infowars host Alex Jones offered to pay $120,000 per plaintiff to resolve a lawsuit by relatives of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims who said he defamed them by asserting the massacre never happened, according to court filings Tuesday. The offer was quickly rejected by the families.

A Connecticut judge found Jones liable for damages in November, and a trial is planned to determine how much he should pay the families.

The plaintiffs said they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy promoted on his show.

The court filings posted online said: “Mr. Jones extends his heartfelt apology for any distress his remarks caused.”

Last week Jones defied a court order to attend a deposition near his home in Austin, Texas, to provide testimony ahead of the trial. Jones said he was ill. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday on a request by the plaintiffs to sanction Jones for not cooperating.

Lawyers for the families rejected the settlement offer within a few hours, saying in court filings that it was a “transparent and desperate attempt by Alex Jones to escape a public reckoning under oath with his deceitful, profit-driven campaign against the plaintiffs and the memory of their loved ones lost at Sandy Hook.”

Twenty first graders and six educators were killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The families of eight of the victims and an FBI agent who responded to the school sued Jones, Infowars and others in Connecticut over the hoax conspiracy. Jones has since said he believes the shooting did occur.

Jones also was found liable for damages in similar lawsuits filed in Texas by relatives of Sandy Hook victims, and also faces trial later this year.

Huff Post, Donald Trump's Truth Social App Is Failing Fantastically, Report Says, Ron Dicker, March 30, 2022. The former president's effort to keep his MAGA base talking appears to be cratering.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social app has plummeted in sign-ups and traffic since its technically challenged launch last month, The Wrap reported Tuesday.

The former president’s social media network for MAGA disciples has sunk to about 60,000 new users a week.
Advertisement

“This is down 93% from its launch week, when it saw 872,000 installs during the week of Feb. 21,” Stephanie Chan of the analytics site Sensor Tower told The Wrap. “We estimate that Truth Social has so far reached approximately 1.2 million installs since its launch.”

Truthsocial.com reportedly has fallen to 1.9 million weekly visits from a high of 6 million in the debut week for the Twitter-like platform, according to Similarweb stats cited by the news website.

Team Trump created Truth Social after he was banned from Twitter for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

The digital opinion site has struggled in a conservative space already occupied by right-leaning ventures such as Gettr.
Advertisement

Truth Social also caught the snarky attention of talk show hosts like Jimmy Kimmel.

“Truth Social has been such a disappointment so far, Trump may have to rename it to ‘Don Jr.,’” Kimmel sniped last month.

Trump has been so perturbed by the stumbling rollout that he was heard asking, “What the fuck is going on?” on the phone, The Daily Beast reported.

March 29

 

National Press Club Journalism Institute, Homeless man living in tree attacks New York Post reporter and photographer, according to NYPD, and is released without bail (New York Daily News/New York Post), National Press Club Journalism Institute staff: Beth Francesco, Holly Butcher Grant, and Julie Moos, March 29, 2022  Lights. Camera. Crime: How a Philly-born brand of TV news harmed Black America. (Inquirer).

■ CNN takes a $100 million step into streaming today (Washington Post) / Earlier: CNN+ readies for debut: Next news innovation or too late to the streaming wars? (Deadline)

■ Vogue, Bon Appétit and other Condé Nast staffers form union (Washington Post) / BuzzFeed Union votes to authorize newsroom strike amid escalating tensions; CEO Jonah Peretti was a no-show to Tuesday’s negotiations (The Wrap)

■ ‘White House comms director Kate Bedingfield says at the press briefing that the White House has "no official comment on the altercation" between Will Smith and Chris Rock, and says Biden did not watch the Oscars.’ (Max Tani) / White House ASL interpreters bring the president's message to a larger audience (CBS News) / Oscars American Sign Language live stream racks up 300,000 views, 1 million impressions (The Wrap) / Oscars: How 'CODA’ helped spotlight ASL interpretation, deaf community (The Hollywood Reporter) / Oscars audience grew by 555,000 after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock (New York Times) / How an Oscars photographer captured the moment Will Smith slapped Chris Rock (CNN) / Will Smith vs. Chris Rock through the eyes of an L.A. Times photographer (Los Angeles Times) / The real reason Will Smith's Oscars outburst was censored on US broadcasts (Washington Post) / Earlier: What was happening in the ABC control room as Will Smith slapped Chris Rock (Variety)

■ Cincinnati broadcast journalist says he's 'taking a break from sports reporting to focus on my mental health' (WVXU)

■ ‘If Alden is a cancer on journalism, Lee is COVID, MRSA and SARS’: Lee quietly slashes jobs following hostile takeover attempt (Axios)

■ CBS News under fire for hiring former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney (Mediaite) / Fox News’ ratings surprise: ‘The Five’ keeps outperforming primetime (Variety)

■ ABC News chief Washington correspondent Jon Karl talked with Fox about replacing Chris Wallace (Daily Beast)

■ 'Stupid of me:' Nick Lachey says he overreacted after incident with photographer (Cincinnati Enquirer)

■ Photographer captures photos of family hours before they died in Ohio car crash (WTVG/Gray News) / 4 women photographers on the hardest photo they ever took (WIRED)

March 28

 

Washington Post, Perspective: Kremlin tries to stifle Radio Free Europe — and its audience surges, Margaret Sullivan, right, March 28, 2022 (print ed.). As the U.S.-funded broadcaster is forced to shut most of its Russian operations, its Web traffic indicates that Russian people are eagerly consuming its stories.

Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-funded operation that got its start by piping American-flavored news through the Iron Curtain in 1950 (and has been affiliated with Voice of America), could see big trouble brewing for its Russian operation in recent years.

The Kremlin kept putting the screws to its Russian-language broadcasts, throwing up ever more regulatory hurdles. But it was in late 2020 that the hammer really came down. The “media regulator” demanded that every broadcast, digital story and video carry an intrusive disclaimer at the top stating that what followed was the product of a foreign agent.

“Basically, it was like telling our audience to go away,” said Jamie Fly, the CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, as the organization has been known since a 1976 merger.

That labeling would interfere with the private nonprofit’s mission at a core level. So, Fly told me, “we refused to comply.”

New York Times, When Nokia Pulled Out of Russia, a Vast Surveillance System Remained, Adam Satariano, Paul Mozur and Aaron Krolik (the reporters, who report on technology, vetted more than 75,000 documents for this article), March 28, 2022. The Finnish company played a key role in enabling Russia’s cyberspying, documents obtained by The Times show, raising questions of corporate responsibility. Nokia said this month that it would stop its sales in Russia and denounced the invasion of Ukraine. But the Finnish company didn’t mention what it was leaving behind: equipment and software connecting the government’s most powerful tool for digital surveillance to the nation’s largest telecommunications network.

The tool was used to track supporters of the Russian opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny. Investigators said it had intercepted the phone calls of a Kremlin foe who was later assassinated. Called the System for Operative Investigative Activities, or SORM, it is also most likely being employed at this moment as President Vladimir V. Putin culls and silences antiwar voices inside Russia.

For more than five years, Nokia provided equipment and services to link SORM to Russia’s largest telecom service provider, MTS, according to company documents obtained by The New York Times. While Nokia does not make the tech that intercepts communications, the documents lay out how it worked with state-linked Russian companies to plan, streamline and troubleshoot the SORM system’s connection to the MTS network. Russia’s main intelligence service, the F.S.B., uses SORM to listen in on phone conversations, intercept emails and text messages, and track other internet communications.

 

New York Times, Chris Wallace Says Life at Fox News Became ‘Unsustainable,’ Michael M. Grynbaum, Updated March 28, 2022. As he starts a new streaming show at CNN, the longtime TV anchor (shown above in a pool photo via Getty Images) reflects on his decision to leave Fox News after 18 years.

“I just no longer felt comfortable with the programming at Fox.”

Chris Wallace uttered those words matter-of-factly, in between bites of a Sweetgreen salad at his new desk inside the Washington bureau of CNN, the network he joined in January after nearly two decades at Fox News.

For those on the left who admired him, and those on the right who doubted him, it’s a statement that was a long time coming.

A down-the-middle outlier at Fox News who often confounded conservatives by contradicting the network’s right-wing stars, Mr. Wallace was also one of the channel’s fiercest defenders, disappointing liberals who hoped he might denounce colleagues like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson.

But in December, Mr. Wallace, 74, issued a final verdict: He was done. In a surprise move, he declined to renew his contract as host of “Fox News Sunday” and jumped to archrival CNN. His daily interview show — “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace?” — starts Tuesday on the new CNN+ streaming service.

New York Times, The Slap Echoes the Morning After the Oscars, Raising Questions, Julia Jacobs, Matt Stevens and Nicole Sperling, March 28, 2022. When Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Academy Awards for telling a joke about his wife, it divided Hollywood, sparking denunciations, defenses and debates. 

The morning after the Oscars tends to be dominated by lighthearted celebrations of the night’s winners and admiring chatter about the fashion on the red carpet, but on Monday it was given to a more somber discussion of the disturbing spectacle that dominated the night: Will Smith striking Chris Rock onstage after taking issue with one of his jokes.

On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” George Stephanopoulos described it as “something we have never seen before, something that is very hard to process: Will Smith, walking up onto that stage after Chris Rock told a joke about his wife — simply assaulting Chris Rock.”

The Academy put out a statement saying that they do not condone violence, but Stephanopoulos noted they “have not taken any other action yet.”

“It changed the entire night,” the anchor Robin Roberts said.

Rolling Stone, Fox News Host Lara Logan Suggests Theory of Evolution Is a Hoax Funded by Jews, Ryan Bort, March 28, 2022. Lara Logan’s latest anti-Semitic dog whistle is a claim that Charles Darwin only came up with the idea of evolution because Jews paid him to.

It wasn’t long ago that Lara Logan was a correspondent for CBS News, which is a little hard to believe considering the types of conspiracy theories she’s been pushing since she left the network. The latest came during an appearance on the right-wing podcast “And We Know,” during which Logan suggested that the theory of evolution is the result of a wealthy Jewish family paying Charles Darwin to devise an explanation for what gave rise to humanity.

“Does anyone know who employed Darwin, where Darwinism comes from?” Logan, recently (but perhaps no longer) with Fox News’ streaming service Fox Nation, asked. “Look it up: The Rothschilds. It goes back to 10 Downing Street. The same people who employed Darwin, and his theory of evolution and so on and so on. I’m not saying that none of that is true. I’m just saying Darwin was hired by someone to come up with a theory — based on evidence, OK, fine.”

Logan rambled for a bit longer, but her point was that evolution is a “chicken or the egg” debate and “you can’t answer it scientifically” and, while we’re here, Jews are trying to control the world with their money. Media Matters caught the claim on Monday:

The Rothschilds, who Logan says is responsible for the theory of evolution, are a Jewish family that often shows up in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) famously wrote on Facebook that the Rothschilds funded a space laser that started the California wildfires.

Logan and Greene share more in common than anti-Semitic comments. Both the Fox Nation host and the bigoted, virulent conspiracy theorist lawmaker have pushed Russian propaganda since Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine last month. Greene has blamed Ukraine for the invasion, while suggesting the nation’s military is rife with Nazis. Greene, however, at least made some sort of superficial effort to insist she’s not a Putin supporter. Logan made no such effort.

“Whether you like Putin or don’t like him, Putin is not willing to be a part of whatever global governing structure is coming our way,” Logan said last week on a right-wing podcast. “Vladimir Putin has been very calculating, he’s been very careful … he’s said for 15 years that he would not tolerate NATO expansion.”

“He’s the man standing between us and this New World Order,” she added after rambling about Ukrainian biolabs funded by Hunter Biden.

The idea of a “New World Order” constructed by Jews is a trope of anti-Semitic rhetoric. We’re starting to notice a pattern in Logan’s conspiracy theorizing.

New York Times, Rumble, the Right’s Go-To Video Site, Has Much Bigger Ambitions, Jeremy W. Peters, March 28, 2022. The company, supported by Donald Trump, Peter Thiel and other prominent conservatives, wants to help build an internet free from Silicon Valley titans.

You won’t find Red Pill News or the X22 Report on YouTube anymore. The far-right online shows were taken down in the fall of 2020 after the major social media and tech companies started purging accounts that spread the QAnon conspiracy theory.

But you will find both of them on a video-sharing platform called Rumble, where their content ranks among the most popular on the site.

Over the last week, as Republicans opened a misleading attack on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as too lenient with criminals who sexually abuse children, Red Pill News and the X22 Report posted videos claiming that her nomination to the Supreme Court by President Biden was all the proof anyone needed that a cabal of pedophiles operated at the highest levels of the government, a belief QAnon adherents hold.

“Think about the bigger picture,” the host of the X22 Report, which has more than half a million Rumble subscribers, implored his viewers in an episode posted on Wednesday. “Right now, people are being taught about pedophilia. People are listening to this, and they’re seeing exactly how these people think and how they’re trying to normalize it.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Wartime news reporting is worse now than it was during World War II, Wayne Madsen, left, March 28, 2022. The news coverage of the current war in eastern Europe has generally been abysmal as compared to reporting during the last major ground conflict in Europe, the Second World War.

From the outset of the rise of fascist regimes in Italy, Japan, Germany, and Spain consumers of news in the United States and the West were much better informed about pre-war and wartime developments than their modern-day counterparts.

That was because newspapers, radio stations, and networks provided raw wire service reports with little in the way of editorializing, including the taking of their scissors to the teleprinter or radio-teletype feed.

Editors in the 1930s and 40s aired more on the side of inclusion than exclusion. If a wire service reporter was staking his reputation on a wire dispatch being correct, editors gave the green light for the copy to the printing press or over the airwaves. Obviously, in their minds, an informed public was better overall for national security and war preparedness than ignorant masses going about their daily routines.

Today, cable and broadcast news are more interested in ratings and a combination of Rupert Murdoch's infamous mantra of "if it bleeds, it leads" and a Hallmark television rendition of a tear-jerker family separation story from the battle zones. Reporters who may have been covering tornado damage in the South one week are virtually "parachuted" the next week into eastern European towns near the Ukrainian border. Their lack of knowledge about the local and regional situation is more than apparent in the first few days of their reporting, with the mangling of names of geographical locations and government officials more than apparent. Also, viewers back in the States do not need to know about reporters' spartan sleeping accommodations, lack of WiFi access, or the quality of local food. No one cares and it's not news at any rate.

In a long-forgotten 1952 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) report on the existing news agencies, World War II, rather than limit news sources, saw them increase in large numbers. With additional agencies came more sources for reporting on the war and other developments.

Press Run, Commentary: Media sleepwalks past Ginni Thomas’ treason, Eric Boehlert, right, March 28, 2022. Burying a blockbuster. The Sunday morning talk shows sprinted into “gaffe” patrol mode after President Joe Biden made a 9-word, ad-libbed comment in Poland over the weekend about how Vladimir Putin should not be allowed to stay in power in Russia.

On “Meet the Press,” USA Today’s Susan Page emphasized Biden’s comment was “distracting” and “undisciplined.” The assembled pundits spent nearly ten minutes discussion the story, along with a new NBC poll that was bad news for Biden. (Inflation!)

What was mostly ignored by the round table was the blockbuster story about Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, wife of right-wing Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She had been texting unhinged QAnon-like messages to Trump’s chief of staff after the 2020 election, strategizing and urging that Biden’s victory be overturned, saving America from “the end of Liberty.” The NBC pundits on Sunday spent 45 seconds discussing that story.

Like when Trump was recently caught smuggling boxes of top-secret documents out of the White House, the Beltway press is treating Ginni Thomas’ seditious assault on democracy as a middling story; one that will likely receive little or no new coverage in coming days.

The revelation that Thomas’ plugged-in wife who enjoyed easy access to the Trump White House hoped that “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators … will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition,” came just after Republican Senators used QAnon signaling during the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. She was smeared as a child pornography apologist.

“Meet the Press” was hardly alone in sleepwalking past the Ginni Thomas story, which represents another GOP direct assault on democracy and election integrity. “ABC This Week”s’ round table spent ten minutes dissecting Biden’s Putin “gaffe,” and just three minutes acknowledging the Supreme Court’s stunning setback in terms of its reputation for fairness. (The Court’s already at its lowest standing ever.)

Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has yet to run a single page-one piece on the Thomas story and how she accused the “Left” of “attempting the greatest Heist of our History,” and complained about being “disgusted” with Vice President Mike Pence for approving the 2020 election results.

CNN announced Biden’s overseas Putin comment had set off “shock waves.” But I can find no CNN coverage that suggest the same thing occurred when we learned about Ginni Thomas’ relentless, high-level push to overturn the election (a “fight of good versus evil”) while Judge Thomas was the only justice who voted against allowing the release of records from the Trump White House related to the Jan. 6 attack. Thomas’ lone, radical dissent on another 2020 election case openly promoted Trump lies about mail-in ballots. Lies that sound a lot like Ginni’s.

Cable news in general has been slow walking the story. Look at how much TV attention the Thomas controversy received compared to how many hours this month were showered on the issue of rising gas prices in the U.S.

News organizations still see themselves primarily as witnesses in the anti-democracy drama, paid to document the beating it’s taking at the hands of radical Republicans who try to dismantle the concept of free and fair elections in America.

“The Thomases are a team. When I was a Heritage intern as a young conservative, Ginni brought in Clarence to visit with the interns. The idea that there’s some wall of separation btw their respective, uh, professional activities is willful naivety,” tweeted Matthew Sitman. He’s a co-host of the “Know Your Enemy” podcast, which spotlights the conservative movement. “One of the most important tasks of our time is to see extremely obvious things and not pretend they’re anything other than they are because our brains’ have been poisoned by the idea that telling the truth and holding corrupt, lawless actors accountable is “partisan.”

The press isn’t all that interested in telling the obvious truth about Ginni and Clarence Thomas.

March 26

New York Times, Putin Goes Into Battle on a Second Front: Culture, Anton Troianovski and Javier C. Hernández, March 26, 2022. Beyond Ukraine, President Vladimir V. Putin is also fighting cultural battles.

In a speech on Friday from the nondescript, beige-walled office in which he has been conducting much of his public business this month, Mr. Putin made no mention of Ukraine. Instead, he expanded upon a personal obsession: “cancel culture.”

Western elites “canceled” the author J.K. Rowling because she “did not please fans of so-called gender freedoms,” Mr. Putin said in his nationally televised remarks, flanked by two Russian flags. Ms. Rowling was widely criticized in 2020 after voicing support for a researcher whose views on transgender people had been condemned by a court.

Japan, he claimed, “cynically decided to ‘cancel’” the fact that it was the United States that dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. And now, he said, the West is busy “canceling” Russia, “an entire thousand-year-old country, our people.”

That the Russian president delivered a disquisition on Western public discourse on Friday may seem odd at a time when Russia is fighting what some analysts believe to be its bloodiest war since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. But it underscores how Mr. Putin tries to channel cultural grievances and common stereotypes for political gain — while using language that also allows him to speak directly to possible allies in the West.

“This is his cultural front,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “He’s also at war there.”

Speaking at the beginning of a videoconference with Russian cultural figures, Mr. Putin said “proverbial ‘cancel culture’ has become the cancellation of culture.”

And, as seems inevitable in Mr. Putin’s speeches these days, the Nazis came up, too.

“The names of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff are being removed from playbills. Russian writers and their books are being banned,” Mr. Putin said. “The last time such a mass campaign to destroy objectionable literature was carried out was by the Nazis in Germany almost 90 years ago.”

For the moment, Mr. Kolesnikov said, Mr. Putin’s main audience when railing against Western “cancel culture” is domestic, with the Kremlin intent on feeding the grievances against the West upon which Mr. Putin draws much of his support. But casting Russia as a protector of traditional values from the thrall of wanton liberalism is also a message that finds sympathy around the world — including among American right-wing commentators like Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, whose monologues are often shown on Russian state television.

“We have a constitutional right to a free press but we don’t have it,” Mr. Carlson, dubbed into Russian, said in a clip from his show that was played in a news segment on state-controlled Channel 1 this week. “And that is not Russian propaganda.”

Mr. Putin on Friday defined “cancel culture” as the “public ostracism, boycotting and even complete silencing” of people who “do not fit into modern templates, no matter how absurd they really are.”

It was at least the third time in recent months that he spoke about the subject, one that appears to encapsulate for him the hypocrisy and shallowness of Western elites.

 

Associated Press via Hartford Courant, Sandy Hook families seek Alex Jones arrest after 2nd no-show, Staff Report, March 26, 2022. Lawyers for relatives of Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims have asked a Connecticut judge again to order the arrest of Infowars host Alex Jones, shown above in a broadcast screenshot, after he defied a court order to attend a deposition as part of a lawsuit over his calling the massacre a hoax.

Jones missed both days of a scheduled deposition Wednesday and Thursday in Austin, Texas, home to Jones and Infowars. He cited a health problem that included vertigo and revealed Friday that it was a sinus infection. After he didn’t show up Wednesday on the advice of his doctors, Connecticut Judge Barbara Bellis ordered him to appear Thursday, noting he wasn’t hospitalized and had appeared in-person on his show Tuesday.

Bellis did not immediately rule on the new arrest request. She rejected a similar motion by the families’ lawyer seeking an arrest order after Jones failed to appear Wednesday. She has set a hearing by video conference for Wednesday next week.

The families’ lawyers filed a motion late Friday afternoon requesting that Jones be arrested and detained until he sits for a deposition, be fined $25,000 to $50,000 a day until he completes the questioning, be found in contempt of court and to pay their expenses for traveling to Austin this week.

“The plaintiffs subjected themselves to hours and hours of painful questioning by Mr. Jones’s lawyers — and Mr. Jones plays sick when it is his turn to tell the truth under oath,” Alinor Sterling, one of the families’ lawyers, wrote in the motion.

Jones’ lawyer, Norman Pattis, called the request “an unprecedented overreach” and raised concerns about due process, in an email to The Associated Press.

Earlier Friday, Jones said on his website show that it was “absolutely preposterous” the families’ lawyers were trying to have him arrested for missing a deposition because of illness. He said the families’ lawyers had delayed depositions in the case several times and he didn’t complain.

In November, Bellis found Jones liable for damages, and his testimony is now being sought in a deposition ahead of a trial later this year to determine how much he should pay the families.

Twenty first graders and six educators were killed in the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The families of eight of the victims and an FBI agent who responded to school sued Jones, Infowars and others in Connecticut, saying they have been subjected to harassment and death threats from Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy promoted on the show. Jones has since said he believes the shooting did occur.

Jones also was found liable for damages in similar lawsuits filed in Texas by relatives of Sandy Hook victims, and also faces trial later this year.

Jones returned to the Infowars studio on Friday for the first time since Tuesday and disclosed on the show that medical testing showed he had a sinus infection. He said he had experienced vertigo, and his doctors initially thought it was a serious heart problem and advised him to stay home and not go to the deposition.

March 24

BIG, Commentary: Judges Behaving Badly: Amazon Antitrust Suit Dismissed, Matt Stoller, right, March 24, 2022. It was a good week for Amazon, with the firm also closing on the MGM merger. But the antitrust meat grinder goes on.

Three items this week:

• An incompetent judge let Amazon off the hook for monopolization.
• Why hasn’t the FTC challenged the Amazon-MGM merger?
• Is Congress about to fix our shipping mess? Sort of!

Last May, I wrote a long piece explaining the scam at the heart of Amazon Prime. When you think about it, Prime doesn’t really make any economic sense. Prime members pay a small annual or monthly fee, and in return get massively valuable and expensive benefits like free shipping, free movies and TV, video games, and so forth. Amazon likely gets between $10-20 billion a year in Prime fees, but delivering these services costs Amazon probably upwards of $80-100 billion a year. That means Amazon has to find $70 billion of cash somewhere as an endless subsidy. Yet, Amazon is profitable, and prices for goods on Amazon are almost always the lowest you can find online. How does Amazon pull this off?

There are three steps. First, Amazon acquired enough customers for its retail division to monopolize online buying and selling. It did this by offering free shipping and other benefits at a vastly subsidized rate to Prime members. For consumers, this seemed like a great deal. They got a very good reliable place to buy stuff online. But on the other side of the market, for sellers, many of whom sold 80-100% of their wares on Amazon’s Marketplace, Amazon acquired substantial market power. “[We] have nowhere else to go and Amazon knows it,” said one seller that sells products on Amazon.

Second, Amazon forced these captive sellers to pay massive fees to sell on its marketplace, by making them use its fulfillment and warehousing (as well as other services). Amazon took those fees, which brought in $121 billion in 2021, to pay for its various Prime benefits, including shipping. And third, and this is where it becomes brilliant, Amazon then forced those sellers to keep their prices high through non-Amazon sales channels. If they ever sold elsewhere for less, they would be de facto kicked off Amazon.

These three steps were each pivotal. Without the subsidy of Prime, it wouldn’t have been possible for Amazon to capture control over most online buying. Without the seller fees, Amazon couldn’t afford that subsidy. And without forcing sellers to raise their prices elsewhere to ensure Amazon had the lowest prices online, you’d see signs like ‘Buy cheaper at eBay.com’ or ‘Walmart.com costs less than Amazon’ everywhere, and Amazon would be undercut in the marketplace. But you don’t see such signs. Consumers think they are getting the best deal at Amazon, and they usually are.

It’s a genius scheme, because it gives the appearance that Amazon offers the lowest price and free shipping, when in fact consumers pay a higher cost for products without realizing it. I first wrote about Prime because of an antitrust suit filed by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine, right, who filed a case in district court spelling out this scheme in a rigorous and detailed way. There are a bunch of investigations going on into Amazon, and this was the first case filed that came out of them. Filing this case was a sort of loner approach by Racine, who is an aggressive and fearless litigator. It was an excellent complaint -- detailed, factually rigorous, and legally sound -- and a class action case with a very similar theory just passed the critical motion to dismiss stage in a Seattle courtroom with a Bush-appointee judge.

I thought it was going to be a titanic clash, and it brought critical legal questions into the courts to be hashed out by a jury. Unfortunately, the judge Racine got assigned to this case, Hiram Puig-Lugo, did not agree. Earlier this week, at what looked like a routine scheduling hearing, Puig-Lugo, whose expertise is in family law, shocked everyone involved by dismissing Racine’s Amazon complaint outright. That means the case is over, unless Racine appeals. And how Puig-Lugo dismissed the case was as odd as his choice to do so. For important complaints like this, judges almost always put down in writing their rationale for making decisions at key stages. But Puig-Lugo did not. He simply read from the bench that he didn’t think the claimed conduct violated the law.

The deeper you go, the more odd the decision. According to Law360, Puig-Lugo said in his ruling that maybe it was just a coincidence that merchants were raising prices on other channels. They could be engaged in “lawful, unchoreographed free-market behavior.” Such a statement makes no sense, because there were explicit contracts between Amazon and sellers mandating higher prices. And yet, the judge simply said when making his ruling from the bench, "That's how the market works.”

There are bad decisions in antitrust law, ones that make the law harder to enforce going forward. Usually bad decisions are on the outer edge of precedent, and have legal reasoning that is illogic but coherent. This, however, wasn’t just a bad decision. It was the decision of someone who didn’t care to learn the facts of the case before him, or even how antitrust law itself works. Frankly I’m not sure Puig-Lugo even read the complaints, though it’s also possible he’s just dumb. There are dumb judges. Or maybe he wanted the case to go away; his interest is in family law and trafficking, not complex business litigation. In any case, Puig-Lugo dismissed a well-prepared complaint on a very important part of the economy, without even explaining himself in writing.

Obviously, Racine should appeal.

Jezebel, Commentary: The Sordid History of Right-Wing Pedophilia Conspiracy Theories, Kylie Cheung, March 23, 2022. Republican attacks framing Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as "soft" on child sex offenders are part of a greater conservative trend to disrupt social progress.

Ahead of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s historic Senate confirmation hearings this week, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri injected a predictable dose of nastiness into the dialogue when—sans evidence—he accused the Supreme Court nominee of enabling child sex offenders.

Hawley backed up his claim by misrepresenting Jackson’s record of sentencing offenders in several child pornography cases to less prison time than was recommended by federal sentencing guidelines, which is an ordinary practice within the federal judiciary. At Jackson’s Tuesday confirmation hearing, she clarified that she had ruled on 14 cases involving child pornography or sex crimes related to children, and in 10 of those cases, she imposed a sentence consistent with or greater than what was recommended by the government.

If Hawley and other Republicans’ bizarre fixation on framing Jackson as supposedly soft on child sex crimes feels like a twistedly familiar right-wing song and dance at this point, that’s because it is. There’s a reason 15% of Americans have said they believe Satan-worshiping pedophiles run the country. From Pizzagate—the viral 2016 conspiracy theory that the Hillary Clinton campaign ran a child sex trafficking ring at restaurants including a pizzeria in DC—to QAnon, the very online far-right has relied on equating the Democratic Party with pedophilia as its go-to smear. And actual prominent Republican politicians like Hawley, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and others have not-so-subtly been taking their cues from these conspiracy theorists.

None of this is new. Cultural panics involving child porn and pedophilia have long been weaponized to stymie social progress, Jeffrey Debies-Carl, a professor of sociology at the University of New Haven whose research has focused on online conspiracy theories, told Jezebel. “People often make these accusations kind of cynically, because they have an agenda, because they know a lot of people will believe them,” he said. “These theories are frequently reactionary, or there’s some sort of threat perception involved that’s usually progressive in some way.”

Historically, the rise of cultural lore about supposed pedophilia and child sexual abuse at daycare centers in the 1980s was deployed as part of anti-feminist backlash against mothers for supposedly endangering their kids by dropping them off at daycare to go to work. More recently, the right wing has used egregious sexual violence cases involving children to argue for more policing, despite lack of evidence that registries or expanding the carceral system keeps children safe at all.

March 23

Marilyn Monroe with her ear to a telephone receiver at a payphone in a scene from the film 'Niagara', 1952. By Michael Ochs Archives/20th Century-Fox/Getty Images.

Vanity Fair, Marilyn Monroe’s Final Hours: Nuke Fears, Mob Spies, and a Secret Kennedy Visitor, Anthony Summers, March 23, 2022. Sixty years ago, her death was ruled a “probable suicide,” but questions have persisted about the iconic actor’s relationships with JFK and RFK—and how they might have been exploited by the Mafia, the Soviet Union, and the FBI. New details from an updated investigative biography, soon to feature in a Netflix documentary, shed clarifying light on the turmoil swirling around Monroe on the last day of her life.

When Marilyn Monroe died, 60 years ago, people all over the world asked questions. How could it be that the gifted and phenomenally beautiful actress was dead—at just 36? The Los Angeles coroner’s verdict was “probable suicide,” but the nagging questions have never gone away. “Who killed Marilyn Monroe? That’s a question,” the dramatist Sean O’Casey mused soon after. Conspiracy theories have flourished ever since. Hollywood’s George Cukor, who had directed Monroe in two of her movies—including the last, unfinished one—had his own view. Her death, he said, was “a nasty business. Her worst rejection. Power and money. In the end she was too innocent.”

The author Anthony Summers has just updated GODDESS, his bestselling biography of the actress, for which he interviewed some 650 people. Publication coincides with the launch next month of a Netflix special that draws largely on his work. Inevitably, both book and film probe deeply into Monroe’s relationships with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy—relationships that came close to destroying them politically.

‘Do you know who I’ve always depended on?’ Marilyn Monroe asked the British journalist W.J. Weatherby not long before she died. “Not strangers, not friends. The telephone! That’s my best friend.” Marilyn worked her phone hard in early August 1962, the final week of her life.

She was in a whirl of planning future projects, making arrangements to fly to New York for discussions about a new musical. Most of the people Monroe spoke with thought she seemed in good spirits. But there were glimpses of another mood. Kenny Kingston, a California psychic she had consulted over the months, remembered Monroe talking moodily about love. “Love,” she said, “is the one immortal thing about us. Without it, what can life mean?”

National Press Club Journalism Institute, The Latest: Politico names new top editor; Journalist dies in Kyiv; ‘'This year has taken a bigger toll,' National Press Club Journalism Institute staff: Beth Francesco, Holly Butcher Grant, and Julie Moos, March 23, 2022. Journalist Oksana Baulina died Wednesday under fire in Kyiv after a rocket strike on a shopping center (The Insider) / ‘Oksana was funny, dedicated and extremely brave. She was putting a new life together in Warsaw after having to flee Russia due to Navalny links and determined to do important journalism. Another victim of this awful senseless mess.’ (Shaun Walker)

■ ‘We knew that something big and awful was coming’: I was a reporter in Russia for 20 years—until I finally fled three weeks ago. I watched our press fall apart in real time. (Slate) / As risks for media rise in Ukraine, safety efforts ramp up (VOA)

■ Almost as many Americans getting Ukraine news from social media as TV, poll shows (The Hill)

■ Kirsten Allen to serve as Harris' new press secretary (CNN) / When Anna Wintour pissed off Kamala (POLITICO)

■ POLITICO names Dafna Linzer executive editor (POLITICO) / ‘Honored to join this stellar news organization at a time when POLITICO is expanding in scope and ambition, building upon its 15-year legacy of excellent political journalism and policy reporting. Excited to join talented colleagues and be part of a new era at POLITICO.’ (Dafna Linzer) / POLITICO's new administration is taking office (Puck)

■ 'I’ve decided it’s time to close this chapter. This industry can be tough’; 'This year has taken a bigger toll on me personally than I first realized' (News & Observer) / Four local TV reporters announce they're leaving (Times Union)

■ Inside the app Minnesota police use collect data on journalists at protests (MIT Technology Review) / Minneapolis city attorney subpoenas reporters in police brutality suit filed by photographer blinded by officer (MPR News)

■ BuzzFeed shares jump over 6% amid news of journalist job cuts (Insider)

■ Go big or go home: The Baltimore Banner readies for launch; 'Job No. 1 has been attracting top talent, which has gone slower than … anticipated' (Northwestern)

■ Doomscrolling got you down? Take a break at a digital rest stop. (Washington Post)

Press Freedom

■ Palin moves to disqualify judge in defamation case against NY Times (The Hill)

Vanity Fair, Marilyn Monroe’s Final Hours: Nuke Fears, Mob Spies, and a Secret Kennedy Visitor, Anthony Summers, March 23, 2022. Sixty years ago, her death was ruled a “probable suicide,” but questions have persisted about the iconic actor’s relationships with JFK and RFK—and how they might have been exploited by the Mafia, the Soviet Union, and the FBI. New details from an updated investigative biography, soon to feature in a Netflix documentary, shed clarifying light on the turmoil swirling around Monroe on the last day of her life.

The Daily Howler, Von Drehle profiles "Putin's brain!" Bob Somerby, March 23, 2022. In search of Putin's dream: Based on current tabulations, it's currently the fourth MOST READ piece in the whole of the Washington Post.

We recommend it strongly. It's David Von Drehle's profile of Aleksandr Dugin, the man who is apparently known as "Putin's brain."

VON DREHLE (3/23/22): Dugin’s intellectual influence over the Russian leader is well known to close students of the post-Soviet period, among whom Dugin, 60, is sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain.” His work is also familiar to Europe’s “new right,” of which Dugin has been a leading figure for nearly three decades, and to America’s “alt-right.” Indeed, the Russian-born former wife of the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer, Nina Kouprianova, has translated some of Dugin’s work into English.

It sounds to us like David Von Drehle may know what he's talking about.

VON DREHLE: A product of late-period Soviet decline, Dugin belongs to the long, dismal line of political theorists who invent a strong and glorious past—infused with mysticism and obedient to authority—to explain a failed present. The future lies in reclaiming this past from the liberal, commercial, cosmopolitan present (often represented by the Jewish people). Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I...

Dugin tells essentially the same story from a Russian point of view. Before modernity ruined everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, appropriately ruled by ethnic Russians. Alas, a competing sea-based empire of corrupt, money-grubbing individualists, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s destiny and brought “Eurasia”—his term for the future Russian empire—low.

In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.

Putin has followed that counsel to the letter, and he must have felt things were going well when he saw window-smashing rioters in the corridors of the U.S. Congress, Britain’s Brexit from the European Union and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas. With the undermining of the West going so well, Putin has turned to the pages of Dugin’s text in which he declared: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia” and “without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”

New York Times, How Russia and Right-Wing Americans Converged on War in Ukraine, Sheera Frenkel and Stuart A. Thompson, March 23, 2022. Some conservatives have echoed the Kremlin’s misleading claims about the war and vice versa, giving each other’s assertions a sheen of credibility.

After President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia claimed that action against Ukraine was taken in self-defense, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, below right, and the conservative commentator Candace Owens repeated the assertion. When Mr. Putin insisted he was trying to “denazify” Ukraine, Joe Oltmann, a far-right podcaster, and Lara Logan, another right-wing commentator, mirrored the idea.

The echoing went the other way, too. Some far-right American news sites, like Infowars, stoked a longtime, unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine. Russian officials seized on the chatter, with the Kremlin contending it had documentation of bioweapons programs that justified its “special military operation” in Ukraine.

As war has raged, the Kremlin’s talking points and some right-wing discourse in the United States — fueled by those on the far right — have coalesced. On social media, podcasts and television, falsehoods about the invasion of Ukraine have flowed both ways, with Americans amplifying lies from Russians and the Kremlin spreading fabrications that festered in American forums online.

By reinforcing and feeding each other’s messaging, some right-wing Americans have given credibility to Russia’s assertions and vice versa. Together, they have created an alternate reality, recasting the Western bloc of allies as provokers, blunderers and liars, which has bolstered Mr. Putin.

The war initially threw some conservatives — who had insisted no invasion would happen — for a loop. Many criticized Mr. Putin and Russia’s assault on Ukraine. Some have since gone on to urge more support for Ukraine.

But in recent days, several far-right commentators have again gravitated to narratives favorable to Mr. Putin’s cause. The main one has been the bioweapons conspiracy theory, which has provided a way to talk about the war while focusing criticism on President Biden and the U.S. government instead of Mr. Putin and the Kremlin.

 

Washington Post, Israel blocked Ukraine from getting potent Pegasus spyware out of fear of upsetting Russia, Craig Timberg, Stephanie Kirchgaessner, Souad Mekhennet, Ellen Nakashima and Shane Harris, March 23, 2022. Worries about Russia drove Israel’s decision to keep the surveillance technology out of the hands of the Ukrainian government

A Ukrainian effort to acquire the powerful Pegasus spyware system was blocked by Israeli defense officials out of fear that such a move would upset Russia, which in 2014 had seized Crimea and fomented separatist fighting in Ukraine’s eastern region, according to people familiar with the decision.

Ukraine’s efforts to bolster its surveillance capabilities, like its efforts to strengthen its military, had support from the United States, Israel’s closest ally.

But Israeli officials balked at any move that might provoke a confrontation with Russia, whose military at the time was aggressively helping Syria combat a rebellion beyond Israel’s northeastern border. The country’s Defense Exports Controls Agency rejected a possible license that would have allowed the NSO Group to offer Pegasus to Ukraine, said the people familiar with the decision, who included Western intelligence officials. These people believed this action happened as far back as 2019, but the exact timing was unclear.

Concerns about Russian reaction also affected NSO’s dealings with Estonia, a member of NATO, say people familiar with those actions. According to these people, NSO had licensed Pegasus to Estonia, which achieved independence from five decades of Soviet rule in 1991 and is known for its aggressive counterintelligence measures against Russia, but the company later imposed restrictions on the spyware’s use. The exact nature of those restrictions is not clear, though Estonia does not have the ability to target Russian phones, according to people familiar with its Pegasus license.

Associated Press, Amid Russia's new crackdowns, small signs of defiance emerge, Staff Reports, March 23, 2022. When Alexei Navalny was arrested in January 2021, tens of thousands of Russians filled the streets in protest, demanding that the top Kremlin critic be released and chanting slogans against President Vladimir Putin. Thousands were arrested.

Since then, Putin has unleashed the harshest crackdown since the era of the Soviet Union: Navalny was imprisoned and his organization outlawed. His associates and other activists were either prosecuted, fled the country or had their hands tied by draconian new laws. Independent news outlets were blocked and social media platforms banned.

And now, Russia has sent its military into Ukraine, the largest invasion in Europe since World War II.

But while the Kremlin has worked hard to crush political dissent and opposition to the war, flickers of defiance have emerged.

Antiwar marches of protesters chanting “No to war!” occurred in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere after the Feb. 24 invasion, with more than 15,000 people detained, according to the OVD-Info rights group that tracks political arrests.

A live evening news broadcast on Russia’s state TV was interrupted March 14 by a woman who walked behind the anchor and held up a handmade poster protesting the war in English and Russian. OVD-Info identified her as Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of the station, who was taken into custody and fined.

Navalny remained unbowed at a trial held in the penal colony where he is serving a 2 1/2-year sentence. On Tuesday, he was convicted on fraud and contempt of court charges and given nine years — a move that was seen as an attempt to keep Putin’s biggest foe behind bars for as long as possible.

The 45-year-old corruption fighter, who in 2020 survived a poisoning with a nerve agent that he blames on the Kremlin, said on Facebook in a sardonic comment that was posted by his team: “My space flight is taking a bit longer than expected.”

Navalny ally Ilya Yashin, who has vowed to remain in Russia, also spoke out against the increased jail time.

“Of course, nine years is a stiff sentence,” Yashin said on Facebook. “Rapists, thieves and murderers in Russia often get less. ... But in reality (the sentence) doesn’t mean anything, because everyone understands: Alexei will spend as much time behind bars as Putin will sit in the Kremlin.”

Addressing Putin, Yashin added sarcastically, “You’re quite the optimist.”

Navalny’s trial, which began a week before Russian troops rolled into Ukraine, prompted a small act of defiance by one of the witnesses for the prosecution. Fyodor Gorozhanko, a former activist in Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, who has since left Russia, testified that he had been coerced to give evidence against the opposition leader.

Navalny’s foundation and a nationwide network of regional offices were outlawed last year as extremist and ceased operating. The Kremlin also turned up the heat on other opposition activists and groups, as well as on independent media and human rights organizations.

Dozens have been slapped with a crippling “foreign agent” label, which implies additional government scrutiny and scorn. Many have been forced to shut down under pressure.

Navalny’s team has been undeterred by both the war and the trial of its leader, announcing it was rebooting the foundation as an international organization.

“Corruption kills,” read its new website. “As Ukrainian cities are bombed by Putin, this has never been more obvious. Putin and his circle have done everything to stay in power — and steal, and steal, and steal some more. High on their own impunity, they unleashed a war.”

“We will find all of their mansions in Monaco and their villas in Miami, and when we do, we will make sure Putin’s elite loses everything it owns,” the statement said. “We have been fighting Putin since 2011. We will fight him until we win.”

The Navalny team also promoted a new YouTube channel it has launched, Popular Politics, that since March 5 has attracted more than 920,000 subscribers.

March 22

 

National Press Club Journalism Institute, White House press secretary Jen Psaki tests positive (again) for COVID (NPR), National Press Club Journalism Institute staff: Beth Francesco, Holly Butcher Grant, and Julie Moos, March 22, 2022. Deputy Press Secretary fills in for Psaki after positive COVID test results (POLITICO) / 'No members of the press who attended the briefing yesterday are considered to be close contacts.’ (NBC News) / Psaki’s statement (The White House)

■ Journalist reportedly kidnapped and tortured by Russian soldiers in Ukraine (CBS News) / Ukrainian photographer missing following captured journalist’s release: report (New York Post) / In Ukraine, Russia is turning on journalists and the truth with personal & painful consequences (Deadline) / 'She loved every day of her life.' Family and friends pay tribute to Ukrainian journalist killed in Kyiv (CNN)

■ Fox News hosts thank Biden official John Kirby for helping evacuate Benjamin Hall from Ukraine (The Wrap) / 'Save Our Allies' helps rescue Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall from behind enemy lines in Ukraine (Fox News) / 'Post injury, I’ve covered conflicts again. Benjamin Hall, when he’s ready, if he chooses, may as well. We got into this job to speak for those who can't & to let the rest of the world know what's being done to those who can't escape it.' (Kim Dozier)

■ Russian journalist will auction his Nobel peace medal for Ukrainian refugees (CNN) / Facing Putin's wartime censorship, a Nobel laureate fights to keep truth in Russia alive (Washington Post)

■ BuzzFeed announces news cuts on first earnings call (Axios) / BuzzFeed investors have pushed CEO Jonah Peretti to shut down entire newsroom, sources say (CNBC) / Top editors to leave BuzzFeed News ahead of newsroom cuts (New York Times) / Read BuzzFeed editor-in-chief's resignation letter to staff (The Wrap) / BuzzFeed News deputy editor-in-chief Tom Namako joins NBC News as executive editor, digital (Adweek's TVNewser).

March 21

New York Times, Investigation: New Details Flesh Out How Project Veritas Acquired Ashley Biden’s Diary,  Michael S. Schmidt and Adam Goldman, March 21, 2022 (print ed.). The right-wing group made a deceptive call to President Biden’s daughter to confirm the diary’s authenticity weeks after it was shown around at a Trump fund-raiser.

A month before the 2020 election, Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s daughter, Ashley, received a call from a man offering help. Striking a friendly tone, the man said that he had found a diary that he believed belonged to Ms. Biden and that he wanted to return it to her.

Ms. Biden had in fact kept a diary the previous year as she recovered from addiction and had stored it and some other belongings at a friend’s home in Florida where she had been living until a few months earlier. The diary’s highly personal contents, if publicly disclosed, could prove an embarrassment or a distraction to her father at a critical moment in the campaign.

She agreed with the caller to send someone to retrieve the diary the next day.

But Ms. Biden was not dealing with a good Samaritan.

The man on the other end of the phone worked for Project Veritas, a conservative group that had become a favorite of President Donald J. Trump, according to interviews with people familiar with the sequence of events. From a conference room at the group’s headquarters in Westchester County, N.Y., surrounded by other top members of the group, the caller was seeking to trick Ms. Biden into confirming the authenticity of the diary, which Project Veritas was about to purchase from two intermediaries for $40,000.

The caller did not identify himself as being affiliated with Project Veritas, according to accounts from two people with knowledge of the conversation. By the end of the call, several of the group’s operatives who had either listened in, heard recordings of the call or been told of it believed that Ms. Biden had said more than enough to confirm that it was hers.

The new details of Project Veritas’s effort to establish that the diary was Ms. Biden’s are elements of a still-emerging story about how Trump supporters and a group known for its undercover sting operations worked to expose personal information about the Biden family at a crucial stage of the 2020 campaign.

Drawn from interviews, court filings and other documents, the new information adds further texture to what is known about an episode that has led to a criminal investigation of Project Veritas by federal prosecutors who have suggested they have evidence that the group was complicit in stealing Ms. Biden’s property and in transporting stolen goods across state lines.

And by showing that Project Veritas employed deception rather than traditional journalistic techniques in the way it approached Ms. Biden — the caller identified himself with a fake name — the new accounts could further complicate the organization’s assertions in court filings that it should be treated as a publisher and granted First Amendment protections. Project Veritas regularly carries out undercover stings, surveillance operations and ambush interviews, mostly against liberal groups and journalists.

At the same time, new information about the case suggests that the effort to make the diary public reached deeper into Mr. Trump’s circle than previously known.

A month before the call to Ms. Biden, the diary had been passed around a Trump fund-raiser in Florida at the home of a donor who helped steer the diary to Project Veritas and was later nominated by Mr. Trump to the National Cancer Advisory Board. Among those attending the event was Donald Trump Jr., though it is not clear if he examined it.

Federal prosecutors have been investigating how Project Veritas obtained the diary, and last fall carried out searches at the homes of three of the group’s operatives, including that of its founder, James O’Keefe, shown at left on a book cover. In court filings, prosecutors have suggested that the organization was complicit in the theft of some of Ms. Biden’s other belongings, which interviews show the group obtained as it was seeking to confirm the diary’s authenticity.

Project Veritas — which is suing The New York Times for defamation in an unrelated case — has denied any wrongdoing or knowledge that the belongings had been stolen. It has portrayed itself as a media organization that is being unfairly investigated for simply doing journalism and has assailed the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for their handling of the case.

Prosecutors have signaled that they view the circumstances very differently, all but dismissing in one court filing the group’s defense that it was acting as a news organization, saying that “there is no First Amendment protection for the theft and interstate transport of stolen property.”

In response to a request to Project Veritas for comment, Mr. O’Keefe sent an email criticizing The Times. “Imagine writing so thoroughly divergent from reality and so mendacious with innuendo that there is literally no utterance that won’t make it worse,” he said.

Daily Howler, Commentary: Who is Tucker Carlson?: The latest episode began with a simple Q-and-A during a Senate hearing, Bob Somerby, March 21, 2022. The question was quite straightforward. At least on its face, the non-answer answer was not.

The question was asked by Marco Rubio. During a March 8 Senate committee hearing, he posed the question to Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs in the Biden administration.

Rubio's question was quite straightforward. At least on its face, Nuland's response was not.

For the record, Rubio, right, showed no sign of dissatisfaction with Nuland's response, nor did anyone else on the Senate committee. The Q-and-A went like this:

RUBIO (3/8/22): I only have a minute left. Let me ask you, does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?

NULAND: Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of. So we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.

The next Q-and-A went like this:

RUBIO (continuing directly): I'm sure you're aware that the Russian propaganda groups are already putting out there all kinds of information about how they've uncovered a plot by the Ukrainians to release biological weapons in the country with NATO's coordination.

If there is a biological or chemical weapon incident or attack inside of Ukraine, is there any doubt in your mind that, 100 percent, it would be the Russians that would be behind it?

NULAND: There is no doubt in my mind, Senator. And it is classic Russian technique to blame on the other guy what they're planning to do themselves.

In that follow-up, Rubio lobbed the kind of softball question senators will frequently direct to allies, feeling confident of what they will hear in response. From there, Rubio moved on to one last question on a completely different matter.

All in all, he and Nuland seemed to be of one mind concerning events in Ukraine. All in all, they seemed to agree "100 percent."

There was no sign of any concern about what Nuland had said. Still, she'd been asked a very specific question—"Does Ukraine have chemical or biological weapons?"—and she hadn't said no.

In a rational world, Nuland's response, or lack of same, might have generated a bit of journalistic follow-up. It's normal for journalists to take note of "non-response responses"—misleading responses which may have been carefully couched by an evasive official.

In the world in which we live, Tucker Carlson hosts an hour-long TV program on the Fox News Channel.

On the following evening—on Wednesday, March 9—Carlson, right, opened his program with a lengthy monologue about what Nuland had said.

As is fairly common with Carlson's monologues, he made so many different statements during his lengthy cri de coeur that it remains hard to say exactly what he said.

What did Carlson say that night? We can't exactly tell you! But we can tell you this—this is what some editor or producer at Fox News apparently thought he said:

Tucker Carlson: Someone needs to explain why there are dangerous biological weapons in Ukraine. The Pentagon is lying about this—why?

Those are the headlines which sit above the official Fox News transcript of Carlson's March 9 monologue. They seem to represent what Fox News believes that Carlson said.

Is that what Carlson actually said? Did he actually say that "there are dangerous biological weapons in Ukraine?" Did he actually say that "the Pentagon is lying about this?"

Because of the shrieking hysterics which routinely appear in Carlson's monologues, we can't necessarily tell you what Carlson actually said. But it isn't hard to see why Fox News believes that Carlson said those things. Those headlines provide a perfectly reasonable account of what it sounded like Carlson had said.

Those headlines emerged from Carlson's shrieking monologue on Wednesday, March 9. Pushback quickly emerged, much of it as imprecise and as hard to parse as Carlson's monologue was.

Result! On Monday evening, March 14, Carlson returned to the issue in another opening monologue. On this garbled occasion, he seemed to deny that he and one of his guests had ever said that Ukraine had nuclear weapons, or any other such thing.

Quite routinely, Carlson's monologues are a garbled, barely coherent mess. His hysterical shrieking on March 9 provides a good case in point.

We're going to spend the rest of the week examining what Carlson did and didn't say on March 9, and then again on March 14. Two major questions arise at this point: Who in the world is Tucker Carlson? And what can be said about the news org which lets him shriek in such ways?

 New York Times Magazine, Anaïs Nin’s Los Angeles Hideaway Still Keeps Her Secrets, Kurt Soller, Photographs by Chris Mottalini, March 21, 2022, Shrouded by the pines of Silver Lake, the erotic writer’s minimalist, midcentury residence is a lasting monument to her life and legacy.

Among many writers, there’s a commonly held belief that a desk must be organized, an office must be tidy, an entire home must be cleaned, before one can finally sit down and fill the empty pages before them. One can’t help but think of such habits — the physical manifestation of routine and discipline — when visiting the completely preserved home of the midcentury French American eroticist Anaïs Nin, who died at 73 in 1977 in Los Angeles.

Here, hidden among pines overlooking the Silver Lake neighborhood’s reservoir, Nin envisioned a low, single-story aerie, which she called her “one large studio, no separate, small partitions.”

This description appeared in the first edition of her diary (originally published in 1966), which she began writing at 11 as a child traveling to America from the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine and continued until her death.

Today, there are 18 volumes — with a final one left unpublished — comprising an oeuvre that also includes frank, feminist, sexually explicit, oft-censored essays about her various lovers; literary criticism (the English writer D.H. Lawrence was a favorite); and beloved works of fiction like “House of Incest” (1936) and “Delta of Venus” (1977), many of which she initially printed herself.

March 20

Washington Post, Opinion: The GOP’s gibberish about ‘cancel culture’ never looked so dumb, Jennifer Rubin, right, March 20, 2022. The GOP’s profligate use of “cancel culture” — like its use of “critical race theory” and “wokeness” — has turned the phrase into an all-purpose epithet to be flung at the left. “Cancel culture” is a cry of victimhood and an accusation (the left is made up of intolerant bullies!). But it has no real meaning. It’s a way of escaping accountability or even mild public criticism for behavior that deserves social opprobrium.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates

When a right-wing politician who cheered on the Jan. 6 mob loses a book contract, he isn’t being “canceled”; his publisher is exercising good moral and business judgment. When Twitter and Facebook boots a defeated former president from their networks, they are not “canceling” him; they are forcing him to find his own platform from which he can undermine democracy.

The best proof that “cancel culture” is a vapid jibe comes from people who both the left and right can agree are immoral bullies. Russian President Vladimir Putin, widely seen as a war criminal, now whines that economic sanctions deployed in response to his brutal war of aggression amount to a campaign to “cancel” Russia.

When perpetrators of unacceptable conduct invoke “cancel culture” as their defense, they reveal not only their disgraceful character, but also the people they are trying to impress. They are appealing to the right-wing culture warriors in the United States who want to be free to insult, demean and bully others. This includes Republicans currying favor with the MAGA crowd who want to avoid criticism or the consequences of supporting an attempted coup, suppressing voting or spewing antisemitic conspiracy theories.

March 18

 

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, seen in this photograph from a state-run media organization, addressed a cheering crowd of tens of thousands at Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow, the city's largest, on Friday, March 18, 2022 (Photo by Ramil Sitdikov of Sputnik via AFP and Getty Images).

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Putin's many fifth columns constitute fascist toeholds around the world, Wayne Madsen, left, March 18-19, 2022. In many respects, there has not been a war in Europe like the current Russo-Ukrainian War since Adolf Hitler's armored divisions rolled across frontiers in Europe, sending millions of refugees scurrying for safety to countries around the world.

And there has not been such active fifth columns in support of fascism -- in the current situation, the Russian variety -- since Hitler's Nazis and Benito Mussolini's fascists co-opted international support from the likes of Charles Lindbergh, Henry Ford, Father Charles Coughlin, Senator Theodore Bilbo, Oswald Mosley, Ezra Pound, and Errol Flynn.

In 1941, The New York Times referred to Germany's fifth column in the United States, among whose ranks included one Fred Trump, Sr., as "fools, madmen, and paid spies." That description fits nicely for Vladimir Putin's fifth column outside of Russia.

It is important to note that the very term "fifth column" was borne out of the fascist conquest of Spain by the army of General Francisco Franco, a prelude to Hitler's and Mussolini's occupation of most of Europe.

Putin's fifth column abroad can be separated into various categories, the first being those who are out-and-out fascists, Hitler admirers, and white nationalists. These include Putin's greatest asset recruiting triumph, Donald Trump.

The second fifth column includes those who claim they are progressive, Democrats, or Greens but have clearly sided with Putin because they have some tired old worn-out enmity toward NATO, the U.S. military, vaccinations, Corvairs, or sliced white bread. To these ranks we can include Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, former U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard, perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, and the cranky pedantic Trotskyists who comprise the Democratic Socialists of America.

The third set of fifth columnists are professional grifters, con men, and robber barons, including those who have profited handsomely from the largesse bestowed on them by Russian oligarchs and their money troughs. In this category we find Paul Manafort and his colleague, Rick Gates; Blackwater founder Erik Prince; retired U.S. Army Lieut. General and former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Mike Flynn; Charles Koch of Koch Industries; and Robert Herring, the founder and CEO of One America News (OAN).

• Wayne Madsen Report (WMR), Investigative Commentary: Russian Federation ethnic components rebelling; fighting on side of Ukraine, Wayne Madsen
• Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Putin and Hitler: Twin evils bent on maximum conquest, Wayne Madsen

March 17

Washington Post, ‘Unprecedented’ wave of hacking attacks hit Russian government websites, ministry says, Mary Ilyushina, March 17, 2022. Russian government websites and state-run media face an “unprecedented” wave of hacking attacks, the government said Thursday, prompting regulators to filter traffic coming from abroad.

In a statement, the Ministry of Digital Development and Communications said the attacks were at least twice as powerful as any previous ones. It did not elaborate on what filtering measures had been implemented, but in the past, this has often meant barring Russian government websites to users abroad.

“We are recording unprecedented attacks on the websites of government authorities,” the statement said. “If their capacity at peak times reached 500 GB earlier, it is now up to 1 TB. That is, two to three times more powerful than the most serious incidents of this type previously recorded.”

Wednesday evening, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry website was defaced by hackers, who altered its content. Notably, the hack replaced the department hotline with a number for Russian soldiers to call if they want to defect from the army — under the title “Come back from Ukraine alive.”

Computer programmers are taking aim at Russia’s propaganda wall, March 17, 2022.

Washington Post, Amazon closes $8.45 billion acquisition of MGM, Cat Zakrzewski, March 17, 2022. Amazon on Thursday said that it closed its acquisition of MGM, in an $8.45 billion deal that will allow the e-commerce giant to expand its TV and movie offerings.

The deal underscores the limits of the mounting antitrust scrutiny of tech giants in Washington, with the closure happening after anti-monopoly groups and their allies pressed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to block the deal to slow Amazon’s growth.

The FTC signaled it would take a tougher line on tech acquisitions under Khan’s leadership, but it is mired in a 2-2 partisan deadlock that has prevented key agenda items from moving forward.

(Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“MGM has a nearly century-long legacy of producing exceptional entertainment, and we share their commitment to delivering a broad slate of original films and television shows to a global audience,” said Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios.

Washington Post, Five people charged with acting as Chinese government agents to spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing, Ellen Nakashima and Shayna Jacobs, March 17, 2022. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have charged five people with acting on behalf of the Chinese secret police to stalk, spy on and harass U.S. residents critical of Beijing, officials announced Wednesday.

The defendants were charged in three separate cases brought by the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York as part of the Justice Department’s new strategy to counter nation-state threats.

A major focus of the strategy is fighting transnational repression by authoritarian governments. Its launch last month coincided with the shutting down of a program known as the China Initiative, following controversy fueled by what officials said was a misperception that the department was targeting ethnic Chinese for prosecution.

Justice Department officials stressed that prosecutors remained committed to cracking down on crimes such as espionage and cyberattacks, especially those directed by or benefiting foreign governments.

March 16

 

Marina Ovsyannikova, the editor at the state broadcaster Channel One who protested against Russian military action in Ukraine during the evening news broadcast at the station, speaks to the media as she leaves the Ostankinsky District Court after being fined for breaching protest laws in Moscow on March 15, 2022 (AFP photo via Getty Images).

Truthout, Marina Ovsyannikova Refuses to Retract Antiwar Statements in Moscow Court, Chris Walker, March 16, 2022. Marina Ovsyannikova, a former employee of the state-run Channel One television station in Russia who protested the invasion of Ukraine by holding up a “No War” sign on the air, was offered the chance to retract her antiwar statements in a Moscow court on Tuesday.

She refused to do so, and pleaded not guilty to administrative law charges that were filed against her.

Those charges did not stem from her protest, but from the content of a pre-recorded video she made ahead of her action, in which she explained her antiwar views and how she was “embarrassed” for being part of the propaganda machine on Channel One.

“What’s happening in Ukraine right now is a true crime. And Russia is the aggressor,” she said in that video. “And the responsibility for this crime lies only on the conscience of one person, and that person is [Russia President] Vladimir Putin.”

Ovsyannikova was found guilty of violating the administrative law and fined 30,000 rubles (the equivalent of $280 USD). She could face future criminal charges for her on-air protest.

Ovsyannikova’s lawyers pointed out that her rights were being denied to her during her detainment — under Russian law, women who have children under the age of 14 cannot be detained for violating administrative laws (Ovsyannikova has two children under that age limit).

In addition to refusing to retract her statements and pleading not guilty, Ovsyannikova reiterated her viewpoints on the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine to the judge overseeing her case.

“I still believe that Russia committed a crime by attacking Ukraine,” she said. “I do not retract any of my words, it was indeed an antiwar statement.”

Speaking outside of the courthouse after being fined, Ovsyannikova shared her experience in detention, during which her lawyers presumed she was missing due to the fact that she wasn’t allowed to contact them. The dissident, whose father is Ukrainian and mother is Russian, explained that she was interrogated for more than 14 hours while under arrest, and wasn’t allowed to call any of her family to tell them what was going on.

“I spent two days without sleep,” she added.

Ovsyannikova’s protest is but one example out of thousands of Russians in the country speaking out against the Putin-ordered invasion of Ukraine. Protests have sprung up in dozens of cities across the nation, with dissidents risking their livelihoods to showcase their opposition to the war.

Earlier this month, the Kremlin made it illegal to independently report on the war or for citizens to protest against it, threatening those who violated the law with up to 15 years in prison if found guilty.

As of last week, more than 13,000 Russians have been arrested for protesting the invasion of Ukraine, according to a protest monitoring group called OVD-Info.

Washington Post, Why haven’t Apple and Google shut down their app stores in Russia? The U.S. doesn’t want them to, Joseph Menn, March 17, 2022 (print ed.). Cloudflare, Apple and Google provide ordinary Russians with the means to find independent news sources and to connect to activists and nonprofit organizations opposed to the war in Ukraine.

Ukraine’s digital officials and some tech-savvy expatriates in the United States have been calling for Apple and Google to cut Russia off from their app stores and for security company Cloudflare to stop protecting Pravda and Russian war propaganda sites from state-backed and activist hackers.

But civil liberties groups and American officials are pushing the other way, arguing that the three California companies provide ordinary Russians with the means to find independent news sources and to connect to activists and nonprofit organizations opposed to the war in Ukraine.

“It’s important for tech companies to maintain those channels,” said Natalia Krapiva, an attorney at digital rights group Access Now. “App stores are important alternatives for people to learn what is happening.”

Asked about the continued presence in Russia of Cloudflare, one of the world’s best-known providers of cybersecurity services, a State Department spokesperson said, “It is critical to maintain the flow of information to the people of Russia to the fullest extent possible.” The spokesperson agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

March 15

 

Washington Post, Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Kuvshynova killed near Kyiv, Jeremy Barr, March 15, 2022. Zelensky to family of slain U.S. journalist: ‘The people of Ukraine ... are mourning with you.’

Pierre Zakrzewski, a cameraman for Fox News, was killed Monday alongside a Ukrainian colleague, Oleksandra Kuvshynova (shown above), while reporting outside Kyiv, according to statements from Fox News and Ukrainian officials on Tuesday.

Both journalists were traveling in a car Monday with Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall in the town of Horenka when the vehicle was struck by incoming fire. The network said on Monday that Hall, a State Department correspondent, has been hospitalized with his injuries, but no further update has been given on his condition.

Zakrzewski, 55, an Irish citizen who was based in London, had been working in Ukraine since February. Kuvshynova, left, was serving as a consultant for Fox News in Ukraine, helping the network’s team navigate the area, gather news and speak with sources, the network said.

In a memo to employees Tuesday, Fox News Media chief executive Suzanne Scott said Zakrzewski had covered “nearly every international story for Fox News,” including dispatches from Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. In December, Fox gave the cameraman the company’s “Unsung Hero” award for helping evacuate Afghan citizens who had worked for the network along with their families last summer.

“He was profoundly committed to telling the story and his bravery, professionalism and work ethic were renowned among journalists at every media outlet,” Scott wrote. “He was wildly popular — everyone in the media industry who has covered a foreign story knew and respected Pierre.”

Kuvshynova’s death was confirmed Tuesday afternoon by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. A young native of Kyiv, she recently held jobs in public relations, filmmaking and the local music scene, according to her social media accounts. Yonat Friling, a senior field producer for Fox News, said that Kuvshynova worked with the network’s team for the past month and “did a brilliant job.”

 

Politico, Judge imposes $61K penalty on Omarosa for failing to file financial disclosure, Josh Gerstein, March 15, 2022. The former Trump White House aide (shown above in a file photo) claimed officials held necessary files after she was fired.

A judge on Tuesday hit former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman with a $61,585 penalty for ignoring her duty to file a financial disclosure report after she was fired from her post as a communications aide to President Donald Trump in December 2017.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon rejected Manigault Newman’s claims that her firing was so abrupt that she did not have a chance to collect her personal files, which contained financial details she said were necessary for the filing.

In an unsparing 15-page opinion, the judge also dismissed her assertion that the protracted delay in filing the report was due to a dispute over precisely which day was her final one on the White House staff.

“Manigault Newman was well aware of her obligation to file a Termination Report … having received countless reminders — but nevertheless failed to file her report for more than a year after the statutory deadline,” wrote Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. “This conduct establishes a willful violation.”

The Justice Department sued Manigault Newman over the missing form in June 2019. She finally filed the financial disclosure report in September of that year.

Leon agreed with Justice Department attorneys that the “egregiousness” of Manigault Newman’s actions merited the maximum allowable civil penalty under the Ethics in Government Act for the belated filing. “Manigault Newman’s years-long failure to comply with the EIGA after ‘many written and verbal reminders’ is a ‘flagrant’ violation warranting imposition of ‘the full civil penalty,’” Leon wrote.

Manigault Newman appeared as a contestant on several seasons of Trump’s TV show “The Apprentice” before taking a post as head of African-American Outreach for Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. After Trump’s victory, she took a $179,000-a-year job as a communications adviser in the White House Office of Public Liaison. However, her relationship with other aides reportedly grew acrimonious, leading chief of staff John Kelly to fire her in a meeting in the situation room in December 2017.

Unknown to Kelly, Manigault Newman was recording the session.

“It’s important to understand that if we make this a friendly departure … you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation,” Kelly said. He also offered to keep her on the government payroll for a month without her working, she said. She was later escorted out of the White House complex.

In heated social media exchanges about her firing and her surreptitious recordings, Trump later called her a “lowlife” and a “dog.”

Manigault Newman suggested on Tuesday that it was absurd she was being punished for failing to file a form on time, while others — perhaps alluding to her former boss or colleagues — had broken the law without consequence.

“The question remains … are there two systems of justice in this country,” she said in a message posted on Twitter. “One that allows those who violate the Hatch Act and Emoluments Clause a slap on wrist and the other that orders an unprecedented fine (highest in history) for an alleged unintentional failing to file a form?”

Manigault Newman’s attorney, John Phillips, expressed disappointment in the decision and in the Justice Department’s decision to keep pursuing the case even after President Joe Biden’s appointees took over last year.

“I’ve advised her to appeal. I’m frankly stunned by the ruling,” Phillips said in a statement sent via email. “They kept her boxes hostage, which contained the records she needed; while weaponizing litigation against her on multiple fronts. They played games with the system, which is laid out in our Motions and Responses. And a record setting fine as a penalty for public service is beyond inappropriate. Merrick Garland is supposed to be returning stability and reason back to government. This is the opposite of that. They wouldn’t even respond to my requests.”

New York Times, Guest Essay: The Case That Killed #MeToo in Sweden, Jenny Nordberg (a Swedish journalist and author based in New York), March 15, 2022. In 2017, Cissi Wallin, a Swedish journalist, posted a now infamous mirror selfie to her tens of thousands of followers on Instagram.“The powerful media man who drugged and raped me in 2006 is named Fredrik Virtanen.” She would soon learn how much trouble naming the man would cause. The post led to a maelstrom on social media and in the news. Cissi Wallin convicted of gross libel.

As Flight SK946 rounded the southern tip of Greenland, with her husband and 2-year-old son quietly sleeping next to her, Cissi Wallin felt her resolve begin to harden. Two generations of silence was enough.

Her mother and her grandmother, too, told her they had mostly kept quiet when they’d been mistreated by men. It’s what women did back then, they’d said.

But as the plane carried Ms. Wallin, a Swedish writer and actor, from Chicago back to Stockholm that night in October 2017, her thoughts were on what was happening in America. Harvey Weinstein had just been exposed and was fired within days. Something seemed to be gathering momentum. Within a few weeks, women across the country and the world would be saying it out loud: Me Too.

A week after the flight, after working out, skipping her shower and drinking several mugs of strong coffee at a cafe near her house, Ms. Wallin posted a mirror selfie to her tens of thousands of followers on Instagram. “The powerful media man who drugged and raped me in 2006 is named Fredrik Virtanen,” the caption began.

Today — more than four years later — Mr. Virtanen has never been charged with any crime in connection to his encounter with Ms. Wallin. (He has denied her allegations.) She, meanwhile, is a convicted criminal, at risk of prison time.

In 2019 she was charged with and convicted of defamation, after Mr. Virtanen reported her to the police. Other Swedish men have pursued similar tactics: At least 12 criminal convictions have followed of women who had told their own stories since the #MeToo movement began.

And now, in what might be a low point in Ms. Wallin’s quest for the right to speak about what she says happened to her, she’s about to be prosecuted again — after self-publishing a memoir about her experience. Although the book doesn’t name the man, if she’s convicted, the government will seek to have all unsold hard copies of her book destroyed.

Even today, in the post-Stieg Larsson era, Sweden retains its reputation as the feminist capital of the world. Much of that reputation is deserved: In Sweden, 480 days of parental leave is standard; fathers can be spotted pushing strollers around on any given day in the capital’s parks; sexual encounters are — in theory, at least— governed by a consent law; the government even officially proclaims itself “feminist.”

And still, the outpouring of testimonials at the height of #MeToo was striking. More than 60,000 Swedish women signed appeals, many of which detailed personal stories ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault at workplaces and beyond.

But what marked the Swedish version of #MeToo as unusual is that this outpouring of testimonials took place almost completely anonymously: few women were willing to come forward to be identified as the victims, and only a handful of the accused men were named.

March 14

Press Run, Commentary: Covid Nation — press shrugs as Biden restores "normalcy,” Eric Boehlert, right, March 14, 2022. Covid cases evaporate. The media’s goalpost moving on Covid has become exhausting.

For months, the press hammered President Joe Biden for not returning “normalcy” to America, especially as the Omicron variant surged. Thankfully, new cases have fallen 95 percent from a peak of 800,000. In New York City, which got pummeled by the surge, officials now count fewer than 700 new infections each day, down 99 percent from the winter spike. The pandemic is not over (Barack Obama just tested positive), but the news is mostly good these days.

That’s why so many mask mandates have been lifted nationwide, and virtually all schools are open.

What’s the media’s response to that long-awaited turn for the better? They shrug and move on. Instead of celebrating and crediting the Biden administration, returning towards normalcy has instead stirred “disappointment, frustration and queasy ambivalence,” according to a New York Times front-page piece on Sunday. Using anecdotes only, the article suggested that lots of residents in “Covid cautious cities” are reluctant to return to normal.

Talk about heads you lose, tails you lose. The Times somehow managed to frame Covid’s rapid decline in the U.S as upsetting news. (People are “bewildered.”) Can you imagine the coverage today if cases under Biden were still rising?

The press, which treated Covid as the most important news event for two years and hung it around Biden’s neck like a political anchor for the last nine months, suddenly thinks gas prices in the U.S. represents a bigger news story.

Americans have noticed the welcome Covid developments. Eight in ten acknowledge we are in a better place than we were a year ago. Approval for Biden’s handling of the pandemic jumped eight points in the most recent NPR poll. And Google searches of “Covid,” a good indication of public anxiety, are now at their lowest point of the two-year pandemic. (85 percent of Americans 12 and older have received at least one dose of the vaccine.)

For months this winter, the press was adamant Covid represented the defining issue of the Biden administration. It was the “central crisis” according to NPR. Added Puck, “Presidencies are just as defined by events beyond one’s control as they are by promises, and the primary culprit for Biden’s woes is an unmistakable five-letter word that would slot nicely into the first row of a morning Wordle: COVID.”

CNN not long ago demanded Biden address his Covid “crisis,” stressing that the pandemic had led to a sense “that events at home and abroad are cascading out of control.” Covid this year spurred, “growing doubts over whether [Biden] can fulfill his promise to solve problems,” according to the network.

When the U.S. economy added nearly 700,000 new jobs in February, Politico announced it represented a “rare spot of bright news” for Biden’s “mired” presidency. Apparently, Covid cases plummeting to pandemic lows in 2022 doesn’t constitute a “bright” spot.

Today as infections plunge, the topic has virtually disappeared. “Covid” mentions on cable news during the first two weeks of March are down nearly 90 percent compared to the first two weeks of January, according to TVeyes. (References dropped nearly 95 percent on CNN, from 1,170 to 85.)

It’s true that the mainstream media are more interested in relaying bad news vs. good news, simply because it’s more compelling and likely more alluring to news consumers. But the Covid coverage represents a telling example of how an issue that the press itself claimed would define the Biden administration gets translated into no news when it turns towards positive territory. Look for the same look-away coverage when gas prices and inflation eventually go down.

Some might argue that Covid coverage has been thinned out because there’s an unprecedented land invasion taking place in Ukraine and the media are rightly focusing their time and resources on that life-and-death story. That argument would ring true if the same press corps — and especially TV news — didn’t lose its mind last week with its around-the-clock gas price coverage. ‘Breathless’ barely begins to describe the relentless, hyperbole-laced reportage that has dominated the airwaves in recent days.

In that environment, the good news about Covid — and the good news for the White House — has been treated as an afterthought.

Ukraine bumped lots of stories off the front page and off the airwaves, including Covid’s sharp decline in America. Still, the press made sure to carve out oceans of space to constantly remind news consumers that gas prices are up, and that is trouble for Biden. Over that same, recent seven-day period, “gas” was mentioned a total 1220 times on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, compared to “Covid” being referenced just 205 times.

The salivating press lost touch with context and reality, last week treating the bloody, murderous war in Ukraine as being just slightly more pressing than the fact Americans are paying $10 more each week at the gas pump. (Fox News: 720 “Kyiv” mentions, 605 “gas” references.)

Covid remains a hugely important story today and should be covered that way, even if most of the news is good.

March 13

Washington Post, Analysis: How the right embraced Russian disinformation about ‘U.S. bioweapons labs’ in Ukraine, Glenn Kessler, March 13, 2022 (print ed.). Russia for years has been seeding the ground to claim that the United States set up bioweapons labs in Ukraine. The effort paid off when remarks by a State Department official were twisted to suggest the falsehood was confirmed.

“Bioweapon labs in Ukraine prove US criminal activity, diplomat says”

— headline of Tass news article, quoting Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, right, the morning of March 9

“Under oath in an open committee hearing, Toria Nuland just confirmed that the Russian disinformation they’ve been telling us for days is a lie and a conspiracy theory and crazy and immoral to believe is, in fact, totally and completely true.”

— Tucker Carlson, right, remarks on his Fox News show, the evening of March 9

 

Russian disinformation often begins with a speck of fact, which is then twisted into a full-blown conspiracy theory. The technique makes it easier to spread and take root among the country’s supporters. Note how quickly the party line uttered by the Russian Foreign Ministry was embraced by Carlson.

In this instance, Russia for years has been seeding the ground to claim that the United States set up biowarfare labs in Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. Then, brief remarks by Victoria Nuland, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, were twisted to provide “confirmation” of the disinformation program.

The Facts

The Russian claims about Ukrainian labs bear the earmarks of the Soviet Union’s long-running campaign of false allegations that the United States used biological weapons. The KGB, for instance, in the early 1980s spread false claims that a U.S.-funded research project in Pakistan was sending “killer mosquitoes” into Afghanistan, leading to local outrage that ended the program.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, former officials admitted the fabrications. But Russian disinformation about biological weapons resumed again in earnest after Vladimir Putin took control in 1999, according to a 2021 article in the Nonproliferation Review by Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland. Leitenberg says the effort is designed to distract from Russian’s own biological weapons program.

Here are the specks of truth that Russian officials are using to spread their propaganda. The labs were initially funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), as part of its cooperative biological engagement program. And the labs do study African swine fever — but with the aim of preventing its spread.

Nevertheless, despite the constant debunking, the Russian propaganda that the United States has bioweapons labs in Ukraine has taken root, especially on the right, with the hashtag #usbiolabs trending on Twitter as the Russian invasion of Ukraine commenced. “Would the Russian invasion of Ukraine be justified if it were for biodefense?” asked Robert W. Malone, right, a prominent vaccine skeptic, on March 9.

The latest iteration of this claim was sparked by a brief exchange during a Senate hearing on March 8 between Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Nuland. Rubio, left, asked whether Ukraine has biological or chemical weapons. Nuland responded by talking about the research labs and the U.S. concern that Russia would get access to them.

“Ukraine has biological research facilities, which, in fact, we are now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to gain control of,” Nuland replied. “So, we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.”

Following the lead of the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman — who asserted Nuland’s comment was proof of the United States’ “illegal and criminal activity on Ukrainian soil” — Carlson and many others on the right jumped to the conclusion that this meant the labs really were biological weapons facilities.

Carlson briefly acknowledged numerous fact checks that previously had debunked the claim but then embraced the latest Russian spin as the truth. Russian state TV then featured Carlson’s take the next day, completing the circle.

Donald Trump Jr. gleefully tweeted a clip of Nuland, saying: “Well that went from conspiracy theory to Senate testimony in about 6 days … It used to take six months to go from conspiracy theory to fact.”

(Never mind that in 2020, during Trump’s father’s presidency, the State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine expressly denied Russia’s renewed claim that Ukraine possessed U.S.-funded bioweapon labs after China’s Foreign Ministry echoed that falsehood to distract from scrutiny of the origins of the coronavirus.)

In reality, Nuland’s statement about “biological research facilities” did not confirm allegations of bioweapons labs. African swine fever, for instance, is not a human pathogen. But it does devastate pigs and can be used as an economic weapon, so it is considered by the United States to be a potential biowarfare agent — especially in countries (such as the United States) with little experience with it.

Asked on Thursday to expand on Nuland’s comment, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said medical facilities “all have equipment, pathogens or other things that you have to have restrictions around because you need to be sure it is being treated and handled appropriately.” She said there was a concern the Russians could misuse materials, even if not designed for weapons, “in dangerous ways or create challenges for the population.”

The Pinocchio Test

Under Putin, Russia has a biological weapons program, one that it has clearly used to target its opponents. Yet it tried to provide cover for its activities by repeatedly charging that the United States, through facilities it has funded in countries like Ukraine, has its own bioweapons program.

As we said, it’s straight out of the old Soviet playbook. But that doesn’t mean prominent commentators like Carlson should be so quick to fall for it.

 

Brent Renaud, right, and his brother Craig Renaud in Little Rock, Ark., in 2007 (Photo by Oscar Hidalgo for The New York Times).

New York Times, An award-winning American video journalist was killed while reporting in a suburb of Kyiv, a local official said, Michael Schwirtz, March 13, 2022. Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist, was killed in Ukraine on Sunday while reporting in a suburb of the capital, Kyiv, according to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry.

Mr. Renaud, 50, had worked for a number of American news and media organizations in the past, including HBO, NBC and The New York Times. The Ukrainian authorities said he was killed in Irpin, a suburb that has been the site of intense shelling by Russian forces in recent days, but the details of his death were not immediately clear. Ukrainian officials said another journalist was wounded as well.

Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior minister, said in a statement that Mr. Renaud “paid with his life for attempting to expose the insidiousness, cruelty and ruthlessness of the aggressor.”

Mr. Renaud had contributed to The Times in previous years, most recently in 2015, but he was not on assignment for the company in Ukraine. Early reports that he was working for The Times in Ukraine circulated because he was found with a Times press badge that had been issued for an assignment years ago.

New York Times, First Amendment Scholars Want to See the Media Lose These Cases, Jeremy W. Peters, March 13, 2022. Some legal experts say it is time to draw a sharp line between protected speech and harmful disinformation.

The lawyers and First Amendment scholars who have made it their life’s work to defend the well-established but newly threatened constitutional protections for journalists don’t usually root for the media to lose in court.

But that’s what is happening with a series of recent defamation lawsuits against right-wing outlets that legal experts say could be the most significant libel litigation in recent memory.

The suits, which are being argued in several state and federal courts, accuse Project Veritas, Fox News, The Gateway Pundit, One America News and others of intentionally promoting and profiting from false claims of voter fraud during the 2020 election, and of smearing innocent civil servants and businesses in the process.

If the outlets prevail, these experts say, the results will call into question more than a half-century of precedent that created a clear legal framework for establishing when news organizations can be held liable for publishing something that’s not true.

Libel cases are difficult to prove in the United States. Among other things, public figures have to show that someone has published what the Supreme Court has called a “calculated falsehood” or acted with reckless disregard for the truth.

But numerous First Amendment lawyers said they thought the odds were strong that at least one of these outlets would suffer a rare loss at trial, given the extensive and well-documented evidence against them.

That “may well turn out to be a good thing,” said Lee Levine, a veteran First Amendment lawyer who has defended some of the biggest media outlets in the country in libel cases.

The high legal bar to prove defamation had become an increasingly sore subject well before the 2020 election, mainly but not exclusively among conservatives, prompting calls to reconsider the broad legal immunity that has shielded journalists since the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan. Critics include politicians like former President Donald J. Trump and Sarah Palin, who lost a defamation suit against The Times last month and has asked for a new trial, as well as two Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch.

Mr. Levine said a finding of liability in the cases making their way through the courts could demonstrate that the bar set by the Sullivan case did what it was supposed to: make it possible to punish the intentional or extremely reckless dissemination of false information while protecting the press from lawsuits over inadvertent errors.

 

Trump attorney and former Justice Department Deputy Attorney Gen. Rudy Giuliani, his colleague and significant other Maria Ryan, volunteer Trump attorney John Eastman, a law professor, and One America Network White House correspondent Christina Bobb are shown working in a Willard Hotel "War Room" near almost across the street from White House grounds with fellow Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021 in a photo by a fellow Trump supporter.

Palmer Report, Opinion: Major media outlets are finally warming up to the growing signs that the DOJ may be criminally targeting Donald Trump, Bill Palmer, right, March 13, 2022. Signs have been brewing for months that the DOJ might be criminally targeting Trump, which we’ve been steadily documenting here at Palmer Report.

Now that major media outlets are finally waking up to this trend, it’s a good time to revisit what the DOJ would want to have in hand in order to charge Trump: one or more key co-conspirators flipping on him.

To get a trial conviction against a crime boss like Trump who mostly doesn’t do his own dirty work, rarely uses email or texts, and often gives henchmen instructions in code words, you need one of those henchmen to testify that Trump really was instructing them to commit the crimes they committed.

That’s why it’s so crucial that Roger Stone’s Oath Keeper driver cut a seditious conspiracy plea deal last week. If the DOJ can convince Stone that it has him nailed, and that he’s better off flipping now than going to trial, the DOJ gains a witness who can get Trump convicted.

It’s also why the DOJ case against Rudy Giuliani, which was stalled by the courts for about eight months in a battle over attorney-client privilege that was just recently resolved (largely in the DOJ’s favor), is now so relevant.

“So if the DOJ has Stone and Giuliani nailed already, why not just indict them?” Because it’s not about nailing them. It’s about nailing them so thoroughly, they REALIZE they’re nailed, and flip. Otherwise you have to wait a long time for their trial conviction, before they flip.

New York Times, In Whitmer Kidnapping Trial, Lawyers Debate Defendants’ Free Speech, Frances Robles, March 13, 2022. The case of what prosecutors say was a conspiracy to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Michigan’s governor, is testing the government’s ability to root out extremism.

Few people took the Covid-19 lockdown restrictions that swept the world in the spring of 2020 harder than the far-right extremist Adam Fox.

The burden of being unable to work out at shuttered gyms offended Mr. Fox to his core, so he took to recording Facebook videos to rant about what he viewed as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s tyrannical regime. Ms. Whitmer of Michigan, a Democrat, had mandated masks, canceled school and closed most commerce, and for militia movement members like Mr. Fox, she personified everything going so wrong in America.

He suggested a citizen’s arrest.

“We want her flex-cuffed on a table,” Mr. Fox, 38, said in a recording played in court.

Mr. Fox and three fellow militia members are now on trial at the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Michigan in connection with what prosecutors say was a conspiracy to kidnap Ms. Whitmer and blow up a bridge a few miles from her lakeside vacation cottage to delay the police response. The trial, which opened with jury selection on Tuesday and is expected to take up to six weeks, is an important and unusual domestic terrorism prosecution that will test the government’s ability to root out violent right-wing extremism on American soil, particularly in the wake of the attack on the U.S. Capitol last year.

As the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 elections helped fuel a rise of extremism, the case offers a rare inside look at the secretive world of militia groups that use social media, encrypted apps, field training exercises and secret meetings to discuss violent uprisings.

The suspects — some survivalists, others who hoped to foment a new civil war — have framed the case as a critical examination of something entirely different: the country’s commitment to free speech. To them, the legal proceedings underway at the federal courthouse in Grand Rapids, Mich., before Chief Judge Robert J. Jonker put a spotlight on an overreaching government willing to manufacture plots to criminalize free speech and crack down on the government’s perceived enemies. Although Judge Jonker had initially ruled that he would limit the use of an entrapment defense, he changed course after opening statements.

But even as defense lawyers argue that the alleged conspiracy amounted to nothing more than trash talk from drug users, prosecutors contend that hundreds of hours of the defendants’ own words, surreptitiously recorded by informants and presented as evidence in support of the charges of kidnapping, conspiracy and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, are the very thing that will do them in. If found guilty, they potentially face life sentences.

“I’m going to do some of the most nasty, disgusting things that you have ever read about in the history of your life,” one of the defendants, Barry G. Croft Jr., 46, of Delaware, said as he was secretly recorded chronicling his plans to sow mayhem. He went on to explain how packing pennies in explosives could cause even more injuries and how he had thought about killing police officers and federal agents.

“They’re looking forward to the civil war,” Jonathan Roth, an assistant U.S. attorney, said. “They’re getting ready for it, and they’re looking for ways to start it.”

 

Washington Post, Nicaraguan presidential candidate Cristiana Chamorro convicted in crackdown on opposition, Ismael López Ocampo and Mary Beth Sheridan, March 13, 2022. Chamorro, the most prominent of dozens of political activists arrested by Nicaragua’s government, faces up to 13 years in jail.

Cristiana Chamorro, the most prominent of dozens of political activists arrested by Nicaragua’s government, has been found guilty of money-laundering and other charges, part of a judicial offensive that could derail any serious challenge to President Daniel Ortega for years. Ortega is shown above in file photos spanning his decades in power or as a left-wing opposition leader.

Chamorro, 68, is the daughter of former president Violeta Chamorro and a member of one of the best-known political dynasties in Central America. Cristiana Chamorro was placed under house arrest in June, as she was emerging as a leading candidate in presidential elections. After locking up his potential opponents, Ortega cruised to a fourth consecutive term in November.

Cristiana Chamorro, 68, had served as editor of the country’s largest newspaper, the family-run La Prensa, and as director of a press-freedom foundation named after her mother.

She, her brother Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, and three other people who were involved with the foundation were found guilty on Friday, at the end of a week-long trial, according to relatives. Prosecutors had maintained the organization received money from overseas to destabilize the government, a charge the defendants denied. Cristiana Chamorro faces up to 13 years in jail, while her brother, a former lawmaker, could get up to seven years.

“As my siblings said in court, this trial has the goal of staining the legacy of our parents — an objective that will not be achieved,” said Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a journalist, in a telephone interview from exile in Costa Rica. The Chamorros’ father, also named Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, was the best-known opposition figure confronting the right-wing Somoza dictatorship when he was shot dead in 1978.

Nicaragua's Ortega is strangling La Prensa, one of Latin America's most storied newspapers

Some analysts had expected Ortega to ease his crackdown on the opposition after his November reelection. Instead, the judicial system has convicted more than 30 opposition activists, many charged with treason.

New York Times, Former employees of RT America described what it was like to work for Russian state television, Cecilia Kang, March 13, 2022 (print ed.). For eight years, Lee Camp hosted a weekly show on RT America that aimed to satirize American politics, finding punchlines in subjects like sanctions against Afghanistan and student debt forgiveness. That ended unceremoniously on March 3, a week after Russian airstrikes began in Ukraine, when the Russian-state-funded network suddenly shut down.

Now, Mr. Camp is fuming about it.

He blamed the “U.S. government war machine” for RT America’s defeat and lamented what he saw as corporate media’s victory in squelching alternative views like his.

More than 100 people lost their jobs at the network, which the Russian state media outlet RT created more than a decade ago to offer a counternarrative to CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. It had headquarters in Washington and bureaus in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, and produced a full slate of news, comedy and political commentary programs available on cable and satellite television and online.

A role at RT America was a rare job in an industry where if you had screwed up, were washed up or were completely new to the field, there weren’t many other options. RT America was where Rick Sanchez, who had lost his anchor gig at CNN, was given a second shot, and where Mr. Camp, a standup comedian, made his way to the television set with the potential to reach tens of millions of cable subscribers with RT America on their menus.

Opportunities abounded. Young reporters were promoted to anchors and teleprompter technicians to control room operators within months. Rachel Blevins co-hosted a show, “Boom Bust,” four years out of college.

For the employees who swiped into the second-floor office in downtown Washington, a few blocks from the White House, RT America offered good pay and benefits in the fiercely competitive cable news job market.

It looked and felt like a typical American cable news network, with flashy live studios ensconced in fishbowl glass walls, stylish leather furniture in the green room and free bagels with schmears on Fridays.

“It was actually so normal,” Ms. Blevins said.

In interviews with 11 former employees of RT America, some who were working there when it shut down and some who worked there in the network’s earlier days, many stressed that they were against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and some had criticized the invasion on air.

But they are now grappling with having worked at a company that American television distributors kicked off their platforms days before RT America closed down. Several former employees would discuss their experience only on the condition of anonymity for fear of drawing attention to the affiliation.

March 12

Washington Post, Putin’s moves against U.S. tech giants set stage for crackdown on free speech, Greg Miller and Joseph Menn, March 12, 2022. Google and Apple blinked after direct threats from Russian agents.

Russian agents came to the home of Google’s top executive in Moscow to deliver a frightening ultimatum last September: take down an app that had drawn the ire of Russian President Vladimir Putin within 24 hours or be taken to prison.

Google quickly moved the woman to a hotel where she checked in under an assumed name and might be protected by the presence of other guests and hotel security, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The same agents — believed by company officials to be from Russia’s FSB, a successor to the KGB intelligence service — then showed up at her room to tell her the clock was still ticking.

Within hours, an app designed to help Russians register protest votes against Putin could no longer be downloaded from Google or Apple, whose main representative in Moscow faced a similarly harrowing sequence. Titans of American technology had been brought to their knees by some of the most primitive intimidation tactics in the Kremlin playbook.

The unnerving encounters, which have not previously been disclosed, were part of a broader campaign that Putin intensified last year to erode sources of internal opposition — moves now helping him maintain his hold on power amid a global backlash over the invasion of Ukraine.

In a single year, Putin had his political nemesis Alexei Navalny imprisoned after a poisoning attempt failed to kill him; pushed independent news outlets to the brink of extinction; orchestrated a Kremlin-controlled takeover of Russia’s Facebook equivalent; and issued “liquidation” orders against human rights organizations.

Amid this internal offensive, Putin also moved to bring foreign technology companies to heel. Moscow deployed new devices that let it degrade or even block Russians’ access to Facebook and Twitter, imposed fines totaling $120 million on firms accused of defying Kremlin censors, and ordered 13 of the world’s largest technology companies to keep employees in Russia and thus exposed to potential arrest or other punishment for their employers’ actions — a measure that U.S. executives refer to as the “hostage law.”

March 11

 

World War

52 year-old Ukrainian teacher Olena Kurilo following a Russian missile strike in Chuhuiv, Ukraine.

Proof, The Ten Hardest Truths About the War in Europe, Seth Abramson, left, March 11, 2020. The author of a bestseller on Russia, Ukraine, and links between the Russia-Ukraine conflict and U.S. politics reveals 10 terrifying things about the worst military crisis in Europe since 1945.

Introduction: I’ve been nervous about publishing this article ever since I started writing it.

The reason for my anxiety will be familiar to anyone inside or outside the American government who has extensively researched Vladimir Putin and understands what the current atrocities in Europe represent: a terrifying new stage in the war against the West that Putin has been waging for twenty years, and that he’s been winning for at least half that time in part because many in the West remain unaware they’re at war.

To write at length about Putin and his twenty-first-century infiltrations of Western democracies and their institutions—as I did in the “Proof” trilogy—is to run the risk of seeming not just alarmist but almost ludicrously paranoid. It’s only the fact that all the warnings those who’ve written extensively about Putin have been giving for years are now coming to horrific fruition that it even feels safe to write candidly about what we’re all now experiencing.

Academics can debate whether our current period is in the umbra of the same Cold War that dominated the last century, or a new one; whether we’re on the doorstep of World War III, or are already in it; whether the conditions on the ground in Europe today are most reflective of the eve of World War I or World War II; but what no one can deny is that what is happening in Ukraine is not merely a “news story” or even a spate of well-televised war crimes but a fundamental shifting of our age toward chaos.

There is no need to rehash the core facts beyond this brief summary: Putin is a former KGB agent and current murderous autocrat who is almost certain to be a dictator over Russia until his death; he has repeatedly said that the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century was the 1991 fall of the Communist Soviet Union; he seeks to reconstitute the land area of the Soviet Union by whatever means necessary and over however long a period of time is required, though he understands that this cannot be accomplished without the dissolution or destruction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization defensive alliance (NATO) and possibly both the European Union and the United States; the post-Soviet government in Russia, including (indeed perhaps especially) Putin’s KGB, began searching for ways to collapse American democracy through asymmetrical warfare from the moment the Soviet Union passed into history; and some significant portion of the current domestic political strife in the United States has been deliberately provoked by the Kremlin and its agents through acts of subterfuge, espionage, propaganda, and hacking that properly answer to the name war.

Yesterday, a former high-ranking official in the Donald Trump administration, Miles Taylor, said that the current Trumpist-Putinist Republican Party is far and away the greatest national security threat America has faced in his lifetime. That he is correct is confirmed not just by the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trumpist irregulars or the fact that former president Trump—to please Putin and ensure his own future business opportunities in Russia—put every U.S. alliance and interest lying beyond our shores at risk, but the fact that America is now in a global conflict (call it the Cold War, World War III, or Second Cold War, as you like) at a time when Trump and Trumpism have deliberately put our body politic at a point of permanent fracture. That most Americans still do not understand what Putin is trying to do and the cost that will be exacted upon the United States as he seeks to do it means that the coming months and perhaps years will be the darkest and most fraught in a century.

Because Putin has now advanced from waging a “hot” cyberwar on America’s sacred electoral infrastructure to waging a hot conventional war on the European continent, everything is now in play that was previously only a harrowing specter in books like Proof of Collusion (Simon & Schuster, 2018), Proof of Conspiracy (Macmillan, 2019), and Proof of Corruption (Macmillan, 2020). Putin has already threatened the world with nuclear war; facing the most comprehensive sanctions ever leveled against a major global power, he has categorized those sanctions as themselves an act of war (thus, at least theoretically, permitting an immediate military response from Russia); there are already significant signs that the war in Europe will destabilize Earth’s international economy for the foreseeable future; the war has also shifted global alliances in such an extraordinary fashion and to such a dramatic degree that America’s supposed allies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will not speak to the president of the United States, and the United States has now sent emissaries to negotiate with our long-time enemies in Venezuela. Gas prices just hit a historic high and show no signs of coming down rather than going up. Thousands of civilians are now being killed in Ukraine because they lack air cover, and yet the United States has just declared that it has no appetite for aiding Ukraine in rebuilding its air force via MiG-29s from Poland.

In short, we’re in the earliest days of a sequence of global events whose end none can know but whose present is a darkness deeper than anyone younger than 85 has known.

By and large, American media has so far done yeoman’s work covering the fighting in Europe. While certain news articles published in the United States have endangered the Ukrainian resistance by giving explicit descriptions of its defensive operations and placement, the fact that so many leading American journalists are now embedded in Ukrainian cities has given those of us who care about the indiscriminate killing of women and children—which at this point appears to be approximately half our nation at most—an unmistakable sense that the System of the World is unraveling. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who his aides say has survived more than a dozen assassination attempts in just the last two weeks, may be speaking first and foremost on behalf of the nation he leads when he says the Ukrainians are now fighting for the preservation of Western democracy—and against the global march of autocracy that our own president, Joe Biden, has so often spoken of—but his personal investment in this framing does not make the claim incorrect. While the NATO alliance has refused (and will continue to refuse) to deploy its forces into Europe’s current theater of war, this strategic decision in no way obviates the reality that right now the Ukrainians are indeed the world’s foremost proxies for capital-“d” Democracy.

In the coming weeks and months, Americans will be repeatedly confronted with the question of how much we’re willing to sacrifice to preserve our nation and preserve the very notion of democracy on the global stage. Unfortunately, during the COVID-19 pandemic we learned that at least half of America is unwilling to have its daily routine at all disturbed by a global or even domestic tragedy; there’s no reason to expect we’ll answer the call of history any more honorably now that it’s a political principle and the integrity of American democracy at stake rather than hundreds of millions of lives.

Of course, the impact of what’s happening now in Europe will fall upon the shoulders of hundreds of millions soon enough. Already we’re learning that the war in Ukraine is launching a refugee crisis the likes of which the West hasn’t seen since World War II, with the near certainty that at least 5 million Ukrainians will ultimately cross a national border to flee the war crimes Putin is presently inflicting on their homeland. But beyond this ever-expanding refugee crisis, and the morally intolerable civilian deaths in cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv and Mariupol, lies the fact that many millions in European democracies like Finland and Latvia and Estonia and Lithuania now feel under military threat from Russian aggression, as will those in Romania and Poland if (or more likely when) Ukraine is annexed in its totality by Russia. The economic and geopolitical effects of having the world’s largest country by land area—and its second-largest military—become a “pariah state” encompass the lives of hundreds of millions more than the tragedy in Ukraine has already affected. And that’s only in the medium term.

This essay seeks to speak candidly about this medium-range outlook, and to do so in terms that American media has so far eschewed—in part because it is habitually and temperamentally “present-oriented,” and in part because it has missed the fact, as have most Americans, that our country is, sadly, already implicitly at war with Russia.

While this may seem an inauspiciously hot-headed and alarmist start to what intends to be a sober essay on the very geopolitics that I wrote three national bestsellers about over the last forty months, understand that with the advent of the internet and the establishment of a global economy there was never a chance that World War III would look like World War II or World War I. The war we are in now is very much a twenty-first-century war, which doesn’t mean that there are no conventional components to it—as the Ukrainians are learning right now, with devastating consequences—but that if we fail to appreciate the unconventional components of international warfare in this century we are dooming ourselves to defeat at the very moment that the inchoate and unconventional aggressions of our enemies have become conventional and dire.

With all this said, here are ten truths that American media and American voters need to come to terms with immediately.

 

The Ten Hardest Truths About the War in Europe

(1) America is now in a world war.

If you’re one of those people who—like the notoriously geopolitically unsophisticated Trumpists, who speak so often of courage yet categorically oppose any instance of it—have always thought that World War III would feature the same sort of military, para- military, and asymmetrical logistics that World War I and World War II did, you need to rearrange your thinking immediately. While major international military conflicts always bear certain hallmarks—for instance, war crimes, so-called collateral damage, and the threatened use (or use) of weapons of mass destruction—the chances that a global military conflict in 2022 would look like a global military conflict that began on September 1, 1939 (let alone one that began on July 28, 1914) were always zero. Don’t be fooled by the fact that what’s happening now indeed exhibits certain similarities to what happened when Nazi Germany invaded Eastern Europe at the close of the 1930s, whether it’s the fact that Eastern Europe has again been invaded by a global military power with an autocratic leader, that fears of a genocide in Europe again dominate international political discourse, or that the use of nuclear weapons already hangs over the world like a glowering spectre. 2022 is, nevertheless, not 1939, and no amount of far-right Putin apologists whining about “liberals” wanting to drag America into a war with Russia will change the simple fact that America is already at war with Russia.

This war is a worldwide conflict that could last as many as a hundred years—think of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1337-1453) rather than World War I or World War II—and began upon the conclusion of hostilities in the European theater of WWII in 1945. The principal disputants have from the start been the United States and Russia, and while one could certainly question the instances in which one or the other of the two parties pushed the dispute into outright military conflict (e.g., the Korean War, the disaster at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, or the 1979-to-1989 Soviet-Afghan War that the United States involved itself in by coordinating with men who’d later turn their violent attentions on America), one of the least-discussed errors that either side has made during this Second Hundred Years’ War was made by America: many of our diplomats, generals, and politicians believed the war had ended when the Soviet Union fell. By the time GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney was correctly telling Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama that the Russians were still America’s foremost geopolitical opponents, it was all then-President Obama could do not to laugh in Romney’s face. And back in 2012, U.S. media scored the point for Obama.....

(6) The costs of the current world war may well be more than Americans are willing to bear—and if a majority of Americans come to wrongly believe that it’s President Biden rather than Vladimir Putin and his allies (very much including Donald Trump) who’ve brought the world to its current pass, they’ll punish the Democrats and reward the Republicans. Yet doing so would play into Putin’s hands.

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).

March 10

New York Times, Analysis: 4 Falsehoods Russians Are Told About the War, Stuart A. Thompson, March 10, 2022. Russia’s international disinformation campaign seemed to flounder in the early days of the invasion, as narratives about Ukrainian bravery dominated the internet. But in Russia, the country’s propaganda machine was busy churning out a deluge of misinformation aimed at its own citizens.

The narrative disseminated online through state-run and unofficial channels has helped create an alternate reality where the invasion is justified and Ukrainians are to blame for violence. To control the narrative at home, Russia also shut down access to several websites and threatened the news media with long prison sentences for criticizing the war. There’s some evidence that the effort has mollified at least some Russians.

Here is what the war looks like to Russians, based on a review of state news articles, channels on the popular chat app Telegram, and input from several disinformation watchdogs who are monitoring Russia’s propaganda machine.

Some of the most disturbing images from the war have come from Mariupol, a port city in the southeastern coast. Shelling battered the region, killing several civilians who were trying to flee the area, during what was supposed to be a cease-fire.

But Russians got a different explanation online: Ukrainians had fired on Russian forces during the cease-fire, and neo-Nazis were “hiding behind civilians as a human shield,” according to the Russian state news website Tass.

Neo-Nazis have been a recurring character in Russian propaganda campaigns for years, used to falsely justify military action against Ukraine in what Russian officials have called “denazification.” Those claims have only continued during the conflict. To explain away attacks on other Ukrainian apartment buildings, the same article by Tass claimed that neo-Nazis had placed “heavy weapons in apartment buildings, while some residents are forcibly kept in their homes,” providing no evidence.

Russian social media accounts have used a mix of fake and unconfirmed photos showing Ukrainian soldiers holding Nazi flags or photos of Hitler. An analysis by the Center for Information Resilience, a nonprofit focused on identifying disinformation, showed that the number of tweets connecting Ukrainians to Nazis soared after the invasion began.

“Propaganda works when it coincides with your existing assumptions,” said Pierre Vaux, a senior investigator at the Center for Information Resilience. “The stuff that chimes into the Nazi stuff is really effective.”

After Russia attacked an area near the nuclear complex in Zaporizhzhia, leading to a fire, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine called it “nuclear terrorism.”

But according to a Kremlin statement reported in Tass, the military seized the facility to prevent Ukrainians and neo-Nazis from “organizing provocations fraught with catastrophic consequences.” Even though Ukrainians heavily fortified the region against an attack, Russian officials claimed they already had control of the compound before Ukrainians opened fire. They added that Ukrainians set fire to an adjacent building before fleeing, providing no evidence. Western experts said controlling the Zaporizhzhia complex would allow Russia to trigger blackouts or shut down the entire power grid.

The image of Russia as a world protector surfaced again after the country’s officials claimed they discovered evidence that Ukraine was working on a nuclear bomb. According to Russian officials, plans for the bomb were uncovered at the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

“It doesn’t even make sense, because if you’re going to develop a nuclear weapon, you don’t do your secret development in a nuclear power plant,” Mr. Vaux said. “But that kind of thing is just being beamed out on Russian state TV.”
After Russia shelled a residential neighborhood, Russians claimed Ukrainians did it.

An attack on Kharkiv, a northeast Ukraine city bordering Russia, provided additional evidence that Russia had indiscriminately bombed residential neighborhoods and killed civilians, according to the Atlantic Council, an American research group. The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into war crimes after the assault.

In one attack that included heavy shelling, 34 civilians were killed and 285 were injured, according to the Ukrainian State Emergency Service.

March 9

Washington Post, Analysis: A judge uses Tucker Carlson’s own words against Fox News, Aaron Blake, right, But not like you might expect. It’s a pretty remarkable state of affairs when a judge is approvingly citing Tucker Carlson’s journalistic rigor, but that’s precisely the situation we find ourselves in now.

And rather ironically, that could be bad news for Fox News.

New York Supreme Court Judge David B. Cohen has now ruled that voting-machine company Smartmatic’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News and Rudolph W. Giuliani can proceed. The case involved numerous false and baseless claims made on Fox about voter fraud involving the company’s voting machines.

In the ruling, the judge notably dropped Fox host Jeanine Pirro and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell from the lawsuit — Pirro because her statements didn’t so directly accuse Smartmatic of illegality, and Powell because New York doesn’t have jurisdiction over her.

But the case against Fox, its other hosts and Giuliani can proceed. And in allowing it to, the judge previewed a tough road ahead for them in this monumental defamation case.

The ruling repeatedly says Fox hosts, Giuliani and Powell made claims “without any evidence” and “without any basis.” It also says that claims made by Giuliani, Fox host Maria Bartiromo and now-former Fox Business host Lou Dobbs could meet the legal standard of claims being “so inherently improbable that only a reckless person would have put [them] in circulation.”

But perhaps the ruling’s most biting — and also potentially legally important — section involves Carlson.

In the course of laying out the legal requirements for Smartmatic to prove its case, the judge noted that the company must prove Fox met the standard of acting with “actual malice” — i.e. not merely promoting false claims, but doing so with malice. And on that count, the judge says the best evidence that it did is Carlson.

That’s because Carlson, unlike the others, applied significant actual skepticism to the claims — and broadcast it.

Washington Post, Opinion: Why we need to keep protections for the news media, George Freeman and Lee Levine, March 9, 2022 (print ed.). In New York Times v. Sullivan, decided on March 9, 1964, the Supreme Court wisely recognized that news organizations need constitutional protection against libel suits to ensure “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” debate. Today, the safeguards established by that landmark case are under a dangerous two-pronged assault.

First, the past several years have seen a worrisome increase in libel lawsuits brought by a broad array of political candidates, elected officials and domestic corporate titans, not to mention foreign autocrats and oligarchs.

Second, despite this torrent of litigation, the Supreme Court might be poised to weaken constitutional protections for the news media — “opening up the libel laws,” as Donald Trump once urged.

Two justices have called for Sullivan to be reconsidered, and they might find takers among their colleagues. Justice Clarence Thomas wants to see the case overruled. Justice Neil M. Gorsuch has suggested that, given “momentous changes in the Nation’s media landscape,” Sullivan now incentivizes shoddy journalism and an “ignorance is bliss” mentality.

Reconsidering Sullivan and relaxing the “actual malice” standard imposed on public officials and public figures who claim they have been defamed would be a terrible mistake. The case was correct when it was decided; it remains equally correct — and at least as necessary — today.

George Freeman is executive director of the Media Law Resource Center. He was previously the in-house newsroom and First Amendment attorney for the New York Times. Lee Levine, a retired lawyer, served as managing editor of the MLRC report referenced in this column.

Washington Post, Fact Checker Analysis: Pence-backed ad falsely blames Biden for hike in purchases of Russian oil, Glenn Kessler, March 9, 2022. “Before Russian bombs began to rain on Ukraine. Before hundreds of innocent Ukrainians lost their lives. A horrific decision had already been made. Joe Biden caved to the radical environmentalists and stopped America’s Keystone pipeline and dramatically increased Americans’ dependence on Russian oil, endangering America’s security and helping Russia fund their invasion.”

— Voice-over of a new ad, “Horrific Decision,” via former vice president Mike Pence’s political organization, Advancing American Freedom, March 7, 2022

Well, this ad certainly is not subtle. It starts with vivid, frightening images of the Russian invasion of Ukraine — and then connects President Biden’s “horrific decision” to halt the Keystone XL pipeline to increased U.S. purchases of Russian oil.

Text appears at one point: “U.S. reliance on Russian oil hits record high.” And then another text appears: “U.S. ‘paying Putin to invade’ Ukraine.” That is attributed, oddly, to “Oil analyst, Fox News.” (It turns out to be Stephen Schork, a onetime commodity trader and research analyst who writes a newsletter.)

The Pence organization claims it will spend $10 million targeting 16 congressional Democrats with this message. The ad ends by urging viewers to contact the lawmaker to “support America’s security instead of Russia’s terror.” Images of explosions and the sound of a woman’s cry close the ad.

Given that Biden on Tuesday announced a halt to imports of Russian oil and gas, the ad already feels rather stale. Moreover, the ad displays little understanding of the energy markets and makes an unwarranted suggestion that Biden is responsible for increased purchases of Russian oil. Energy analysts say other factors — which predate the Biden administration — are responsible.

The Facts

Within hours of taking office, Biden canceled the planned construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. The move was designed to be a signal that the Biden administration was taking a tougher stand on fossil fuels and shifting the country toward cleaner energy.

We’ve written many fact checks on this project over the years, about inflated claims about the number of jobs that would be created and about false assertions that the oil moving through it would bypass the United States. If the pipeline were built, the crude oil would travel to the Gulf Coast, where it would be refined into products such as motor gasoline and diesel fuel, with one estimate that 70 percent of the refined product would be consumed in the United States.

But here’s the rub — despite President Donald Trump’s enthusiastic backing, the pipeline still had not been built because of court fights and other challenges. So even if Biden had not canceled it, there is little chance it would have been built by now. The move was more symbolic than anything else. (Moreover, in the past 10 years, the production of oil from tar sands has doubled, by more than what the Keystone XL would have carried, and it is ferried by railroad and other pipelines.)

Washington Post, Analysis: Tucker Carlson goes full blame-America on Russia’s Ukraine invasion, Aaron Blake, March 9, 2022 (print ed.). Tucker Carlson’s remarkably Putin-sympathetic view of the war in Ukraine has yet to catch on with large swaths of the conservative movement. But if it doesn’t, it apparently won’t be for lack of trying.

Carlson, right, lately has tempered his unfortunately timed suggestion that perhaps Vladimir Putin isn’t that bad a guy. But with that point largely conceded, he now has shifted to assuring that Putin is not the only bad guy. Carlson on Monday drove home an argument that has lingered on the fringes of the conservative movement for some time — that the United States and the West invited this war with their support for admitting Ukraine into NATO, a step that Russia finds unacceptable.

To be clear, the idea that NATO expansion into countries such as Ukraine is provocative and might even be a bad idea is not a fringe position; it has long been espoused, dating to prominent, establishment foreign policy voices in the 1990s. But Carlson took things a good few conspiratorial steps further, arguing that the push for NATO was deliberately intended to provoke this war.

March 7

 

New York Times, Alex Jones and Donald Trump: A Fateful Alliance Draws Scrutiny, Elizabeth Williamson, March 7, 2022. The Infowars host, shown above, tormented Sandy Hook families and helped elect former President Trump. Investigators are now eyeing his role in the Capitol attack.

The day President Donald J. Trump urged his supporters to “be there, will be wild!” at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Alex Jones spread the message to millions.

“This is the most important call to action on domestic soil since Paul Revere and his ride in 1776,” Mr. Jones, the Infowars broadcaster, said on his Dec. 19, 2020, show, which airs live online and on a network of radio stations. Mr. Jones, whose lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting fueled years of threats against the 26 victims’ families, urged his listeners to take action.

A little more than two weeks later, Mr. Jones joined his followers at the Capitol as a behind-the-scenes organizer — a crucial role in the riot that is under increasing scrutiny by congressional investigators.

It is part of a reckoning Mr. Jones faces on multiple fronts. He is still fighting a half-dozen defamation lawsuits filed by the targets of his false claims, including the relatives of 10 Sandy Hook victims. Late last year the Sandy Hook families won four default judgments against him after he for years resisted court orders, and in upcoming trials, juries will decide how much he must pay them.

For Jan. 6, Mr. Jones helped secure at least $650,000 from a Publix grocery-store heiress, Julie Fancelli, an Infowars fan, to underwrite Mr. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse the morning of the attack, $200,000 of which was deposited into one of Mr. Jones’s business accounts, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack said. The night before the riot Mr. Jones was at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, where Trump aides and allies had set up an outpost. He has longtime ties to at least a half-dozen people arrested after the riot, including the founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, Stewart Rhodes, still a regular guest on Infowars, and Joseph Biggs, a former Infowars employee and Proud Boys leader.

The House committee has subpoenaed Mr. Jones, and included a three-page list seeking his related communications and financial records. The panel is also seeking Mr. Jones’s communications with Mr. Trump, his family and anyone from the White House or Congress in the days before the riot. Questioned by the panel this year, Mr. Jones invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, and is trying to block the committee’s demand for records in court.

Whatever the outcome of the Jan. 6 investigation, Mr. Jones’s journey from Sandy Hook to the assault on the Capitol is a reflection of how conspiracy theories in the United States have metastasized and corroded public discourse in the digital age. A defender of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and a former regular on RT, the Kremlin-funded international television outlet, Mr. Jones espoused such extreme views of American democratic society — he has cast airport security screenings as a plot to usurp Americans’ freedoms — that in 2011 RT stopped inviting him on air.

This article is adapted from “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth,” to be published by Dutton on March 8.

Elizabeth Williamson is a feature writer in the Washington bureau. She has worked for the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, and is the author of “Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth.”

Washington Post, The tiny radio station broadcasting Russian propaganda in D.C., Paul Farhi, March 7, 2022. How the Kremlin found a middleman who found a Beltway home for Radio Sputnik, known for spreading Russian spin.

For a few seconds every hour, WZHF-AM interrupts its round-the-clock schedule of talk to air a curious disclaimer: “This radio programming is distributed by RM Broadcasting on behalf of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, Moscow, Russia. Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.”

The cryptic notification masks a larger story. WZHF, a former Spanish-language station 11 miles east of the White House in Maryland’s Capitol Heights, is the flagship of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s effort to harness America’s radio airwaves to sell the Kremlin’s point of view. Despite periodic legal and political challenges, and the imposition of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, the station has stayed on the air, broadcasting its Kremlin-approved message.

The station at 1390 AM is one of only five outlets in the United States that air English-language broadcasts of “Radio Sputnik,” produced in Moscow and Washington under the Russian government’s supervision.

Sputnik is the radio and digital arm of Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today), the same Kremlin-controlled media agency that directs RT and RT America, the better-known TV and digital media operations founded by Putin’s regime in 2005.

But while American distributors and European governments have banned RT since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, leading to the collapse of RT’s American operations on Thursday, WZHF is still offering Sputnik’s content to Beltway listeners.

With names like “Political Misfits” and “By Any Means Necessary,” its talk shows are as slickly produced as anything on NPR or the giants of conservative talk radio. Some discussions — organ transplantation, recycling and paranormal activity were among last week’s topics — are apolitical. But many Sputnik hosts offer more barbed commentary about America’s perceived flaws: racism, economic inequity and political dysfunction. One consistent thread for years: Skepticism of the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia acted to influence the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump.

Sputnik’s talking heads have tended to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, alleging Ukrainian “crimes” against its Russian-speaking population and “encroachment” on Russia from the NATO alliance. They typically describe the invasion as “a military operation” or “an intervention,” echoing Putin’s framing. There’s plenty of whataboutism: A Russian commentator on Friday fretted that the United States could give nuclear weapons to Ukraine. “We cannot be confident that America will be a responsible member of the international community,” he said.

Listeners are also likely to hear arguments that the severe economic sanctions imposed on Russia are doomed to backfire. A guest, American economist Jack Rasmus, predicted on Wednesday that sanctions could lead to a 20 percent stock market decline and a $1-per-gallon spike in gas prices. One host speculated recently that the United States and Europe could experience a “cataclysmic shift where entire industries won’t survive.”

Despite a 9,000-watt signal that can be heard across the region, the message doesn’t appear to be going very far. WZHF doesn’t rank among the top 40 stations in the Washington area in Nielsen’s ratings. But as limited as Sputnik’s audience and likely influence is, its Kremlin connections have lately begun to attract some negative attention.

The National Association of Broadcasters on Tuesday called on station owners to stop carrying Russian state-sponsored programming. Without mentioning WZHF or Sputnik by name, chief executive Curtis LeGeyt nevertheless suggested they were spreading Kremlin propaganda.

“While the First Amendment protects freedom of speech … it does not prevent private actors from exercising sound, moral judgment,” LeGeyt said in a statement. “Our nation must stand fully united against misinformation and for freedom and democracy across the globe.”

Sputnik has come under political fire before. In 2017, three Democratic members of Congress sought an investigation into why it was still on the air despite evidence that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time, Ajit Pai, declined to take action, saying the First Amendment would bar his agency “from interfering with a broadcast licensee’s choice of programming, even if that programming may be objectionable to many listeners.”

Sputnik doesn’t own WZHF, nor could it under federal regulations that bar foreign governments from controlling U.S. broadcast licenses. The decades-old prohibition was driven by concerns that hostile foreign powers would use American radio and TV stations to broadcast propaganda. But the Kremlin found another way to get on the air.

WZHF has been licensed to a New York company, Way Broadcasting, since 2001, according to FCC records. But Way appears to be a largely passive owner. In 2017, it agreed to lease the station’s airtime to a second party, RM Broadcasting of Jupiter, Fla.

RM, in turn, sold all of the station’s airtime to Rossiya Segodnya and Sputnik. RM made a similar deal in 2020 with Alpine Broadcasting to place Sputnik’s programs on Alpine’s three stations in the Kansas City area.

The practice, known as a time-brokerage agreement, has been a financial lifeline for small and financially troubled broadcast outlets since the 1930s. Instead of hiring a sales staff and producing programs, station owners merely lease blocks of airtime to another party, often through a broker, which puts its own programs on the air. The best-known form of such agreements are TV “infomercials.”

Sputnik’s deals have been lucrative for the broadcasters involved. According to federal filings, RM paid Way Broadcasting $1.12 million last year to air Radio Sputnik full time and Alpine Broadcasting about $160,000 to carry Sputnik for six hours a day on its Kansas City stations.

RM’s owner, Arnold Ferolito, defended Sputnik in a recent interview, saying efforts to remove it from the air were an attack on free speech.

March 6

Washington Post, Perspective: Putin’s full-scale information war got a key assist from Donald Trump and right-wing media, Margaret Sullivan, right, March 4, 2022. Thanks to his skills at the influence game, Putin knew how to ‘soften up the enemy’ — and get a swath of the American public cheering for him. The former presidential adviser and Russia expert Fiona Hill made headlines last week when she stated bluntly in a Politico interview that Vladimir Putin would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons.

But it was another part of that long interview that I found almost as arresting. Hill described how Putin, as he reaches for domination, relies heavily on his skills at the influence-and-information game.

“What happens in a Russian ‘all-of-society’ war, you soften up the enemy,” she told her interviewer, Maura Reynolds. Hill named some names: “You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you.”

And now, after a few years of their apologetic rhetoric on behalf of Russia, Putin “has got swaths of the Republican Party” and “masses of the U.S. public saying ‘Good on you, Vladimir Putin,’ or blaming NATO, or blaming the U.S.” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she added.

It was quite an indictment from a well-respected intelligence officer, who worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations. She became known to the American public for her unsparing analysis when she testified during Trump’s first impeachment hearings.

But while it’s startling to hear it said so directly — a Fiona Hill specialty — the proof is there for anyone to see.

March 5

New York Times, TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app, is grappling with a flood of violent footage and misinformation about the war, Sheera Frenke, March 5, 2022. Bre Hernandez used to scan TikTok for videos of makeup tutorials and taco truck reviews. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the 19-year-old has spent hours each day scrolling the app for war videos, watching graphic footage of Ukrainian tanks firing on Russian troops and civilians running away from enemy gunfire.

“What I see on TikTok is more real, more authentic than other social media,” said Ms. Hernandez, a student in Los Angeles. “I feel like I see what people there are seeing.”

But what Ms. Hernandez was actually viewing and hearing in the TikTok videos was footage of Ukrainian tanks taken from video games, as well as a soundtrack that was first uploaded to the app more than a year ago. The footage and soundtrack were traced back to their original sources in a New York Times analysis of the videos.

TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app known for viral dance and lip-syncing videos, has emerged as one of the most popular platforms for sharing videos and photos of the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past week, hundreds of thousands of videos about the conflict have been uploaded to the app from across the world, according to a review by The Times. The New Yorker has called the invasion the world’s “first TikTok war.”

March 3

New York Times, Covid Live Updates: U.S. Surgeon General Seeks Virus Misinformation Data From Big Tech, Staff Reports, March 3, 2022. Dr. Vivek Murthy said top tech platforms must provide the major sources of misinformation and how much users may have been exposed to it. “This is about protecting the nation’s health,” he said.

President Biden’s surgeon general on Thursday formally requested that the major tech platforms submit information about the scale of Covid-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems.

A request for information from the surgeon general’s office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The notice asks the companies to submit “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation,” as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation.

The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, right, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.

“Technology companies now have the opportunity to be open and transparent with the American people about the misinformation on their platforms,” Dr. Murthy said in an emailed statement. He added: “This is about protecting the nation’s health.”

Companies have until May 2, 2022, to submit the data. Denying requests for information does not carry a penalty, but the notice represents the first formal request from the Biden administration of the tech companies to submit Covid-19 misinformation data, according to the surgeon general’s office.

The move comes six months after Dr. Murthy used his first formal advisory to the United States to deliver a broadside against tech and social media companies, which he accused of not doing enough to stop the spread of dangerous health misinformation — especially about Covid-19. Dr. Murthy called the misinformation “an urgent threat to public health.”

Washington Post, Opinion: As criminals unleash more violence in Mexico, the president goes on the offensive — against the press, León Krauze, March 3, 2022. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, right, keeps stepping up his attacks against the press — an alarming development in the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country to be a journalist. Just this year, five journalists have already been killed.

Recently, in a brazen (and likely illegal) act of intimidation, López Obrador publicly divulged what he said were the sources of income of Carlos Loret de Mola, a Mexican reporter and contributing columnist for The Post’s Spanish-language Post Opinión section who has uncovered alleged corruption scandals. In the following days, López Obrador demanded that other journalists disclose their income. He insinuated that the journalists in the group (in which I was included) were members of a shadowy conservative cabal.

His obsession with characterizing journalists as political enemies not only adds to the deadly climate of intimidation in Mexico, but also reveals the populist leader’s brazen efforts to obscure the fact that the country is becoming more and more dangerous, with various regions now resembling war zones.

Last weekend, in the southern state of Michoacán, a large convoy of heavily armed men reportedly rode into the town of San Jose de Gracia and barged into a funeral. They then lined up a group of people against a wall and shot them. The exact number of dead is still unclear, but the purported execution, in a hail of bullets, was apparently caught on video.

Just a few days prior, dozens of heavily armed men drove into Caborca, Sonora, near the border with the United States, and opened fire, terrorizing the community. At least two people were killed.

This carnage is reminiscent of other massacres that have shaken Mexico throughout the country’s drawn-out war against drug cartel violence. In 2010, sicarios, or hit men, killed 13 people at a drug rehabilitation center in Tijuana. Then, in 2014, 43 student teachers from the town of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero, another southern state in Mexico that has suffered years of bloodshed, were kidnapped by a criminal organization, in cahoots with the local authorities. At least 38 of them were killed.

The Tijuana and Ayotzinapa massacres changed the course of the administrations of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto. Public debate in Mexico changed, as well. Back then, as Mexico’s most prominent opposition figure, López Obrador did not mince words. “Ayotzinapa is an impossible case to close without achieving justice,” he tweeted in 2014. “They will fail if they try to manipulate or have impunity prevail.”

But now, about seven and a half years later and in power, López Obrador has reacted to the San José de Gracia massacre in a starkly different way. At first, he questioned the veracity of the reports and suggested journalists had jumped to conclusions, despite the fact that local authorities and television crews had visited the site and found evidence of the massacre, including blood stains and bullet casings.

On Tuesday, a few minutes before his own national security officials confirmed details of the carnage, López Obrador still made sure to cast doubt over the motives of the press. “Anything that happens, like these regrettable events, they amplify it!” he said. “There’s a lot of misinformation because the conservatives are desperate and set on attacking us. Most media outlets act like a choir, against the transformation we are carrying out.”

Washington Post, U.S. to share some coronavirus technologies with World Health Organization, Dan Diamond, March 3, 2022. Plan would allow other countries to replicate American scientific breakthroughs, intended to boost supplies to fight pandemic.

The Biden administration will share U.S. government-devised coronavirus technologies with the World Health Organization, a policy shift intended to allow other countries to replicate some American scientific breakthroughs and better fight the pandemic abroad, according to three people with knowledge of the announcement who were not authorized to discuss it.
FAQ: What to know about the omicron variant of the coronavirus

Under the plan, some technologies now being developed by the National Institutes of Health will be licensed to WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool, the people said. The technologies will also be sub-licensed to the United Nations-backed Medicines Patent Pool.

The policy is not intended to apply to the vaccines and therapeutics that have been developed by private companies and are currently in the U.S. market, the people said.

The United States is not expected to share NIH-developed technology that was used by Moderna, the vaccine maker that worked closely with the U.S. government in its messenger RNA vaccine. Foreign countries and developers have long petitioned for access to Moderna’s technology and know-how, saying that it would allow them to more quickly replicate their own versions of Moderna’s vaccine.

Washington Post, Amazon is killing off its physical bookstores, after killing everyone else’s, Rachel Lerman, March 3, 2022. Amazon will close 68 physical bookstores and 4-Star stores.

Amazon has realized it’s easier to sell books online.

The tech company confirmed Wednesday it is closing all of its physical bookstores, as well as its small pop-up stores and its chain of 4-Star locations, which sell products that are well-reviewed online. In total, the company will close 68 stores, the vast majority in the United States.

Amazon’s grocery stores, including Whole Foods locations and Go convenience stores, will remain open. Company spokeswoman Betsy Harden said in a statement that Amazon will focus on its grocery stores, its new clothing store in Los Angeles and its computer-vision technology that allows shoppers to pick items off shelves and stroll out of stores, bypassing cashiers. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“We remain committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies, and we’re working closely with our affected employees to help them find new roles within Amazon,” Harden said in an emailed statement.

The Seattle e-commerce giant opened its first bookstore in an upscale shopping mall in its hometown in late 2015 to much speculation, fanfare — and a bit of disbelief. Amazon started its rise to prominence by selling books online, and it became a big reason once-successful bookstore chains such as Borders and Barnes & Noble shrank and withered.

Borders filed for bankruptcy protection in 2011, and Barnes & Noble sustained years of declining revenue. Small, independent shops have regularly pointed to competition and price-cutting from Amazon as a reason they are struggling, while urging customers to shop local.

Reuters earlier reported the news of the closures.

Amazon Books stores were a way for the company to collect customer data and track people’s shopping habits in the real world. The stores never grew to be a big source of revenue for the company, said Forrester analyst Sucharita Kodali.

March 2

Mother Jones Magazine, Pro-Putin Disinformation on Ukraine Is Thriving in Online Anti-Vax Groups, Kiera Butler, March 2, 2022. All the usual themes: Secret government alliances, anti-Semitic tropes, and nefarious scientists.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, we’ve seen how conspiracy theories can overlap and collide. I’ve documented how anti-vaccine groups embraced QAnon disinformation about liberal elites conspiring to unseat Trump, and how white nationalists find willing audiences for their racist ideology in anti-mask groups. Over the last week, a new disinformation hybrid has appeared, as online anti-vaccine groups have become a hotbed of pro-Russia conspiracy theories about the conflict in Ukraine—and some of the most prominent anti-vaccine activists are actively promoting geopolitical falsehoods.

Imran Ahmed, executive director of the online extremism tracking group Center for Countering Digital Hate, has been following the convergence of the conspiracy theories, and he’s noticed they share familiar themes: alleged secret government alliances, anti-Semitic accusations, and allusions to nefarious scientists. “There are particular individuals within the anti-vaccine world who are amenable to pro-Russian propaganda,” he says, “and that would include some of the people who’ve cohered around QAnon and Trump.”

One example of this is how an old Trump-era storyline—the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered in a lab and released—seems to have been reconstituted in a new form: Anti-vaccine influencers claim that the United States owns a network of secret biolabs in Ukraine where dangerous infectious disease research takes place. For them, it’s just obvious that Biden is sending aid to Ukraine in order to protect those assets. This rumor has been proven to be manifestly false—but that hasn’t stopped it from circulating and gaining momentum.

Last week, Christiane Northrup, an influential holistic medicine practitioner who regularly spreads pandemic misinformation and promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory, shared with her 78,000 Telegram followers a map that supposedly showed the secret labs in Ukraine that she insists create viruses. She also shared a post from a Bulgarian news site claiming that the US government “conducted biological experiments with a potentially lethal outcome on 4,400 soldiers in Ukraine and 1,000 soldiers in Georgia.” This is not true. On Instagram, a popular meme traveling with the hashtag “#biolabs” shows a photo of Tom Hanks as Forrest Gump, with the caption “I might not be a smart man, but I do know if they lied to me about Covid for 2 years, they are probably lying to me about why Russia invaded Ukraine this week.”

Meanwhile, Candace Owens, a conservative political pundit-turned-anti-vaccine activist, used an extended metaphor involving the lab-leak Covid origin theory to describe the conflict in Ukraine. “We are now experiencing Foreign policy Covid: ‘Experts’ pretending that what is happening between Russia and Ukraine is a naturally occurring event, when in fact, it was manufactured in a lab by the people who stood to benefit trillions,” she tweeted to her 3 million followers last week.

Imran’s team has also noted that a strong current of anti-Semitism runs through many of the Ukraine conspiracy theories in anti-vaccine chats. Sherri Tenpenny, right, the anti-vaccine activist who has claimed that Covid shots make people magnetic, suggested in a Monday post to more than 150,000 followers that Jews were using the Ukraine conflict to distract the world from a meeting in Europe about pandemic preparedness. She shared a post from an account called End Times Newz that used echo parentheses, a widely recognized symbol that anti-Semitic hate groups use to identify Jewish people. “Whilst everyone is distracted by the events in (((Ukraine))), the (((WHO))) is ramming through an international treaty on ‘pandemic’ procedures,” the post said. “Same tribe every time 🔯” On the same day, in a separate Telegram post, Tenpenny claimed that the hacker group Anonymous, which has carried out recent cyberattacks against Russia, is “part of the Soros/Klaus/WEF puppet army.” This refers to billionaire philanthropist George Soros and Klaus Schwab, who is the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF) that holds a yearly economic symposium in Davos, Switzerland.

Ben Dubow, a fellow of the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis, has documented the spread of Russian disinformation during Covid. He notes that anti-Semitic tropes involving Hungarian-born Soros are a hallmark of Russian disinformation campaigns, largely because Soros has promoted democracy in “what Russia considers its sphere of influence,” says Dubow. “He is very much an obsession of Russian leadership.” Anti-vaccine groups have their own diabolical Soros myth: Many believe that he worked with Bill Gates to hide microchip tracking devices in the Covid vaccines.

One aspect of Putin’s rhetoric on the Ukraine invasion—that the Western hegemony is trying to force progressive values on Ukraine—will appeal to Americans steeped in far-right conspiracy theories about the Deep State and the villainous intentions of public health agencies. Putin’s message, Dubow notes, “really does throw pretty naturally off of a lot of messaging they had, to try to raise skepticism about vaccines, about the origins of Covid, about how generally you can’t trust any member of the Western establishment.”

 

Washington Post, Bolton, in rejecting Newsmax host’s assertion, says Trump ‘barely knew where Ukraine,’ Timothy Bella, March 2, 2022 (print ed.). Former national security adviser John Bolton, above left, rejected a claim from a Newsmax host who asserted that the behavior of President Donald Trump deterred the Russians from invading Ukraine. Bolton emphasized that Trump “barely knew where Ukraine was.”

Speaking with the conservative network Monday night, Bolton sat back as host Rob Schmitt listed Trump accomplishments that the broadcaster claimed helped hinder Russia from attacking Ukraine. All the while, the pro-Trump network displayed a chyron that read, “Trump was tough on Russia.”

But Bolton, who has become a vocal critic of Trump, denied that his former boss was tough on Russia, claiming that Trump complained about any sanctions on Russian oligarchs in the United States. Then Bolton, who said Trump “did not” do a better job with Russia than President Biden, went one step further about Trump’s knowledge of Ukraine.

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Budowich told the Hill in a statement that Bolton was fired “because he believes anything less than war is not enough.”

“President Trump ensured peace during his administration and ended wars, making Bolton irrelevant,” Budowich said.

Bolton’s comments come as Russian forces continue to bear down on Ukraine. A 40-mile-long Russian convoy approaching Kyiv had “stalled,” perhaps to regroup, a senior U.S. defense official said, but other forces gathered menacing strength on Tuesday, six days into the conflict in Ukraine. While fighting continues across the country, nearly 680,000 Ukrainians have fled since the start of the Russian invasion, according to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi.

Convoy near Kyiv stalls but forces close in on Kharkiv, other cities

Trump has faced criticism since he recently described Putin as “smart,” “savvy” and a “genius” for sending military forces into Ukraine. Trump has continued to champion Putin at the expense of Biden, who defeated him in the 2020 presidential election.

Jefferson Public Radio (Oregon), Klamath Falls Herald and News to lose entire reporting staff, Erik Neumann, March 2, 2022. The Great Resignation has come to the Klamath Falls Herald and News. All members of the four-person newsroom are leaving their jobs this week.

That leaves a newspaper in one of Oregon’s most complicated rural areas, plagued by drought and facing a series of massive dam removal projects, without a reporting staff.

Last month the paper’s editor, Tim Trainor, announced he will be departing Klamath Falls to join the Redmond Spokesman in Central Oregon. After his announcement, the paper’s other three reporters, two of whom are partially funded by the non-profit Report for America, announced they too would leave.

According to Trainor, the paper had struggled to recruit new staff to fill positions in recent years, as the region’s cost of living has increased and pay remained relatively low.

“It’s hard to get good candidates for rural news reporting positions. The jobs are becoming less and less exciting for any journalism student,” Trainor said.

Despite losing the current reporting staff, the paper will not close, according to the Herald and News General Manager Joe Hudon. “We’re going to continue to put out a newspaper for as long as we can. For years to come,” Hudon said. He declined to comment further on the staffing changes.

The Herald and News is owned by Adams Publishing Group, a Minneapolis-based company that owns 220 “media-related products” in 20 states. Unlike a national trend of hedge funds buying and gutting local newspapers, Adams describes itself as a family-owned company.

But the publishing group came under fire on social media in late February when an editor at The Athens News in Ohio was fired for allegedly violating the publisher’s social media policy for criticizing ads in the paper for supposedly valuable collectible coins.

“You need to invest in the news side of things. If you don’t, you’re doing a disservice to the community ... I know the bottom line is the money, but you also have to invest in your product.”

Joe Siess, former Klamath Falls Herald and News reporter

According to the former editor Corinne Colbert, Adams is also known for underpaying and undervaluing journalists.

“The higher ups at APG talk about maintaining/increasing revenue to protect jobs. But they have cut the editorial and production staff of their SE Ohio papers to the bare minimum. Every issue is a struggle to produce quality journalism with no resources or support,” Colbert wrote in a tweet.

Adams Publishing Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Former Herald and News reporter Joe Siess left his job in January for a position at the Bend Bulletin that would offer better pay at a larger paper.

“You need to invest in the news side of things. If you don’t, you’re doing a disservice to the community,” Siess said. “I know the bottom line is the money, but you also have to invest in your product.”

According to Trainor, most Herald and News reporters start out being paid in the low $30,000 range. A current Herald and News job posting on the website JournalismJobs.com lists compensation for a general assignment reporter at $14 to $20 per hour.

Meanwhile, the City of Klamath Falls and the greater Klamath Basin are areas rich with news. The region along the Oregon-California border continues to struggle under exceptional drought conditions. Residents' domestic wells went dry over the past year because of the drought and tensions over scarce water remain between farmers, Native American tribes, and environmentalists.

Next year could also see the start of the largest dam removal in U.S. history with the deconstruction of four dams on the Klamath River. And in November, more than $160 million was allocated for watershed investments in the Klamath Basin in the coming years through President Biden’s federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

According to managers at the paper, they’ll fall back on a mix of freelancers in the short-term and attempt to fill the open positions going forward.

New York Times, Major League Baseball canceled games, delaying the start of the season, James Wagner, March 2, 2022 (print ed.). After the league and the players’ union failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement by M.L.B.’s self-imposed deadline Tuesday evening, the league said the season would not start on March 31.

Major League Baseball canceled the first two series of the 2022 regular season on Tuesday after the league and the players’ union failed to reach a new collective bargaining agreement.

After nearly a year of negotiating, including nine straight days of talks between the league and the union in Florida starting Feb. 21, the sides could not come to a new pact by M.L.B.’s self-imposed deadline of 5 p.m. Tuesday in order to begin the 162-game season on March 31 as scheduled.

Rob Manfred, the M.L.B. commissioner, announced the cancellations in a news conference on Tuesday at Roger Dean Stadium, where the Cardinals and Marlins would usually be having spring training but instead hosted the talks.

“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” Manfred said, adding, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”

 

The late Congressman Allard Lowenstein (D-NY) during his time in Congress (Photo via WNYC radio).

Covert Action Magazine, Was Liberal Activist Allard Lowenstein—a NYC Congressman Who Headed “Dump Johnson” Movement in 1968 and Investigated Robert Kennedy’s Assassination—a CIA Asset? Gregg Wager, March 2, 2022.

The name Allard Lowenstein (1929-1980) may not mean too much to political activists today, but in the 1960s and 1970s he was a well-known liberal figure associated with many of the progressive causes of the day.

For this reason, it would come as something of a shock to many of his contemporaries to discover that he appears to have been an asset of the CIA.

Despite his fervent opposition to the Vietnam War, Lowenstein was strongly anticommunist. His political mentors included Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962),[1] with whom he remained very close, Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972) and Norman Thomas (1884-1968) who all defined themselves during the Cold War as part of the anti-communist left.[2]

Five of the most dynamic episodes in Lowenstein’s life reveal diverse political activities which can be sorted under the following headings: 1) Lowenstein’s presidency in the National Student Association; 2) his role in smuggling Hans Beukes out of South West Africa; 3) his work with and political betrayal of the Freedom Riders in Mississippi; 4) his “Dump Johnson“ movement of 1968; and 5) his television appearances and ongoing bromance with conservative talk show host William F. Buckley.

Did Lowenstein simply stumble with Forrest Gump-like serendipity into one of these hot situations after another? Or were allegations and rumors of his secret ties to the CIA true and his peripatetic antics part of larger strategies steered by some sort of domestic espionage?

In 1985 (as soon as five years after Lowenstein’s bizarre assassination[3]), Hendrik Hertzberg[4] of The New York Review of Books called out Lowenstein biographer Richard Cummings[5] for his then-shocking accusations that linked Lowenstein to the CIA.
A person with a beard and glasses Description automatically generated with low confidenceHendrik Hertzberg [Source: twitter.com]

While eviscerating Cummings and Cummings’s publisher, Grove Press, this critic (and former speechwriter for Jimmy Carter) often referenced a telephone-book-sized volume prepared by three lawyers[6] purporting to list inaccuracies in Cummings’s research.

Fox News 5 (Washington, DC), Virginia substitute teacher suspended for allegedly pushing Russian propaganda in class, Maureen Umeh, March 2, 2022. A Northern Virginia substitute teacher was suspended by a public school system for allegedly trying to push Russian propaganda on students.

FOX 5's Maureen Umeh reports Swanson Middle School officials say the incident happened Friday during a world languages class.The substitute teacher identified as 65-year-old John Stanton allegedly made comments supporting the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Umeh says.

Umeh spoke with Stanton who says he is a journalist and that he was recorded without his knowledge. According to his resume he has worked for such outlets as Pravda, which is the Soviet Union's main propaganda platform and Sputnik news. He's also written and commented on national security and political issues for various news outlets including CNN and ABC, Umeh says.

Stanton says he has no intention of seeking his job back at Swanson Middle School.

March 1

Washington Post, Arlington suspends substitute teacher who backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Hannah Natanson, March 1, 2022. Arlington Public Schools has suspended a substitute teacher who, during a Spanish class, expressed approval of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine and urged students to read Russian-run propaganda outlets.

The substitute, John Stanton, 65, made the comments during an eighth-grade Spanish lesson on Friday at Swanson Middle School. Stanton said in an interview Tuesday that he spoke about Russia and Ukraine for the first 10 minutes of a 90-minute class and that he hoped to offer students an opposing viewpoint that he said is rarely heard.

Stanton said he told the students to read as many news sources as possible — including Sputnik News, a Russian news agency that a 2017 report compiled by the FBI, CIA and NSA declared a “state-run propaganda machine.” He said he also drew a map of Ukraine and marked areas where Russian forces had invaded.

“I said, ‘Here’s what’s going on,’” Stanton said. But “the statement I think that got me was I said, ‘I personally support the logic of Putin,’ and what I meant by that is, he made a rational decision from his perception.”

The Friday lesson prompted parents of a student in the class to write to the School Board raising concerns about Stanton. In the email, a copy of which was shared with The Washington Post, the parents wrote that Stanton “told students he supported Russia, asked whether anyone in the class ‘hated Russia,’ and complained about rising gas prices, presumably as an effect of the current crisis.” The email noted there was a Ukrainian student in the class.

The parents wrote that Stanton’s comments amounted to “advocacy of political positions, and Russian propaganda” and called the remarks “wholly inappropriate.”

On Tuesday, Stanton received a letter from Arlington school officials notifying him that he was suspended because of “an allegation of comments made to students during instructional hours regarding sensitive world events with Russia and Ukraine.” In the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Post, Arlington officials wrote that Stanton can petition for reinstatement within five days, but Stanton said he has no desire or plans to do so.

Stanton said that he has been subbing for Arlington for three years, and that he took the job because he is retired and wanted to supplement his income. Before that, he said, he had a varied career.

He emailed The Post a two-page résumé that listed roles as a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, as host of an unspecified 1980s “political/cultural radio program” in D.C. and as an “independent journalist” who provided commentary on national security and political issues to U.S. news outlets including CNN, ABC and this newspaper’s Foreign Policy magazine. Stanton said he still writes for outlets such as Pravda, which was the Soviet Union’s chief propaganda platform.

In a Pravda opinion piece published Feb. 28, Stanton wrote that the United States owns “every country in the NATO alliance” and called the Russia-Ukraine conflict “great news for the West’s defense contractors” who will earn “billions of profit.” He also wrote that “any support aired by anyone on the West for the Russian position gets mauled and derided by pro-West pundits” and that “self-censorship by Western media will only get more wicked.”

From 2016 to 2018, Stanton said, he worked as a reporter for Sputnik News in D.C. A 2018 “PBS NewsHour” article identified Stanton as a Sputnik News “wire reporter” covering the Pentagon and quoted a Sputnik spokeswoman, Beverly Hunt, confirming that Stanton was employed there.

The “NewsHour” piece said Stanton was fired by Sputnik News because he provided information about the news outlet to an unnamed third-party client. Stanton said in an interview that the client was “a U.S. government intelligence agency.” He declined to specify which agency or to provide proof of his employment there.

“I was extracting as much information as possible from their [Sputnik News] computer systems, taking pictures of the staff, collecting information,” Stanton said.

Washington Post, How Ukrainians have used social media to humiliate the Russians and rally the world, Drew Harwell and Rachel Lerman, March 1, 2022. A defiant resistance has used the Internet to counter one of the world’s most fearsome war machines, telling the invaders, ‘Welcome to hell.’

Ukrainians and their supporters have used social media to bruise, belittle and humiliate the Russians, seeking to boost citizens’ spirits and sap invaders’ morale during the most Internet-accessible war in history.

A flood of real-time videos across Facebook, Telegram, TikTok and Twitter has blunted Kremlin propaganda and rallied the world to Ukraine’s side as it fights to defend its democracy from a military behemoth.

It has also potentially saved lives: Ukrainians have raced to disseminate defensive strategies, plot escape routes and document the brutality of a raging clash. Some expect that the phone footage recorded in recent days could play a critical role in investigating war crimes after the combat ends.

Russia has long been fabled as the Internet’s most wily mischief-maker, and the nation’s propaganda machine has for years used social and state-backed media to deceive and disempower its enemies.

But Ukraine has in many ways begun to beat Russia at its own game, using constant, colorful communication to foment a digital resistance and expose its aggression on a global stage.

The tactics reveal how social media has opened a new dimension of modern war, showing how the Internet has become not only a territory to fight over but a tactic for real-world conquest.

It has also helped Ukrainians feel they can contribute to the fight. Solomiia Shalaiska, a Kyiv-based motion designer, said she felt helpless until she started posting pro-Ukraine rally images on an Instagram page she previously used for art and design.

One image — a David-and-Goliath-style map comparing the size of both countries titled “Realize the Scale of Ukrainian Heroism” — has been “liked” more than 100,000 times in the past day. Shalaiska said she has joined the nation’s nascent “IT army” of volunteer hackers and hell-raisers, who have worked to counter Russian psychological operations by overwhelming their websites and flooding their intelligence officers with spam. (Shalaiska said she has helped mostly by spreading information and reporting bots.)

Washington Post, Cyberwar predictions are still unrealized in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Joseph Menn and Craig Timberg, March 1, 2022. For more than a decade, military commanders and outside experts have laid out blueprints for how cyberwar would unfold: military and civilian networks would be knocked offline, cutting-edge software would sabotage power plants, and whole populations would be unable to get money, gas or refrigerated food.

But while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has spawned all manner of cyberattacks and defenses, few are playing out the way the experts thought they would.

As of Monday, five days after tanks moved into Ukraine, the Internet and other key Ukrainian infrastructure were still functioning, the outgunned Ukrainian military was still coordinating effectively and Russia’s vaunted disinformation capabilities were failing to persuade Ukrainians that resistance is futile.

“We imagined this orchestrated unleashing of violence in cyberspace, this ballet of attacks striking Ukraine in waves, and instead of that we have a brawl. And not even a very consequential brawl, just yet,” said Jason Healey, a former White House staffer for infrastructure protection and intelligence officer who’s now a research scholar on cyber conflict at Columbia University.

A vastly larger, more powerful military — one especially feared for its cyber-military prowess — has allowed Ukrainians almost unfettered access to the Internet. This has helped them get weapons to citizens and harness social media to rally global political support through direct, emotional appeals backed by stirring visuals.

“It’s certainly not what anyone predicted,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a longtime cybersecurity executive and U.S. government adviser who heads Silverado Policy Accelerator.

Ukraine’s core cyberdefense has done better than expected because it focused on the issue after Russian hackers briefly knocked out power to swaths of the country in 2015 and 2016, said David Cowan, a veteran cybersecurity venture capitalist and corporate director, and because it has had help from American and European experts.

Washington Post, Analysis: Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin fully loses her patience with Fox’s Ukraine punditry, Aaron Blake, March 1, 2022 (print ed.). Among the many times in which punditry can go very wrong, few rank as high as wartime. And nothing demonstrates that better than some corners of Fox News right now.

Tucker Carlson, right, has spent years suggesting maybe Vladimir Putin isn’t a bad guy. Several of its hosts wagered that the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine was manufactured to distract from the Biden administration’s domestic political issues — right before Russia actually invaded. A number of its pundits and hosts have seen their statements on issues like sanctions contradicted by the network’s actual reporting on the situation.

Fox’s Jennifer Griffin seems to have almost completely lost patience with all of it.

The Washington Post’s Jeremy Barr reported Friday on how the network’s respected longtime national security correspondent has repeatedly found herself in the position of fact-checking her network’s hosts and pundits. And it continued this weekend, with Griffin apparently becoming even more exasperated. She even went so far as to seemingly question the platform her employer has afforded some fringe figures.

Washington Post, Art Briles steps down as Grambling’s offensive coordinator days after being hired, Des Bieler, March 1, 2022 (print ed.). Just days after being hired to be Grambling’s offensive coordinator, Art Briles stepped down from the position. The former Baylor head coach, who was fired from the school in 2016 amid criticism of his handling of sexual assault allegations against a number of his players, said in a statement Monday that he didn’t want to be a distraction for Grambling’s program.

 

February

Feb. 28

Guardian, EU to ban Russian state-backed channels RT and Sputnik, Patrick Wintour, Jennifer Rankin and Kate Connolly, Feb. 28, 2022 (print ed.). The EU has announced it will ban the Russian state-backed channels RT and Sputnik in an unprecedented move against the Kremlin media machine.

The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said: “Russia Today and Sputnik, as well as their subsidiaries, will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war and to sow division in our union. So we are developing tools to ban their toxic and harmful disinformation in Europe.”

The move, which was not trailed or widely discussed, came as part of a package of tougher sanctions against Vladimir Putin’s government and the regime of the Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, which Von der Leyen described as “complicit in this vicious attack against Ukraine”.

European foreign policy taboos have been smashed in just a few days. European foreign policy taboos have been smashed in just a few days, after Russia invaded its neighbour, provoking fears of the biggest war in Europe since 1945.

For the first time in its history, the EU will finance the purchase and delivery of weapons to a country under attack, Von der Leyen said. EU foreign ministers are expected to approve the use of funds from the European Peace Facility to finance lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine at a meeting on Sunday evening. While a handful of countries may hold back, because of policies against sending weapons into a conflict zone, the plan is expected to pass.

Ministers are also set to agree to ban Russian airlines from EU skies, after more than a dozen countries took the decision unilaterally. “Our airspace will be closed to every Russian plane – and that includes the private jets of oligarchs,” Von der Leyen said.

Washington Post, Facebook and TikTok ban Russian state media in Europe, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Cat Zakrzewski, Facebook also took down a Russian disinformation campaign targeting Ukraine. Facebook and TikTok said Monday that the companies would shut down access to Kremlin-controlled media sites RT and Sputnik in Europe, setting the stage for retaliation from Russia.

In blocking Russian state media in the region, the companies are complying with requests from the European Union and individual governments there to punish the media outlets for sharing misinformation and propaganda about Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine.

Facebook’s announcement came in a tweet from its president for global affairs, Nick Clegg. TikTok confirmed its decision to The Washington Post late Monday.

Clegg’s announcement came after Facebook disclosed late Sunday that it had disrupted a Russian disinformation operation targeting Ukraine, one of the first official confirmations of such a campaign since the invasion of Ukraine last week. In addition, it said it blocked efforts by a hacking group that in recent days attempted to compromise the accounts of prominent Ukrainians.

Feb. 27

Washington Post Sunday Magazine, ‘You Just Got the World According to Spike Lee,’ Interview by KK Ottesen, Photos by Satchel Lee, Feb. 27, 2022 (print ed.). The seminal filmmaker on the power of storytelling, conspiracy theories and the endless reach of racism.

Spike Lee, 64, right, is an award-winning filmmaker, cultural icon, social critic and die-hard New York Knicks fan whose career includes directing, producing, writing and acting in feature and documentary films, most recently the HBO documentary “NYC Epicenters: 9/11➔2021½.” His vast body of work — close to 40 films — has won numerous awards, including an Academy Award (best adapted screenplay) for “BlacKkKlansman” and an Emmy Award for the documentary “When the Levees Broke.” Lee’s book “SPIKE,” a career-spanning monograph of his work and life, was released in late 2021.

Through his bold and provocative storytelling, Lee has been an important voice on race, racism and other social issues for three decades, and he will receive the Director’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in March. Lee’s company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, is based in his home borough, “Da People’s Republic of Brooklyn,” and he lives in Manhattan with his family.

The following is based on two conversations, which have been edited and condensed.

Can you talk about what shaped your desire to become a filmmaker? When did that first take root?

I grew up in a very artistic household. So you might say the seeds were planted there.

When envisioning your projects, your joints, how much do you think about the audience: who your audience is, who you want it to be, what they will tolerate, what they won’t?

The first thing is: Do I want to make this film? For me. What’s the next film I want to do, what I’m going to say? And then the audience.

The original cut of [your recent documentary] “NYC Epicenter” reportedly featured debunked 9/11 conspiracy theories, and you caught a lot of flak for including them. So I wanted to ask you about why you chose to include them in the first place — and then why you decided to cut them?

Thank you for asking that question. First of all, just because somebody says it’s debunked does not mean it’s not true. The Warren Commission said the motherf---ing magical bullet did a 360-change midair and killed — that was the bullet that assassinated JFK! It defies physics. Bullets don’t do that. So just because somebody says “debunked” does not mean that it’s false. I mean, I was taught in school that that motherf---ing terrorist Christopher Columbus discovered America!

So where do you fall on that? Do you think those [9/11 theories] are true? Or do you think that they may be true?

I think that there’s things that need to be discussed. In all my work, I put the information out there, whether it be documentaries or feature films, and I leave it up to the audience to decide. Simple. They make up their own minds. People, before they come to my theaters, they’ve lived a life. They’ve been impacted where they grew up, the education — all those factors. So I don’t expect everybody to have the same reaction to the film. People today still stop me in the street and say, “Spike, who did the right thing in ‘Do the Right Thing?’ ” And I say, “Who do you think?”

I would not be the filmmaker I am today if just because someone says it’s not true you can’t do it.

So then why did you decide to make the cuts, ultimately?

Well, I really wasn’t given a choice, to be honest.

By HBO, or …

I wasn’t given a choice. But, that too shall pass. I’ll leave it at that.

Feb. 26

Washington Post, RT was Russia’s answer to CNN. Now its pro-Putin spin on Ukraine is sparking new outrage, Paul Farhi, Feb. 26, 2022. Whether defending Putin or downplaying the war, the Kremlin-backed global news organization is drawing louder accusations of propaganda.

As Russian military forces began their broad assault on Ukraine, the top news stories on RT’s English-language website weren’t about missiles, airborne troops or the deaths of civilians.

Instead, Thursday’s most prominent headlines included, “Firm admits selling potentially tainted rocket fuel to NASA” and “U.S. investigating complaints of self-braking Hondas.”

As for Russia’s deadly aggression against its neighbor? That story was literally off to the side, dressed up in benign, pro-Russian spin: “Russia ready to negotiate with Ukraine — Kremlin.”

The latest on the war in Ukraine

It was, in short, a predictable display for RT, the Kremlin-funded media organization. Long denounced as Russia’s propaganda megaphone to the world by the Western nations where it broadcasts, the multilingual network has routinely echoed Vladimir Putin’s criticisms of NATO and the United States, and championed his dubious rationales for attacking Ukraine.

This week, Russia’s aggression against Ukraine sparked a new round of outrage and condemnation of RT, whose initials once stood for “Russia Today.”

Feb. 25

 

Politics USA, This Could Be Huge: The FCC Is Investigating American Media And Other Companies For Russian Ownership Ties, Jason Easley, Feb. 25, 2022. The FCC is investigating American media, telecommunication, and infrastructure companies for potential Russian ownership ties.

CNN reported: Conducted jointly with the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, the FCC review covers more than just media entities regulated by the FCC’s broadcast licensing program, the person said. It also covers a vast array of telecommunications and infrastructure companies, including wireless providers, submarine cable operators, and foreign telecom services that connect US-international phone calls, the person said.

It is not yet clear how many companies with ties to Russia the review may uncover, the person said, describing the initiative as a “top-to-bottom” effort to “identify the universe of licensees that have Russian ownership that should be on our radar.”

Conservative companies like Fox News that have been engaging in pro-Russia coverage have raised suspicion. Any companies that are found to have ownership ties to Russia could be deemed a security threat to the United States and could be subject to being ejected from the United States.

There are likely some conservative media companies that should be very nervous about what the FCC review could find. Any outlet that is offering pro-Putin coverage should raise suspicion.

RT, the Russian own propaganda network in the US, should be kicked out of the country ASAP.

The investigation is the clearest sign yet that the Biden administration isn’t fooling around, as it is possible that the investigation could reveal the Russian penetration into conservative media and get Russian propaganda out of the country.

Washington Post, Some conservative media hosts ridiculed Biden’s warnings of an attack on Ukraine. Now they say it’s his fault, Jeremy Barr, Feb. 25, 2022 (print ed.). Many top hosts for Fox News and other conservative media voices are blaming the White House for supposedly enabling Russia’s attack on Ukraine — even some of the same personalities who previously ridiculed President Biden’s warnings that an invasion was imminent.

“It’s just extraordinary what this president has allowed our adversaries to do,” Fox Business Network anchor Maria Bartiromo told viewers Thursday morning, as reports of Russian incursions across Ukraine poured in. She argued that Biden “has not been tough enough on Russia” and, “so far, anything that this administration has said has been weak.”

But days earlier, Bartiromo had sounded confident the Biden administration was inflating the threat of Russian aggression to distract from bad political news at home — particularly, a motion filed by special counsel John Durham that was described by many Fox News hosts as a massive scandal.

Feb. 23

 

Washington Post, Trump’s Truth Social’s disastrous launch raises doubts about its viability, Drew Harwell, Feb. 23, 2022. Former president Donald Trump's new social media venture, Truth Social, became available for download in Apple’s App Store on Feb. 20.

His long-promised social network, Truth Social, has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage and a 300,000-person waitlist.

Even Trump supporters made jokes about the early slog. Jenna Ellis, a former member of his legal team, posted to Instagram a photo showing Trump with his finger hovering over a laptop, “letting us on to Truth Social one at a time.”

The site had been heralded for months as the crown jewel of Trump’s post-presidential business ambitions, with allies pledging it would revolutionize social media and take down the mainstream social networks where Trump is banned.

But early glimpses at Truth Social suggest its offerings are almost identical to what Twitter and other sites have offered for years — except tweets are called “truths,” and retweets “retruths.” The site’s early struggles also have fueled doubts that Trump’s company will be able to handle tougher long-term challenges, such as policing for dangerous content and guarding against cyberattacks.

“The basic thing they needed to actually get right, to get someone in the door, they couldn’t get right,” said Bill Fitzgerald, a privacy researcher. The “ineptitude of the rollout,” he added, could be a warning of future issues ahead: “There is no better sign of a rushed implementation than the fact that you can’t onboard anybody. So I’m hard-pressed to understand why anyone would trust that these people would keep their information safe.”

Although Trump has criticized social networks’ “wildly aggressive censorship,” his site’s “terms of service” mark some extensive restrictions for acceptable speech.

Trump’s company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, also prohibits anyone from attempting to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” Truth Social has already banned an account named for a Twitter parody that targeted former congressman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who resigned from Congress to become the Trump company’s CEO. The site’s terms of service also show it is designed to benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which Trump has said should be “completely terminated” because it protects tech companies from being sued for what their users post. Pranksters have already defaced Trump’s new social network.

New York Times, Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo, Stuart A. Thompson, Feb. 23, 2022. Some far-right influencers and conspiracy theorists have embraced the search engine as part of an effort to shift people away from Big Tech.

On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast last year, he turned to a topic that has gripped right-wing communities and other Americans who feel skeptical about the pandemic: search engines.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Mr. Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

Praise for DuckDuckGo has become a popular refrain during the pandemic among right-wing social media influencers and conspiracy theorists who question Covid-19 vaccines and push discredited coronavirus treatments. Some have posted screenshots showing that DuckDuckGo appears to surface more links favorable to their views than Google does.

In addition to Mr. Rogan, who has recently been at the center of an outcry about misinformation on his podcast, the search engine has received ringing endorsements from some of the world’s most-downloaded conservative podcasters, including Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino.

“Google is actively suppressing search results that don’t acquiesce to traditional viewpoints of the left,” Mr. Shapiro claimed last March. “I recommend you install DuckDuckGo on your computer, rather than Google, to combat all this.”

The endorsements underscore how right-wing Americans and conspiracy theorists are shifting their online activity in response to greater moderation from tech giants like Google. They have increasingly embraced fledgling and sometimes fringe platforms like the chat app Telegram, the video streamer Rumble and even search engines like DuckDuckGo, seeking conditions that seem more favorable to their conspiracy theories and falsehoods.

That attention has put search engines in a difficult position, fielding queries from a growing set of Americans who seem increasingly gripped by conspiracy theories. They must now try to deliver relevant results for obscure search terms and avoid surfacing possible misinformation, all while steering clear of censorship claims.

DuckDuckGo, which has about 3 percent of the United States search market, holds little direct control over the links in its search results because they are generated by the search engine algorithm provided by Bing, which Microsoft owns. And all search engine algorithms are considered black boxes because the companies that create them do not completely disclose what informs their decisions.

In a statement, DuckDuckGo said it condemned “acts of disinformation” and said the company’s internal surveys showed that its users had a wide mix of political orientations. The company said it was also studying ways to limit the spread of false and misleading information.

Feb. 22

New York Times, U.S. Soccer and Women’s Players Agree to Settle Equal Pay Lawsuit, Andrew Das, Feb. 22, 2022. The athletes will receive $24 million and a pledge from the soccer federation to equalize pay for the men’s and women’s national teams, ending a six-year fight.

For six years, the members of the World Cup-winning United States women’s soccer team and their bosses argued about equitable treatment of female players. They argued about whether they deserved the same charter flights as their male counterparts and about the definition of what constituted equal pay.

But the long fight that set key members of the women’s team against their bosses at U.S. Soccer ended on Tuesday just as abruptly as it had begun, with a settlement that included a multimillion-dollar payment to the players and a promise by their federation to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams.

Under the terms of the agreement, the women — a group of several dozen current and former players that includes some of the world’s most popular and decorated athletes — will share $24 million in payments from U.S. Soccer. The bulk of that figure is back pay, a tacit admission that compensation for the men’s and women’s teams had been unequal for years.

Perhaps more notable is U.S. Soccer’s pledge to equalize pay between the men’s and women’s national teams in all competitions, including the World Cup, in the teams’ next collective bargaining agreements. That gap was once seen as an unbridgeable divide preventing any sort of equal pay settlement. If it is closed by the federation in negotiations with both teams, the change could funnel millions of dollars to a new generation of women’s national team players.

Washington Post, Trial spilled secrets of players’ abuse, but are opioids really MLB’s next drug scandal? Gus Garcia-Roberts and Jack Douglas, Feb. 22, 2022. Prosecutors suggested that baseball has an opioid problem at the trial that followed Tyler Skaggs’s overdose death, but MLB says testing shows otherwise.

The trial of former Los Angeles Angels communications director Eric Kay, which ended last week with the jury finding him guilty of giving pitcher Tyler Skaggs the fentanyl-laced oxycodone that led to his death, at times seemed to spill secrets about a drug scourge in Major League Baseball clubhouses.

MLB players, including former star pitcher Matt Harvey, gave testimony that suggested some were self-medicating with black-market pain pills. They were there ostensibly to help prosecutors prove Kay was distributing drugs to players. But like a miniature version of the Pittsburgh drug trials of 1985 — during which more than a dozen players testified about rampant cocaine and amphetamine use — their testimony also appeared to pull back the curtain on a broader problem in baseball, with prosecutors suggesting the Angels and MLB are complicit.

“There’s no question the MLB system is broken,” assistant U.S. attorney Errin Martin said during her closing statement. “[Major leaguers] have to do whatever it takes to play.”

That appeared to be the government’s answer to the question that was raised by the discovery of ­Skaggs’s body at a Texas hotel in 2019: Does baseball have an opioids problem? But outside of the courthouse, there’s hardly a consensus that baseball is in the grips of a drug dependency epidemic. MLB’s own numbers, the product of thousands of random drug tests implemented following Skaggs’s death, indicate the opposite. And players interviewed by The Washington Post said that, outside of the Skaggs case, they had never encountered opioid abuse in baseball.

 

The Daily Howler, Commentary: When Newton Minow gave a speech...Gilligan's Island responded, Bob Somerby, Feb. 22, 2022. Long ago and far away, Newton Minow gave a famous speech. He spoke on May 9, 1961. He was delivering his first major address since the newly elected President Kennedy made him head of the FCC.

At that time, a basic view was widely held, at least within certain cultural groups. We refer to the widespread belief that American popular culture tended to possibly be a bit dumb.

Needless to say, the question of whether something is dumb always involves matters of judgment. Also, issues of courtesy may arise when popular entertainment, or widely held beliefs, are described as being dumb.

That said, for better or worse, Minow, right, pulled few punches that day. In what became a famous speech, he said the typical contents of American television were unhealthily violent and dumb.

As Minow spoke, he employed a turn of phrase which became quite famous. Here's part of what he said:

MINOW (5/9/61): When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.

I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

American television had become "a vast wasteland," Minow famously said. As he continued, he described what you'd see if you were willing to chain yourself to your TV set for a day:

MINOW (continuing directly): You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.

We ourselves were just 13 when Minow delivered his speech. That said, the notion that our popular culture was possibly dumb was widespread among many teens of the day.

Newton Minow took a swing at the TV of the day. Before we make a modern-day point, we'll offer two more observations about his original speech:

First, the speech occasioned some pushback. That said, we have to chuckle when the leading authority on the speech recalls this stinging retort:

The speech was not without detractors, as that lambasting of the state of United States television programming prompted Sherwood Schwartz to name the boat on his television show Gilligan's Island the S. S. Minnow after Newton Minow.

Was commercial television "a vast wasteland?" Aggressively, the fellow who gave us Gilligan's Island decided he had to push back!

Also, there was Minow's sense of who was to blame for what he saw on the tube. Again, we quote the leading authority:

Minow went on to dismiss the idea that public taste was driving the change in programming, stating his firm belief that if television choices were expanded, viewers would gravitate toward higher culture programming.

If television choices were expanded, viewers would gravitate toward higher culture! On balance, we'll guess that Minow was basically wrong in that assessment.

What makes us think that Minow may have been wrong? We'll cite two relatively recent examples:

First, we'd cite the way modern basic cable channels started out with high-brow aims, then steadily ratcheted their programming downward, presumably in the face of public preferences.

Bravo "originally focused on programming related to fine arts and film." It now pays its bills thanks to the battles of its fatuous gangs pf "Real Housewives."

Meanwhile, the History Channel fills its days, and burns away its nights, with silly/dumb UFO shows. The pattern is widely observed among an array of cable channels which started out with high aims.

For a second example, consider the way the Internet was originally expected to serve as "the information superhighway." (Never mind who said it!)

The Internet does provide instant access to astonishing amounts of information. On balance, though, it isn't always used that way, not even by major journalists.

Instead, the Internet has served as a medium for endless mis- and disinformation, along with lots of puppy videos and rumored boatloads of porn. The information is there for the taking, but we simply don't run on such fuel.

Feb. 20

New York Times, Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints, David D. Kirkpatrick, Feb. 20, 2022 (print ed.). Using machine learning, separate teams of computer scientists identified the same two men as likely authors of messages that fueled the viral movement.

“Open your eyes,” the online post began, claiming, “Many in our govt worship Satan.”

That warning, published on a freewheeling online message board in October 2017, was the beginning of the movement now known as QAnon. Paul Furber was its first apostle.

The outlandish claim made perfect sense to Mr. Furber, left, a South African software developer and tech journalist long fascinated with American politics and conspiracy theories, he said in an interview. He still clung to “Pizzagate,” the debunked online lie that liberal Satanists were trafficking children from a Washington restaurant. He was also among the few who understood an obscure reference in the message to “Operation Mockingbird,” an alleged C.I.A. scheme to manipulate the news media.

As the stream of messages, most signed only “Q,” grew into a sprawling conspiracy theory, the mystery surrounding their authorship became a central fascination for its followers — who was the anonymous Q?

Now two teams of forensic linguists say their analysis of the Q texts shows that Mr. Furber, one of the first online commentators to call attention to the earliest messages, actually played the lead role in writing them.

Sleuths hunting for the writer behind Q have increasingly overlooked Mr. Furber and focused their speculation on another QAnon booster: Ron Watkins, right, who operated a website where the Q messages began appearing in 2018 and is now running for Congress in Arizona. And the scientists say they found evidence to back up those suspicions as well. Mr. Watkins appears to have taken over from Mr. Furber at the beginning of 2018. Both deny writing as Q.

The studies provide the first empirical evidence of who invented the toxic QAnon myth, and the scientists who conducted the studies said they hoped that unmasking the creators might weaken its hold over QAnon followers. Some polls indicate that millions of people still believe that Q is a top military insider whose messages have revealed that former President Trump will save the world from a cabal of “deep state” Democratic pedophiles. QAnon has been linked to scores of violent incidents, many of the attackers who stormed the Capitol last year were adherents, and the F.B.I. has labeled the movement a potential terrorist threat.

The forensic analyses have not been previously reported. Two prominent experts in such linguistic detective work who reviewed the findings for The Times called the conclusions credible and persuasive.

In a telephone interview from his home near Johannesburg, Mr. Furber, 55, did not dispute that Q’s writing resembled his own. Instead, he claimed that Q’s posts had influenced him so deeply that they altered his prose.

Q’s messages “took over our lives, literally,” Mr. Furber said. “We all started talking like him.”

Linguistic experts said that was implausible, and the scientists who conducted the studies noted that their analyses included tweets by Mr. Furber from the first days Q emerged.

Mr. Watkins, in a telephone interview, said, “I am not Q.”

But he also praised the posts. “There is probably more good stuff than bad,” he said, listing as examples “fighting for the safety of the country, and for the safety of the children of the country.” His campaign signs in the Republican primary refer to the online name he uses in QAnon circles, CodeMonkeyZ, and he acknowledged that much of the initial support for his campaign came from the movement.

Relying mainly on small donors, Mr. Watkins, 34, (shown with a hat alongside Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar in a photo on Twitter) trails the primary’s front-runners in fund-raising. (Two other Republicans who have expressed support for QAnon were elected in 2020 — Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Representative Lauren Boebert of Colorado.)

Computer scientists use machine learning to compare subtle patterns in texts that a casual reader could not detect. QAnon believers attribute this 2017 message to an anonymous military insider known as Q.

Paul Furber wrote this tweet after a mass shooting in New Zealand. Scientists who studied the Q posts say Mr. Furber played a leading role in writing the earliest, formative messages.

The scientists say that in 2018 a collaborator took control of the writing as Q: Ron Watkins. This message from Q appeared in 2019, and Mr. Watkins wrote this tweet shortly after the 2020 election.

The two analyses — one by Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz of OrphAnalytics, a Swiss start-up; the other by the French computational linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps — built on long-established forms of forensic linguistics that can detect telltale variations, revealing the same hand in two texts. In writing the Federalist Papers, for example, James Madison favored “whilst” over “while,” and Alexander Hamilton tended to write “upon” instead of “on.”

Instead of relying on expert opinion, the computer scientists used a mathematical approach known as stylometry. Practitioners say they have replaced the art of the older studies with a new form of science, yielding results that are measurable, consistent and replicable.

Sophisticated software broke down the Q texts into patterns of three-character sequences and tracked the recurrence of each possible combination.

Their technique does not highlight memorable, idiosyncratic word choices the way that earlier forensic linguists often did. But the advocates of stylometry note that they can quantify their software’s error rate.

The Swiss team said its accuracy rate was about 93 percent. The French team said its software correctly identified Mr. Watkins’s writing in 99 percent of tests and Mr. Furber’s in 98 percent.

Neither team ruled out the possibility that other writers had contributed to Q’s thousands of messages, especially during what appears to have been a period of collaboration between Mr. Furber and Mr. Watkins around late 2017.

But the scientists relied on other facts to narrow the list of feasible writers to test. That evidence, the scientists said, increased their confidence that they had unmasked the main authors.

Some QAnon followers had begun to suspect as early as mid-2018 that one or more of the commentators who first claimed to stumble onto the Q messages had actually written them. Without prior knowledge, how could anyone have plucked those almost nonsensical postings out of the online torrent? An NBC news report that summer identified Q’s earliest boosters as Mr. Furber (known online as Baruch the Scribe) and three others. The report emphasized that the three others had possible financial motives for stoking the craze because they had solicited donations for Q “research.” (Mr. Furber did not.)

The Swiss team studied writings by those four, as well as by Mr. Watkins and his father, who owns the message board.

In addition to examining those six potential authors, the French scientists added seven more to the mix. They tested tweets by another online Q booster close to the Watkinses as well as by Mr. Trump, his wife, Melania, his son Eric, and three others close to the former president who had publicly encouraged QAnon: Michael T. Flynn, his onetime national security adviser; the political consultant Roger Stone; and Dan Scavino, a Trump White House deputy chief of staff.

“At first most of the text is by Furber,” said Mr. Cafiero, who works at the French National Center for Scientific Research. “But the signature of Ron Watkins increased during the first few months as Paul Furber decreased and then dropped completely.”

The early Q messages, which the scientists say resemble Mr. Furber’s writing, lay out the core QAnon myths and slogans that later messages repeat. That was also when Mr. Furber and a few other early promoters helped attract the interest of entrepreneurial YouTube creators who amplified the messages.

But at the start of 2018, both studies found, the writing changed conspicuously. Where the 2017 posts were filled with Socratic questions, the later posts were more declarative and expository, with heavy use of exclamation points and words written in all capital letters. Sometimes, Q shared internet memes.

The Q messages had recently jumped from an older message board to the one run by Ron Watkins and owned by his father, Jim — the site known then as 8chan and now as 8kun. Jim Watkins, a former U.S. Army helicopter repairman who had settled in the Philippines, also owned pig and honey farms and dabbled in the online pornography business. Around the 2016 election, he had created a conspiracy-minded pro-Trump website, with his son overseeing the technical side.

The evident change in writing style at the start of 2018 coincided with an unusual exchange between the Q account and Ron Watkins. After a period of confusion, whoever was writing as Q publicly asked Mr. Watkins to confirm that the messages were still coming from the original Q. Mr. Watkins immediately did, and then Q declared all future posts would appear exclusively on Mr. Watkins’s platform.

Mr. Furber, left, began complaining that Q had been “hijacked” and that Mr. Watkins was complicit.

From then on, the scientists said, the messages very closely matched the writing of Ron Watkins alone. “When QAnon started to be successful, one of them took control,” said Mr. Roten of OrphAnalytics.

In a podcast interview in 2020, Fredrick Brennan, who started the message board that the Watkinses now own, asserted without proof that Q was the invention of Mr. Furber. An HBO documentary released last year, “Q: Into the Storm,” built a case that Ron Watkins was behind the messages, and in it Mr. Watkins briefly seemed to admit that he had written as Q. He then smiled, laughed and resumed his denials.

Q has now gone silent, without posting a message since December 2020.

Mr. Furber, in an interview, said he believed that QAnon was “an operation that has run its course.” He said he was still convinced that it was orchestrated by a true insider “to awaken people to this massive secret war against the cabal,” and that “the next phase is coming.”

In an online memoir he posted about the QAnon movement, he writes wistfully about the early days before “the hijacking.” Q’s messages, he says, seemed to validate conspiracy theories he had subscribed to for years — tying the Clintons and George Soros to the Rothschilds and the Illuminati.

Palmer Report, Opinion: This is outrageous, Bill Palmer, right, Feb. 20, 2022. Over the past week various judges in various jurisdictions ruled that Donald Trump and his family must testify in the New York probe into the Trump Organization, that Allen Weisselberg must testify in the Washington DC probe into the Trump inaugural, and that Trump can be held personally liable for harm caused by the January 6th attack.

This swarm of devastating rulings against Donald Trump has finally convinced a lot of you that his future really does consist of bankruptcy and prison, not some kind of mythical comeback. It’s good to see some of the defeatist fretting finally subside, and give way to positive momentum. When defeatism rules the day, it’s difficult to organize and put in the work and win any upcoming battles. But when your side has momentum and is able to see what a win looks like, it becomes a whole lot easier to organize and win tough battles such as, say, the 2022 midterms.

However, before we embark on the constructive hard work of winning upcoming political battles, we should take a moment to think about how we got to this point – because it’s not pretty. If you look at what transpired in court this week (particularly in New York), and you work backwards, you realize that this was always going to be the outcome. It’s been clear since late 2019 that if Trump lost the 2020 election, New York would take his assets and put in him in prison. Once he did lose the election, there was never any doubt that we’d end up where we’re at now. Trump was always going down.

Yet for the past year, nearly everyone in the mainstream media – left, right, or center – and nearly all of the most prominent social media pundits, have been insisting that Donald Trump would get away with it all and somehow retake control of the country. Since literally the minute Trump was declared the loser, the media and the pundits have been insisting nonstop that Trump in 2024 was inevitable. Not only was he going to automatically win the Republican nomination, he was somehow magically going to steal the general election as well – and then we’d all be doomed.

There was never anything to support this narrative. Within days of leaving office, polling showed that only about half of Republican voters even wanted Trump to be their 2024 presidential nominee. There was no consensus on an alternative candidate; Republican voters were simply making clear that they knew Trump was washed up, damaged goods, someone who had no future and certainly wouldn’t be competitive if he were the 2024 Republican nominee.

Yet even as the facts have made clear for the past year that the Republican electorate had already moved beyond Trump, and that New York was going to put Trump in prison long before 2024 anyway, the media has almost unanimously spent the past year feeding us a fictional story instead. The media simply ignored every single thing that was happening, and instead fed us baseless “Trump 2024” hype. And if anything, media outlets that lean liberal were more guilty of promoting this narrative.

How could the entire media have spent an entire year getting the entire narrative about Donald Trump entirely wrong? That kind of industry-wide ineptness isn’t possible, of course, unless it was done on purpose. And let’s not mince words: it was in fact done on purpose.

Every single person in the mainstream media, and every prominent political pundit, has known all along that things in New York would inevitably end up where they are now. The New York Attorney General would not only dismantle the Trump Organization, but do it in way that would feed the related criminal case against Donald Trump and his family. Trump was always heading for bankruptcy and prison in New York – and nothing was going to cause that path to deviate.

But it was going to take time for things to progress to this point – an unknown amount of time. And that was the problem. The media and the pundits didn’t want to have to spend every day of the past year factually pointing out that at some unknown future time, Trump would be ripped limb from proverbial limb by New York prosecutors. The media didn’t want to have to keep covering a story that was moving at a snail’s pace and didn’t produce any publicly visible results most days. More specifically, the media didn’t want to annoy audiences by repeatedly pointing out that Trump was going to be indicted and put in prison, without being able to specify when this would actually end up happening.

You should be so outraged by this industry-wide deception, there should be steam coming out of your ears. You’ve been lied to.

Not only have you been lied to, you’ve been lied to in an injurious manner. Many of you have spent the past year scared to death that Trump was going to “get away with it all” and take over the country in 2024. Many of you have been too scared, too paralyzed with fear, too demotivated, to be able to focus on fighting the political battles that have needed to be fought.

Feb. 18

PressRun, Commentary: The media and Durham’s corrupt “spying” investigation, Eric Boehlert, right, Feb 18, 2022. Ken Starr II. Fox News has lost its mind. Again.

Looking for a partisan outrage to promote as Covid cases plummet and the U.S. economy continues to soar, Fox News, Trump and the ferocious Right Wing Noise Machine have gone all-in claiming Hillary Clinton’s campaign six years ago “spied” on the Republican candidate. The dreamt-up allegation comes courtesy of special counsel John Durham’s dishonest handiwork and his Trump-sanctioned investigation into Russiagate and the hollow claims that Trump had been the target of a massive deep state conspiracy.

The current caper has more holes than the GOP’s Benghazi production, but it’s sucking up lots of Beltway oxygen and generating right-wing hysteria which is the whole point — to create a spectacle of Democrat lawbreaking. (Trump’s demanding Durham’s defendant be executed.)

The good news is the mainstream media are not blindly repeating bogus claims about Clinton “spying,” for the simple reason that nobody has offered any proof.

The bad news is the same elite news outlets are stepping lightly around the real story at the center of the right-wing mob — the unethical nature of Durham’s work and how he’s clearly working with the far right to try to manufacture controversy where none exists.

In the ABC News report, it wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that that network spelled out, “nowhere in Durham's filing does he state that lawyers for the Clinton campaign paid a tech company to "infiltrate" servers belonging to Trump Tower and later the White House.” That crucial debunking should have been found in the first paragraph, if not the headline.

The New York Times dissected the phony spying claims, but its woefully soft headline claimed the right-wing “narrative” was merely “off track.” Off track? It’s a mountain of deliberate lies. A Washington Post report suggested Trump’s claims were built on “inaccurate Durham reporting,” which makes the whole thing sound innocuous.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal pretended it couldn’t figure out which side was telling the truth about the “spying” claims, and insisted Durham, left, had simply “reignited disputes.”

By legitimizing the “spying” nonsense in any way, the press helps the GOP run interference on Trump’s 2016 ties to Russia, as well as the January 6 insurrection, by suggesting Clinton is the real traitor.

Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, initially appointed Durham to investigate alleged deep-state plotting within the FBI. Unable to find any proof, Durham has instead spent years helping the right-wing media create a fantasy storyline that the Clinton campaign in 2016 spread misinformation to the FBI and to the media that there was illegal collusion between Russian and Trump, and that somehow that Clinton strategy was against the law.

Along the way, Durham’s court filings have been irregular, unethical and “indecipherable,” as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough put it, as the prosecutor stuffs unsupported conspiracy theories into court records, designed to give the dishonest GOP media new nuggets of vague information, which they can conflate anyway they want, like Durham’s filing last week and Clinton being caught “spying” on Trump’s campaign.

“News organizations often struggle to debunk right-wing disinformation, a complicated undertaking that often ultimately muddies up the truth simply by virtue of covering it, which is what that disinformation is designed to do,” noted Greg Sargent at the Post.

Durham is taking advantage of longtime Beltway media traditions as he aggressively peddles misinformation. Traditions like, if someone has the title “special counsel” in front of their name, than that person is a serious, honest prosecutor doing serious, honest legal work and that they must be left alone to do their digging; their ethics and motivations should not be questioned. So far, that’s working for Durham, who appears to be working with the GOP political and media infrastructure within the Beltway.

Durham is Ken Starr II, and the press still hasn’t learned any lessons.

Here’s a quick example of the type of joke investigation Durham is overseeing. Last year, his shining moment was indicting Democratic cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussman on a single count of making a false statement to an FBI agent, five years after the fact. (The indictment had nothing to do with FBI misconduct, which was supposedly under investigation.)

Durham’s indictment, which is based on the testimony of one witness who has contradicted himself, claims Sussmann committed perjury by denying he was working for the Clinton campaign at the time he brought his information about Trump’s Russian ties to the FBI in 2016. The false statement claim is a laughably small crime to serve as the centerpiece of Durham’s $4 million investigation, which has produced two indictments. (By contrast, Robert Mueller indicted 34 people as part of his Russia probe.)

As blogger Marcy Wheeler details, Durham’s allegation is based on the central claim that Sussman had secretly “coordinated with representatives and agents of the Clinton Campaign.” When Sussman’s lawyers in a court filing last October demanded to know with whom Sussman had directly plotted with on the Clinton campaign, Durham refused name anyone. That’s because at the time, Durham had not interviewed anyone with the Clinton campaign to see if Sussman had coordinated with them.

It’s amateur hour. “There’s tons of instances of where Durham demonstrably failed to do basic investigative work before charging Sussmann five years after a claimed lie,” notes Wheeler, who’s been picking apart Durham’s shoddy work for years.

When Fox News and Trump team up with a corrupt investigation, the role of the media isn’t to do neutral fact checks. It’s to call out the liars and the lies.

Yahoo Sports, Opinion: Michele Tafoya finally free to speak her ugly truths, Shalise Manza Young, Feb. 18, 2022. Just days after she tearfully left her lucrative and high-profile job as sideline reporter for Sunday Night Football, Michele Tafoya appeared on right-wing media networks to show her true colors.

There's a feeling of repugnance seeing Tafoya's recent comments contrasted with the fact that for years she was smiling in the faces of Black coaches and players to mine them for nuggets of information to make sure she looked good in her job, but we'll set that aside for now.

There's also a familiar feeling of disgust, as in some cases she is turning to lies – or at minimum a painfully thin understanding of American history – to prop up her statements. Saying Colin Kaepernick made "business decisions" in protesting the extrajudicial killings of Black citizens by agents of the state, as she told one radio show, is flat out untrue. Kaepernick didn't sit and then kneel with the aim of leaving his job.

The NFL made a business decision by excising him from its league, listening to a loud minority of people, including the former president of the United States, who called Kaepernick and others "sons of bitches" for daring to silently protest and completely ignoring the Black fans and others who understood his message and at minimum supported his method.

(And if we're talking about business decisions, let the record reflect that Kaepernick stood on his principles while he was still playing and had his career taken from him. Tafoya waited until she knew she was leaving NBC before she started spewing her venom, lest she face any backlash.)

One talking point for Tafoya, which she touched on in November while auditioning for "The View" and returned to again Wednesday night on Fox News, is that her children are being taught that skin color matters. She cited affinity groups for children of similar backgrounds and a picnic for families of color at the school. In classic Karen style, she even apparently called the school to rail about the picnic, saying she was "stepping up."

She wasn't stepping up, she was just mad there was something other families were getting that hers didn't.

Affinity groups exist everywhere, and they always have. White people just used to call it legal segregation.

"It breaks my heart that my kids are being taught that skin color matters," Tafoya sighed.

It is completely ahistorical for Tafoya to assert, as she did a few months ago, that white people have been working "since the Civil War" to make sure that skin color doesn't matter in this country, as if the legions of Confederates weren't fighting for the exact opposite, as if the violence of the Jim Crow era and civil rights movement never happened, as if data to this very day, from the rise in hate crimes to the widening racial wealth gap to disparities in health care access don't disprove her assertion.

And as if this video does not exist.

Taken at Somerset Commons mall in New Jersey last weekend – the same weekend Tafoya was in Los Angeles reporting on Super Bowl LVI, her final game before getting to lose the shackles of faux civility in her interactions with Black NFL coaches and players – the video as we see it shows a white-appearing Latino teenager and a Black teenager arguing. When the Latino boy starts sticking a finger in the Black boy’s face, the Black boy swats it away.

They start to throw punches, and of course the peers around them pull out their phones to record it.

Within seconds, two police officers arrive. The female officer pulls the Latino child off the Black child and sits him on a small couch at the scene. The male officer throws himself on top of the Black child, smacking the child's head on a small table and knocking it over.

While the male officer fights to place the Black boy's arms behind his back to put him in handcuffs, the female officer leaves the other boy sitting on the couch to kneel on the upper shoulders and lower neck area of the Black child, prone on the floor with an adult man already on him.

At one point the other child stands up off the couch. The police pay him no mind.

The kids around knew exactly what was happening; you can hear one girl's voice toward the end say, "It's because he's Black … racially motivated!" The Latino teenager told a local news outlet that he couldn't believe what happened: "I didn't understand why. I even offered to get handcuffed."

The police in that situation very clearly saw skin color. The white-appearing Latino teenager, the one that looks to have been the aggressor and was on top of the Black teenager when they arrived, was treated as he should have been. As they both should have been. It was a fistfight between kids. Neither should have been in handcuffs. Break it up, let them disperse and go on with their days.

But the Black child was immediately treated as a threat and violently placed into cuffs, something that will haunt him for weeks if not longer. Something that Black mothers and Black fathers have seen happen again and again to our children. Something people like Tafoya want us to get "get over" because they believe it's "in the rearview mirror," as she said this week.

That teenager was taught something about his skin that day: that it's seen as a threat. That is heartbreaking.

Don't worry Michele, no one expects you to "step up" and talk about how awful this incident was, how a Black teenager was clearly singled out, traumatized by police in a clear case of racial bias.

You've shown your true colors.

New York Times, Donald Trump’s New Social App Is Poised to Join a Crowded Field, Matthew Goldstein and Ryan Mac, Feb. 18, 2022. Truth Social, the former president’s hard-right alternative to Twitter, could go live next month. But as businesses go, outrage may not be the best moneymaker.

For months, former President Donald J. Trump has promoted Truth Social, the soon-to-be-released flagship app of his fledging social media company, as a platform where free speech can thrive without the constraints imposed by Big Tech.

At least seven other social media companies have promised to do the same.

Gettr, a right-wing alternative to Twitter founded last year by a former adviser to Mr. Trump, bills itself as a haven from censorship. That’s similar to Parler — essentially another Twitter clone backed by Rebekah Mercer, a big donor to the Republican Party. MeWe and CloutHub are similar to Facebook, but with the pitch that they promote speech without restraint.

Truth Social was supposed to go live on Presidents’ Day, but the start date was recently pushed to March, though a limited test version was unveiled recently. A full rollout could be hampered by a regulatory investigation into a proposed merger of its parent company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, with a publicly traded blank-check company.

If and when it does open its doors, Mr. Trump’s app will be the newest — and most conspicuous — entrant in the tightly packed universe of social media companies that have cropped up in recent years, promising to build a parallel internet after Twitter, Facebook, Google and other mainstream platforms began to crack down on hate speech.

At least one other social media start-up is hoping to ride the former president’s popularity among conservatives to build its business. Gettr, which began on July 4 and is led by Jason Miller, the former Trump adviser, had hoped to land Mr. Trump before he decided to open his own venture. In January, Gettr advertised that it was the “place to watch” recent rallies by Mr. Trump.

In a written statement, Mr. Miller said the former president was welcome “to join GETTR whenever he is ready.” The site claims to have five million users and a cash pile of tens of millions of dollars. In a recent interview, Mr. Miller denied a previous claim that Gettr had raised $75 million.

Parler, the platform popular with Trump supporters, is still reeling from its role after the violent protests at the U.S. Capitol in January 2021 by thousands of angry fans of Mr. Trump. Downloads of Parler’s app plummeted 88 percent last year after Apple and Google removed it from their app stores and Amazon cut off web services after the riot, according to SensorTower, a digital analytics company.

Parler, which said in January that it had raised $20 million from investors, has since returned to the Apple Store. However, internal turmoil has continued. Last year, Parler fired John Matze, one of its founders, from his position as chief executive. Mr. Matze has said he was dismissed after a dispute with Ms. Mercer — the daughter of a wealthy hedge fund executive who is Parler’s main backer — over how to deal with extreme content posted on the platform.

Christina Cravens, a spokeswoman for Parler, said the company had always “prohibited violent and inciting content” and had invested in “content moderation best practices.”

Moderating content will also be a challenge for Truth Social, whose main star, Mr. Trump, has not been able to post messages since early 2021, when Twitter and Facebook kicked him off their platforms for inciting violence tied to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

With Mr. Trump as its main poster, it was unclear if Truth Social would grow past subscribers who sign up simply to read the former president’s missives, Mr. Matze said.

Feb. 17

 

Daily Beast, Russia’s Top Propagandists Beg for a Putin Interview with Tucker Carlson, Julia Davis, Feb. 17, 2022. That'll Calm It Down. The top Kremlin mouthpieces on Russian state TV think that now is the perfect time for President Vladimir Putin to sit for an interview on Fox News.

For many months, translated clips of Fox News host Tucker Carlson have been making the rounds on Russian state television, delighting hosts, pundits and experts with their pro-Russian slant. Some of the top propagandists even worried out loud that Carlson’s apparent pro-Kremlin bias might result in him being “marginalized” or silenced.

Behind the scenes, Carlson reportedly courted Kremlin intermediaries in his plight to secure an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. What might have been considered an extended audition could soon pay off—Putin’s mouthpieces in high places are now openly pushing for an interview with the controversial host. Appearing on the state TV show "The Evening with Vladimir Soloviev" on Wednesday, RT’s editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan practically begged anyone who can make it happen to go ahead and grant Carlson’s long-standing wish.

The show aired a translated clip of "Tucker Carlson Tonight" from the night before, where Carlson’s guest, retired Army Col. Doug Macgregor, argued that Russia’s intent to subjugate Ukraine should be taken seriously and even respected. Macgregor contended that “Russia has legitimate national security interests in Ukraine” and said that “Russia is about to demonstrate that we are powerless in Eastern Europe to stop them.” Macgregor asserted: “And I do not see any evidence for this overwhelming support around the world for sanctions against Russia over something that most people rightly regard as a matter of national security interest to Russia.” Carlson nodded approvingly.

After viewing the video, the head of RT praised Carlson in a way no other American television host is being lauded on Kremlin-funded TV. Delivering her pitch to Putin in the style of former President Trump’s notorious “Russia, if you’re listening,” Simonyan gushed to Soloviev: “You showed the clip of wonderful Tucker Carlson, who—by the way—is dreaming of interviewing Vladimir Putin, simply dreaming about it! It’s not within my purview, but if anyone could make it happen, it would be amazing. He is the most popular host in the United States and perhaps the only one who is reasonable, has the biggest audience, who understands everything the way it should be understood.” Soloviev and guests in the studio nodded approvingly.

The same day, RT published an op-ed, praising Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard, right, and Jill Stein for their “anti-war” stance, because of their opposition to Ukraine being able to join NATO.

Dmitry Kulikov—a member of the Zinoviev Club, instituted by the Kremlin-controlled media giant Russia Today—said that the growing friction between Russia and the United States should be treated as an ongoing info-war. He praised Simonyan for “brilliantly describing the arrangements between the media and intelligence agencies” and claimed that Tucker Carlson is one of the very few journalists exempt from such dealings.

In this ongoing “info-war,” Carlson’s show and the Russian state television somehow ended up in perfect alignment on multiple contentious topics, not limited to Ukraine and Russia. During his show on Wednesday night, Soloviev urged Americans to pay attention to Canadian truck drivers protesting coronavirus vaccine mandates—instead of focusing on imprisoned opposition activist Alexei Navalny (New York Times, Navalny Appears in Penal Camp Court to Face More Charges, Ivan Nechepurenko, Feb. 15, 2022). Tucker Carlson Tonight and Fox News in general have been providing ample coverage of the topic—second only to RT, according to the stats by Real Clear Politics which Simonyan posted on her Twitter page.

Washington Post, How NBC handled one of the most gut-wrenching scenes in Olympic figure skating history, Cindy Boren, Feb. 17, 2022. One of the most stunning moments in the history of Olympic defeats unfolded Thursday after Kamila Valieva, shown above in a file photo, the 15-year-old Russian figure skater largely expected to waltz to a gold medal, fell twice during her free skate to finish in fourth place.

Centered around a youngster who had been under intense scrutiny after she was allowed to compete despite a positive test for a banned substance, the scene on NBC’s broadcast on the USA Network was excruciating to watch and quickly devolved into teary disbelief and chaos that was unlike anything in recent Olympic memory.

“This is my 18th Olympic Games,” NBC’s Jimmy Roberts said as he closed the live coverage, “and I can honestly say I do not think I have ever seen anything like this. Raw emotions everywhere. A stunning resolution to the story, and it’s one I can’t imagine anyone saw coming.”

• Washington Post, After Russian figure skater’s positive drug test, officials promise expedited hearing

 

Mother Jones, Steve Bannon’s Patron Claimed to Be a Billionaire. Now He Says He’s Broke, Dan Friedman, Feb.16, 2022. Guo Wengui, above right with Trump backer and radio host Steven Bannon, who touted his luxurious lifestyle, filed for bankruptcy.

Gou Wengui, an exiled Chinese businessman and patron of Steve Bannon, who has described himself as a billionaire and touted his luxurious residences and a $28 million yacht, filed for bankruptcy Tuesday, claiming he has assets worth just $50,000 to $100,000.

Guo, who is an investor in Gettr, the conservative social media app, filed for Chapter 11 protection in federal court in Connecticut, where sources said he owns property.

Guo listed liabilities of $100 million to $500 million. His biggest is $254 million that New York Justice Barry Ostrager has ordered Guo to pay a Cayman Islands-based hedge fund, the Pacific Alliance Asia Opportunity Fund, which sued Guo in 2017 to try to recover a debt dating to 2008, when Guo was involved in real estate in China. The bankruptcy filing came on the day the judge had set as a deadline for Guo to pay $134 million for violating a court order to keep his yacht within the court’s jurisdiction.

Gou fled China in late 2014, ahead of fraud charges, and settled in New York, quickly buying a $68 million Central Park West apartment and joining Mar-a-Lago.

In 2017, he began publicly accusing Chinese Communist Party elites of corruption and sexual hijinks. Few if any of his allegations were substantiated, but his efforts helped him win fans among critics of China, including on the U.S. right. After Bannon’s ouster from the White House, he joined forces with Guo, receiving consulting fees and other perks to help Guo launch anti-CCP nonprofits, media companies, and a host of other ventures, many that use the letter “G,” for Guo, and heavily promote his assertions and ventures. These outfits have pushed out false conspiracy theories about Covid, the 2020 election, and other topics.

The bankruptcy filing is an apparent effort to avoid paying Pacific Alliance and other potential civil penalties. Guo’s filing listed creditors that include a number of people who are suing him in cases that remain active.

Guo had already set up complex corporate arrangements that appear aimed at allowing him to try to avoid creditors by denying ownership of assets courts have repeatedly ruled he controls.

Gou has “secreted his assets in a maze of corporate entities and with family members,” Ostrager said in his ruling last week. “This scheme has enabled [Guo] to assert that he has no assets despite his lavish lifestyle, which plaintiff has catalogued with material from social media clippings, photographs and videotapes showing [Guo] living large and boasting of his wealth, expensive homes, private plane, and yacht.”

Guo used his yacht and other flashy possessions to help market a crypto currency offering, a lifestyle company, and other products to fans. Bannon was living on Guo’s yacht in 2020 when he was arrested and charged with defrauding a charity that raised private funds that were supposed to help build a border wall. Trump, in one of his last acts as president, pardoned Bannon.

Guo’s bankruptcy filing, which does not appear to list as assets his stake in companies that bear his name and homes he has bragged about owning, seems to be his latest effort to avoid paying creditors.

“He’s trying to use the Chapter 11 process to avoid lots of debts,” said Sasha Gong, an academic and journalist who was friendly with Guo before falling out with him in 2019. Gong noted that Guo’s list of creditors includes his own family company, Golden Spring New York, through which Guo has made various investments. Guo says that he owes the company about $21 million dollars. This appears to be an effort to shield assets controlled by Golden Spring from creditors, Gong argued.

Committee To Protect Journalists, CPJ condemns ‘harsh’ 9-year sentence for Nicaraguan journalist Miguel Mendoza, Staff Report, Feb. 17, 2022. Nicaraguan authorities should release journalist Miguel Mendoza Urbina, above, from prison immediately, and should ensure that members of the press do not face criminal penalties for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

On Wednesday, February 16, in a closed door hearing in the Ninth Criminal District Court of Managua, a judge sentenced Mendoza to nine years in prison along with a ban on holding political office during that time, according to news reports. Last week, the court convicted the journalist of conspiracy to undermine national integrity and disseminating false news, as CPJ documented at the time.

Following his conviction, Mendoza’s lawyer said they intended to appeal the verdict.

“The entire criminal process against Nicaraguan journalist Miguel Mendoza has been nothing more than a transparent attempt by authorities to silence anyone who dares to question them,” said Natalie Southwick, CPJ’s Latin America and the Caribbean program coordinator. “Mendoza should never have been arrested, nor have spent a single day in prison. This harsh sentence makes it clearer than ever that the government of Daniel Ortega views critical journalists as political opponents to be suppressed.”

Mendoza was detained on June 21, 2021, after police raided his home in Managua, as CPJ documented at the time. He has covered sports for a variety of Nicaraguan outlets for about 30 years, and also shares commentary on politics and human rights issues, including criticism of the government of President Daniel Ortega, on social media.

Steady, This is Not Okay, Dan Rather, right, author and former CBS News Anchor and Managing Editor, Feb. 17, 2022. This won’t take long. Because there’s not much to say. It involves something that went out earlier today on Twitter, that social media platform that limits thoughts to 280 characters and can be both inspirational and a cesspool.

One user who tends to wade into the latter is the tech billionaire Elon Musk, who posted and then deleted a Tweet that created quite a stir [by using a photo of Adolf Hitler to denounce Canada's prime minister]. That he eventually removed his Tweet is welcomed, but it is far from sufficient.

For context, Musk posted his tweet in response to this: "Canadian authorities have ordered financial institutions not to interact with 34 different crypto addresses tied to the country's ongoing trucker protests."

I do not want to get bogged down in the details of cryptocurrency, the Canadian government, or the truck blockade. Those are all important stories that deserve their own treatment. I want to get at something far more basic. There are no words to capture the depravity of what Musk did in using a meme of Adolf Hitler, but words are what we have so we must try. It was offensive, disgusting, and shameful. It trafficked in the basest currencies of hate and ignorance.

To see this face staring back at us, with a message like this, is absolutely beyond the pale of any civilized communication. I think of the millions dead. I think of a world destroyed. I shake with anger. The pit of my stomach is sick. I am deeply saddened.

This kind of dangerous rhetoric cannot go unchallenged. I cannot imagine any resepected national public figure in my lifetime doing something like this. It’s not some “tech dude” being provocative. This is appropriating the deaths of millions of people to make a snarky political comment. And Musk is not alone. More and more we are hearing Hitler and the Nazis invoked to demonize science, knowledge, public health, and social and racial justice. There can be no false equivalence in how widespread the Third Reich is used by right-wing actors in their political and social attacks. But we should denounce all instances where the specter of Nazism is bandied about with abandon.

On the individual level this raises serious concerns about Musk, whose public pronouncements have become increasingly strident and aligned with fringe political actors. Meanwhile, his company Tesla is being sued in California for racism.

No Mr. Musk, this is not going to be allowed. Even those with unlimited funds can be bankrupt of decency. My hope is that this episode causes Musk to pause and reflect. I desperately desire that we can find ways to start to pull back from some of this caustic rhetor

New York Times, Spotify’s Joe Rogan Deal Is Said to Be Worth Over $200 Million, Katherine Rosman, Ben Sisario, Mike Isaac and Adam Satariano, Feb. 17, 2022. The deal, which reportedly was worth double what was initially known, made Spotify a podcasting giant. But controversy followed.

It was the deal that helped make Spotify a podcasting giant, but has now put the company at the center of a fiery debate about misinformation and free speech.

Spotify was already the king of music streaming. But to help propel the company into its next phase as an all-purpose audio juggernaut, and further challenge Apple and Google, it wanted a superstar podcaster, much as Howard Stern helped put satellite radio on the map in 2006. Spotify executives came to view Joe Rogan — a comedian and sports commentator whose no-holds-barred podcast, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” was already a monster hit on YouTube — as that transformative star.

In May 2020, after an intense courtship, Spotify announced a licensing agreement to host Mr. Rogan’s show exclusively. Although reported then to be worth more than $100 million, the true value of the deal that was negotiated at the time, which covered three and a half years, was at least $200 million, with the possibility of more, according to two people familiar with the details of the transaction who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss it.

But in recent weeks the show that helped Spotify catapult into a market leader for podcasts has also placed it at the center of the sort of cultural storm that has long engulfed Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, over questions about the responsibility tech behemoths have for the content on their platforms.

• New York Times, Joe Rogan Apologizes for ‘Shameful’ Past Use of Racial Slur, Ben Sisario, Feb. 6, 2022 (print ed.).

Feb. 16

New York Times, How a Secret Assault Allegation Against an Anchor Upended CNN and Jeff Zucker, Emily Steel, Jodi Kantor, Michael M. Grynbaum, James B. Stewart and John Koblin, Updated Feb. 16, 2022. The network’s top-rated host and its president were forced out following ethical lapses, an office romance and a letter from a lawyer for “Jane Doe.”

Late in the day on Nov. 30, Jeff Zucker, above, the president of CNN Worldwide, summoned his star anchor and friend, Chris Cuomo, to a meeting in the network’s skyscraper overlooking the Hudson River.

Mr. Zucker was joined by the network’s chief marketing officer — and his secret romantic partner — Allison Gollust. They had to deliver a delicate message.

Mr. Zucker told Mr. Cuomo that CNN was suspending him because of his unethical interactions with his brother, New York’s governor.

Mr. Cuomo, right, was shocked and offered to resign. Mr. Zucker countered that the anchor might be able to return at some point, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. Mr. Cuomo felt reassured. He and Mr. Zucker were confidants, their fortunes entwined. Mr. Cuomo didn’t bother to consult a lawyer.

Barely 24 hours later, a letter arrived at CNN. It was from a lawyer representing a woman who had worked with Mr. Cuomo years earlier at ABC News. She said he had sexually assaulted her and that, in the heat of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Cuomo had tried to keep her quiet by arranging a flattering CNN segment about her employer at the time. The letter described it as an “abuse of power at CNN to attempt to silence my client.”

While a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo denied the allegations in the letter, it set in motion a chain of events that would quickly upend one of the world’s most powerful news networks.

By week’s end, Mr. Zucker had fired Mr. Cuomo, telling him that a drumbeat of scandals had become “too much for us.”

Two months later, Mr. Zucker was forced to resign. On Tuesday, CNN announced that Ms. Gollust, too, was leaving the network.

Publicly, Mr. Zucker blamed the failure to disclose his relationship with Ms. Gollust. But other forces had set the stage for his downfall.

CNN had skidded into third place in cable news ratings. A key investor had criticized the network’s opinionated, personality-driven programming. Mr. Zucker had clashed with a top executive at CNN’s parent company. And he had made powerful enemies out of Mr. Cuomo and his brother, the former New York governor.

By the time of Mr. Cuomo’s ouster, the law firm that had been hired to investigate his behavior had turned its attention to Mr. Zucker and his management of a network where his intimacy with sources and employees had been both his calling card and Achilles’ heel. Mr. Zucker’s abrupt departure has thrown the future of CNN into chaos, just as it was poised to introduce a highly anticipated streaming service and to come under new corporate ownership.

Bloomberg, Palin Jurors Knew Judge Dismissed Times Case Before Verdict, Bob Van Voris, Feb. 16, 2022. Several jurors tasked with deciding Sarah Palin’s defamation case against the New York Times learned from smart-phone push notifications that the judge presiding over the trial had already ruled in the newspaper’s favor.

The jurors were still in the midst of deliberating Monday when U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff said in court that he would throw out the suit regardless of their verdict, based on the failure of Palin’s team to present sufficient evidence to win the case.

But some of the jurors learned of his decision when they went home that night, before completing their deliberations, according to people with knowledge of the matter. After Rakoff was told by Bloomberg that jurors had disclosed the information to his clerk, the judge issued a court filing notifying both sides in the case.

“I’m disappointed that the jurors even got these messages, if they did,” Rakoff said in an interview, referring to the news notifications. “I continue to think it was the right way to handle things.”

The incident follows on the heels of British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell’s efforts to win a new trial based on disclosures in the press by one of the jurors in her criminal sex-trafficking case. And it illustrates the difficulty of keeping jurors insulated from information that could affect their verdicts in a time where news -- from the score of a recorded football game to a judge’s decision in a high-profile case -- is increasingly hard to avoid.

On Monday, Rakoff cited a lack of evidence proving the Times had knowingly or recklessly published falsehoods about Palin when it ran a 2017 opinion piece linking her to a deadly shooting. The next day, jurors returned a unanimous verdict in favor of the Times.

Several jurors told one of the judge’s clerks on Tuesday that they weren’t able to avoid learning about Rakoff’s widely-reported decision, according to people with knowledge of the matter. When Rakoff was informed of that information by Bloomberg on Wednesday, he said he spoke to his clerk.

The judge said he was told “at most three” jurors reported knowing about his ruling before delivering their verdict, and all said it didn’t affect their deliberations.

He later issued a written order informing the parties of the jurors’ discussion with his clerk.

“In an excess of caution, the Court hereby brings the foregoing facts to the parties’ attention,” Rakoff said. “If any party feels there is any relief they seek based on the above, counsel should promptly initiate a joint phone conference with the court to discuss whether any further proceedings are appropriate.”

Whether there will be any fallout for Palin or the Times is unclear.

“The standard for overturning a jury’s verdict is a demanding one,” said Barbara Wahl, a partner with the law firm Arent Fox LLP.

Rakoff told the parties that he allowed the jury to deliver a verdict despite his ruling so that if the case is appealed, the court would have the benefit of both for review.

The jury’s knowledge of Rakoff’s intent to throw out Palin’s case doesn’t affect his decision to do so. And Palin may choose to appeal.

 

Vicky Ward Investigates, Prince Andrew Settles to Keep Giuffre Case Out of the Courts, Vicky Ward, Feb. 16, 2022. As I wrote last week, I have bounced a lot of the legal activity around the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell off of former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida-turned-litigator David S. Weinstein, who has been a wise sounding board.

I asked him about today’s news that Prince Andrew has settled with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who had accused him of sexual abuse when she was a minor. In just weeks, Andrew was scheduled to give a deposition.

Here’s my conversation with Weinstein, condensed for clarity.

WARD: You said you foresaw this settlement. Why?

WEINSTEIN: Because of the high stakes that were involved. The stakes were very high for Prince Andrew in this, and you saw how he was trying to avoid any litigation whatsoever because of the fact that he filed his motions to dismiss—he was doing whatever he could to keep this case out of the courts. When that didn't work, he had to answer the complaint, and they were getting ready for the deposition. He certainly didn't want to sit down under oath and answer any questions. So he was faced with a difficult choice: He could reach a settlement and pay Virginia Giuffre or he could pay his lawyers to keep fighting this. But then it would keep staying in the public view.

Above, right: A photograph appearing to show Prince Andrew with a then-17-year-old Virginia Roberts Giuffre and, in the background, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Feb. 15

Washington Post, Jury rules against Palin in New York Times libel case, Elahe Izadi and Sarah Ellison, Feb. 15, 2022. A jury ruled against Sarah Palin in her libel case against the New York Times, one day after the judge said he would toss out her claim, saying she had not met the high legal standard required in libel cases involving public figures and journalists.

The jury’s decision conforms with the one made by U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff. On Monday, he told lawyers for Palin and the Times that he would formally dismiss the former Alaska governor’s claim once the jury returned its verdict.

But since he expected his ruling to be appealed — a process that could alter long-standing protections afforded journalists writing about public figures — Rakoff explained that he wanted the jury to keep deliberating, so that future courts to have both his ruling and the jury’s decision to consider.

It was the first libel case against the Times to go to trial in nearly two decades, and its long path to trial has drawn close attention from press freedom advocates. A landmark 1964 Supreme Court ruling set a high bar for public officials — later extended to include all prominent individuals — who try to sue journalists for libel.

In 2017, when Rakoff first reviewed Palin’s case — in which the former Alaska governor, right, sued the Times for an editorial that inaccurately suggested a link between some rhetoric from the political action committee and a 2011 mass shooting — he dismissed it, stating that it was doubtful that she could demonstrate that the Times had shown the “actual malice” required by that 1964 standard. The newspaper corrected the error hours later.

Yet an appellate court reinstated Palin’s case, prompting many legal scholars to wonder if the courts’ once-forgiving attitude toward journalistic errors had begun to wane — and whether media organizations may find themselves increasingly beset by costly litigation.

Regardless of the judge and jury’s decision this week, it remains likely that Palin will appeal the case again, at a time when higher courts may be open to reassessing the “actual malice” standard. At the Supreme Court, both Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch have signaled an openness to reviewing the 1964 precedent, which has not been seriously challenged in half a century.

This legal tinderbox of a lawsuit began in the wake of a June 2017 shooting attack on a group of Republican lawmakers who had gathered at an Alexandria baseball field to practice for a game. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), left, was among those wounded. Within hours, a writer for the New York Times’s editorial page had started crafting an editorial, later published under the headline “America’s Lethal Politics,” that took note of another mass shooting — the one that injured then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and killed six people in Tucson. That shooting, the Times wrote, had been preceded by the circulation of a map by Palin’s PAC that placed stylized crosshairs over targeted Democratic districts. “The link to political incitement was clear,” the Times wrote.

In fact, there was never any indication that the Tucson shooter was motivated by the map. After an immediate backlash, the Times corrected the error the next morning — which attorneys for the newspaper later pointed to as evidence that it had been an “honest mistake.”

Yet the jury spent the better part of three days considering the case — suggesting that it was no easy decision.

On Monday, while the jury was still nearly eight hours into deliberations, Rakoff took the surprising step of announcing that he would rule in favor of the Times’s motion to dismiss, saying Palin had failed to demonstrate that then-editorial page editor James Bennet, right, had known the statements he was rewriting were false, or even that he suspected they might be.

Rakoff could have dismissed the case after hearing arguments and before handing the case to the jury. But as he explained to the court Monday, he settled on his stance over the weekend. And once he realized how he was going to rule, he decided that to not tell the participants sooner was “unfair to both sides.”

“We’ve had very full argument on this. I know where I’m coming out, and I want to therefore apprise the parties of that,” he said Monday.

The jury, however, was not made aware of Rakoff’s decision and continued to deliberate for another day.

When they delivered their verdict, Rakoff thanked them for the “careful attention” they paid to the case, and then explained that he had already decided to dismiss the case.

“Your job was to decide the facts, which you’ve now done. My job is to decide the law,” he said. “And I’ve concluded as a matter of law that the defendants are not liable, too.”

An attorney for Palin, Kenneth Turkel, said his team was “obviously disappointed” with the outcome and is still deciding whether to appeal.

“That being said, anytime a jury convenes and renders a decision, that is our system, allowing a private citizen like Gov. Palin or anyone to seek redress against a giant media company that wields so much power," Turkel told reporters outside the courthouse Tuesday.

As she left the courthouse, Palin praised Turkel and fellow attorney Shane Vogt for “doing all they can to make sure the little guy has a voice, the underdog can have their say.”

A spokeswoman for the New York Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, on Tuesday called the jury’s verdict a “reaffirmation of a fundamental tenet of American law: public figures should not be permitted to use libel suits to punish or intimidate news organizations that make, acknowledge and swiftly correct unintentional errors."

She added: ”It is gratifying that the jury and the judge understood the legal protections for the news media and our vital role in American society."

The new study focused on children under six months of age who were admitted to one of 20 U.S. pediatric hospitals between July 1 and Jan. 17. Of the 379 infants included in the study, 176 had been admitted for Covid-19 or had symptoms of the disease; all of these children tested positive for the virus. The remaining 203 children tested negative for the virus.

Among the infants with Covid-19, 16 percent of mothers had been vaccinated during pregnancy, compared to 32 percent of the mothers of hospitalized children without the virus.

Vaccination during the first 20 weeks of pregnancy was 32 percent effective against Covid-19-related hospitalization for infants, the researchers found, whereas later vaccination was 80 percent effective.

Slate, Commentary: The former Alaska governor lost her libel suit against the New York Times. But others were watching—and learning, Seth Stevenson, Feb 15, 2022. At about 2:30 on Tuesday afternoon, after roughly a dozen hours of deliberation, a nine-person jury—featuring, among others, a refrigerator repairman, a docent at the Met, a creative director, a hedge fund worker, and a receptionist at a fertility clinic—found that the New York Times Company, and its co-defendant James Bennet, did not libel Sarah Palin.

A day before, Judge Jed S. Rakoff—out of earshot of the jury—had already ruled that “no reasonable juror” could possibly conclude Palin had met her burden of proof. Rakoff advised both sides that if the jury decided the Times had defamed Palin, he’d reverse the outcome. Thus, the verdict from these (apparently reasonable) jurors was a second blow—and a bit of salt in the wound for the former Alaska governor. I’m tempted here to point Palin toward one of her trademark mottos, invoked by an opposing attorney at the trial: “Suck it up, buttercup.”

It seems obvious to me that the jury’s conclusion was sound, given the high hurdle Palin needed to clear as a public figure alleging libel. Palin failed to demonstrate—as she was required to do, per the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times v. Sullivan—that the Times acted with “actual malice.”

She didn’t prove that the Times published something false despite knowing it was false, or that the Times recklessly disregarded the high probability it was publishing something false, or that the Times intended to defame her and took conscious, deliberate steps to do so. What Palin instead showed was that Times journalists are, much like everyone else in the world, capable of making sloppy errors when they rush to meet a deadline. She also showed (and this didn’t help her case) that those journalists really, really hate to make mistakes and try hard to correct them as quickly as possible.

Sitting in the observer section at the trial—along with Sarah Palin’s boyfriend, James Bennet’s wife, a bunch of journalists, and a few curious members of the public—there was one especially intriguing figure. Charles Harder was the lead attorney when Hulk Hogan sued Gawker out of existence. And Harder watched every minute of the testimony in this trial, taking copious notes on a legal pad. He wasn’t working with Palin’s legal team (though he’d worked with them before, in that Gawker case). He was just watching.

During breaks in the proceedings, I peppered Harder with questions. How much did he think this trial was costing Palin? Answer: More than $1 million. How much would it cost to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court? Answer: $5 million, give or take. Was it possible Palin’s attorneys were working on a contingency basis, or maybe doing this just for the publicity? Answer: Basically, no.

Hulk Hogan didn’t pay his own legal costs (meaning, in part, Harder’s invoices) when he took Gawker to court. Silicon Valley grotesquerie Peter Thiel famously footed Hogan’s bill—secretly at first, until he was outed as Hogan’s backer. When it comes to this trial, I just can’t bring myself to believe that Palin paid for it out of pocket. If indeed she didn’t, and someone else was funding this, I wondered where that money was coming from. I asked Harder if he knew. He said he didn’t.

Then I asked Harder one last thing: Why exactly was he here? He was taking all those notes—was it for an article he’s writing, or a book? No, he said, “I’m just here to observe and learn.”

That was the most chilling thing I heard in that courtroom. What exactly did he learn from Sarah Palin’s (so far) failed effort to sink the Times? How exactly is he planning to apply those lessons? My fear is that, before long, we’ll all find out.

Feb. 14

Press Run, Commentary: But Her Emails haunts the D.C. press, Eric Boehlert, right, Feb 14, 2022. Toxic double standard. Responding to critics of the New York Times’ halting, timid coverage of the unfolding story of how Trump smuggled top secret documents out of the White House and stashed them at Mar-a-Lago for a year, the Times’ top Trump chronicler, Maggie Haberman, claimed it wasn’t for the newspaper to suggest whether Trump broke any laws.

“Many are awaiting [Attorney General] Merrick Garland’s view on what’s against the law, which law enforcement and not reporters dictate,” she tweeted.

Haberman’s rationale was stunning — journalists are clearly in a position to determine whether public figures like Trump have broken laws by absconding with 15 boxes of documents when the Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over at the end of their administrations. The idea that the Times newsroom has to wait for law enforcement to officially make determinations of lawbreaking is a new approach.

That’s certainly not how the Times covered the manufactured Hillary Clinton email scandal for two years, commonly referred to as the media’s "But Her Emails" fiasco. In the first Times article about the Clinton email story in March 2015, and in the first paragraph of that story, the daily openly suggested the presumptive Democratic nominee had broken the law [emphasis added]:

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

It wasn’t until August 2015 that the FBI began investigating the Clinton server and whether it involved transmission of classified material. By then, the press had spent five months leaning into the idea that possible criminality was fueling the endless coverage .

The media’s chronic and dishonest But Her Emails coverage, framed as nonstop horse race updates, changed the course of American history by denying Clinton the chance to become the first woman president. By helping elect Trump, it also hastened a political unraveling at home, as he unleashed a new brand of criminal and authoritarian rule. To date, the D.C. press has never acknowledged its sins of 2016; made no serious attempt to grapple with what went so wrong.

Now with the Trump document story, the press is being forced to confront the obvious hypocrisy. One year after the Clinton story broke in March 2015, But Her Emails was still be being covered like the Moon Landing. Yet just five days after the Trump story about smuggling out top secret documents (and reportedly flushing others down the toilet), the same D.C. press corps has already lost interest. On this Sunday’s “ABC This Week,” a panel of pundits had an extended debate about Trump’s impact on the Republican Party — there was no mention of the fact he stole top secret documents from the White House.

Appearing on MSNBC, the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker stressed that stealing documents might not raise to the level of being “nefarious,” and that because Trump wasn’t a “traditional” president and because his aides were “frenzied” during the month of January 2021, the theft of the documents made sense. Why is there still a driving media need to normalize Trump’s criminality?

Feb. 13

 

 

Watergate Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward, left, and Carl Bernstein speaking at the National Press Club on Oct. 20, 2014 (Photo courtesy of Noel St. John).

New York Magazine, Book Excerpt and Commentary: Woodward and Bernstein Didn’t Act Alone, Garrett M. Graff, right (adapted from the author's forthcoming book, Watergate: A New History, Avid Reader Press), Feb. 13, 2022. If not for their competitors, Nixon would probably have survived Watergate.

It’s easy looking back a half-century later to feel that the fall of Richard Nixon was inevitable, but the Watergate plotters almost got away with it. At a half-dozen moments after the June 17, 1972, burglary and attempted bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters, the investigations and follow-ons appeared all but over. Nixon won many of the early rounds of the coverup and went on to win reelection that same year in a landslide. It really did appear, in the White House’s famous words, to be just a “third-rate burglary.”

What eventually caused Watergate to turn from an odd political sideshow into an ultimately fatal, inescapable scandal was dogged investigative reporting — but there, again, the history we remember is not the history that actually happened.

It wasn’t just the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein who broke open the story but a half-dozen other reporters, all working far from the cozy corners of D.C. power — none of whom were immortalized onscreen by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Woodward and Bernstein mattered, yes, but not in the way that the popular history recorded in the gauzy, laudatory movie All the President’s Men tells us. Under a slightly different set of circumstances, it’s not even clear that Woodward and Bernstein’s names would be synonymous with Nixon’s downfall. Without their competitors at other newspapers, Nixon would have almost surely survived.

The first Watergate leak from the man who would become the most famous source of all time, Deep Throat, a.k.a. FBI associate director W. Mark Felt, went not to the Post at all but to its crosstown rival, the Washington Daily News.

On June 30, Felt, already frustrated by what he saw as stonewalling in the investigation by the bureau’s acting director, L. Patrick Gray III, handed the capital’s afternoon tabloid a scoop about the suspicious contents of E. Howard Hunt’s safe at the White House. It turned out to be the Daily News’ first and last Watergate scoop; it shut down publication in early July, a victim of the city’s 1970s newspaper wars. Whether, if it had continued publishing, the paper would have become Felt’s preferred source of leaks, rather than Post, will never be known.

Over the next few weeks, both Woodward and Bernstein, who had doggedly reported about the burglary in the first following days, both drifted away from the story. The Post had all but moved on by mid-July. Bernstein was sure that the break-in was bigger than anyone imagined, but the Post had a daily newspaper to run, and despite his protests, his editors assigned him back to his normal Virginia beat. Woodward took a July vacation home to Michigan, where his Republican father urged him to vote for Nixon in the fall.

Meanwhile, a steady drip of stories about the FBI’s stalled investigation emerged from Time magazine’s Sandy Smith, a gruff former organized-crime reporter who was well-sourced in law enforcement. Smith documented how even in those first days, the Justice Department leadership appeared to be stonewalling attempts by the FBI’s Washington Field Office to dig deeper into the burglary and its ties to Nixon’s campaign. Smith’s scoops resulted in a then-unknown explosive meeting between the field agents and acting director Gray, where he hauled them into his director’s suite on a Saturday morning to rail against the leaks.

It was only a late July scoop by the New York Times’ Walter Rugaber that jolted the capital back to attention. Rugaber had come to the D.C. bureau in 1969 after covering the civil rights movement in Georgia and Alabama and had been suspicious of the Watergate operation as soon as he heard Nixon’s campaign security director was involved.

Rugaber’s scoop on July 25 spurred the Washington Post to reassemble their Watergate team. Managing editor Howard Simons, annoyed, cornered city editor Barry Sussman with the Times in hand and demanded, “Why didn’t we have that?” And by the end of the day, Woodward and Bernstein were back on the beat until further notice. Though in its own way, the assignment of two young, inexperienced reporters amid a newsroom filled with respected veterans still indicated how little attention the Post expected to get out of the scandal.

Barely two years later, Woodward and Bernstein’s legacy of aggressive investigative reporting was mythologized in the movie that grew out of their book. The movie also rewrote history in ways big and small: It put Deep Throat at the center of a story in which he was actually mostly a bit player and sidelined from the narrative two of the paper’s main internal Watergate champions: managing editor Howard Simons and city editor Barry Sussman.

Sussman, who had edited and overseen the paper’s trove of stories, was written out of the movie entirely and ultimately wrote his own (very good) history of the scandal, The Great Cover-Up. “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them,” he said to journalism historian Alicia Shepherd decades later when she was writing a biography of the duo forever short-handed as “Woodstein.”

By the end of the scandal in August 1974, the reporters on the beat — Woodward, Bernstein, Smith, Nelson, Rugaber, Hersh, and others — collectively ushered in a new style of journalism and posture for reporters. “This was a turning point in the relationship between the White House and the press,” Shepherd wrote. “Never again would White House reporters be so trusting or respectful of a press secretary pushing the administration’s agenda.”

Feb. 11

Washington Post, Another Mexican journalist is killed, and Lopez Obrador attacks the media, Kevin Sieff, Feb. 11, 2022. One day after the fifth journalist was killed in Mexico in six weeks, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador launched into another diatribe against the press.

This time, at his regular morning news conference on Friday, López Obrador projected a slide purporting to show the income of one of the country’s most prominent journalists.

“I mean he earns about 15 times more than me,” López Obrador said of journalist Carlos Loret de Mola. “You think it's because he's a highflying journalist, very intelligent, a very good writer? No, it's because of his attacks.”

López Obrador’s use of Loret de Mola’s alleged income drew condemnation from defenders of press freedom and the journalist himself. Loret de Mola, a radio, television and print journalist in Mexico who contributes columns to The Washington Post’s Spanish-language Post Opinión section, also said the number was incorrect.

It also repeated a pattern for López Obrador, who has continued to excoriate the media during a surge in attacks against Mexican journalists. His administration has been criticized for not doing more to protect them.

Mexico offers bodyguards and bulletproof vests to vulnerable journalists. It hasn’t been enough.

On Thursday evening, Heber López Vásquez, the director of RCP Noticias in the state of Oaxaca, was shot to death when he returned to his house after work. He was 39.

López Vásquez had received threats for months. He told colleagues he believed they were related to his reporting on corruption among local officials.

Last year, seven journalists were killed in Mexico. That was more than in any other country in the world, according to Reporters Without Borders. This year, the country is on pace to surpass that total by March.

Rather than addressing the causes behind López Vásquez’s killing or expressing concern about the continued onslaught against the Mexican media, López Obrador showed a slide that he claimed showed Loret de Mola’s salary. It included a sum he supposedly received from The Post.

López Obrador said he was seeking to verify the salary information with Mexico’s tax authority, which appeared to be a violation of Mexico’s privacy laws.

Loret de Mola has been a frequent critic of López Obrador. He recently published a story in Latinus showing the apparently opulent lifestyle of López Obrador’s son in Houston, a stark contrast to the public image of frugality projected by the president. Loret de Mola later referred to the piece in a column for The Post.

Washington Post, After Russian figure skater’s positive drug test, officials promise expedited hearing, Emily Giambalvo, Yasmeen Abutaleb and Gus Garcia-Roberts, Feb. 11, 2022 (print ed.). An expedited hearing will determine whether Russian Olympic Committee figure skater Kamila Valieva will be allowed to compete in the women’s individual competition at the Beijing Olympics, the International Testing Agency said in a statement Friday.

Valieva, shown above in a photo by Chang Lee of the New York Times, tested positive for a banned substance in December and was briefly suspended from competition until a Russian anti-doping committee lifted that suspension.

The International Olympic Committee and World Anti-Doping Agency appealed the lifting of the suspension, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport will make a decision that determines whether Valieva, 15, can continue to compete here. She participated in the team event earlier in these Games, leading the ROC team to a gold medal that has yet to be presented because of the case’s unresolved status. The United States won silver and Japan bronze in the team competition.

According to the ITA’s statement, Valieva’s sample in question was collected on Dec. 25, 2021, during the Russian national championships. On Tuesday, the day after the Russians won the figure skating team event, a Swedish lab reported that the sample contained the prohibited substance trimetazidine.

 

Vicky Ward Investigates, The Last Word on the New Yorker and Isaac Chotiner, Vicky Ward, Feb. 11, 2022. This is the last time, I hope, I refer to the misleading article that Isaac Chotiner wrote in the New Yorker about my reporting on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell over the last twenty years.

What I want to point out is that, strangely, if you bother to read Chotiner’s article closely, it shows that—amid a whole lot of opinionated, fact-less nonsense about my integrity—the answer to the central question of who buried Maria and Annie Farmer’s allegations of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse back in 2002, and then again in 2011, is…drumroll…Graydon Carter. Further, it shows that when Carter was asked about this, his answers were disproven by the time-stamped emails and transcripts I sent to Chotiner and New Yorker fact-checkers.

So how and why then does the article, on an initial reading, make it appear that I am a liar, an unreliable journalist, while Carter is just brushing off a poor memory?

I’m going to give you the facts about what happened during the reporting of this because I am entitled to defend myself and my reputation when it’s under attack. First, why did Chotiner even write this piece? I’ve had many puzzled phone calls with people asking, What is the point of this piece? The news value? The public interest? It’s a head-scratcher.

________________________________________

 

 

Vicky Ward: My 2003 Vanity Fair article, “The Talented Mr. Epstein”
________________________________________

The first thing I should say is that it is just completely false for Chotiner to say that “many of the things that she told me—and had told her podcast listeners—turned out to be untrue.” There was one notable mistake I made—about the use of the word “peccadilloes” in my blog. I actually pointed that out to Chotiner, not vice-versa. I told him I found it in the original draft; I don’t know how it got through vetting. It’s a bad mistake, but I owned it and I immediately informed Audible about it as well.

Does he mention my transparency—as compared with the cover-up by Carter? No.

What Chotiner is trying to milk here is that, during the reporting of his piece, he called me often— catching me on the fly at 10pm, or in transit—and so, when he asked me did I remember X from 20 years ago—or things from even one year ago—I was honest that I couldn’t recall off the top of my head. On the spot, I couldn’t remember every precise date and time and fact from the last 20 years. Could you? Once I was back at my computer with the records of the scripts of my podcast and two decades of emails and transcripts in front of me, I corrected what I had made my best guess at on the fly. But he decided to nitpick and say that I “chang[ed] my story from year to year and at times from day to day.”

No. What happened is he’d talk to me when I was without my computer. I’d then go and look at my computer and phone him back with what the documents supported.

And what those documents showed was that I had the Farmers on the record in early drafts of my 2003 article (contrary to what Carter claimed—he said I was late); that those allegations were supported by others (contrary to what Carter claimed); that I was right to believe the Farmers over Epstein (Carter believed Epstein over the Farmers); that editors at Vanity Fair did email that Carter needed to see the 2011 blog prior to publication (he said he never read it); and that changes were made to the blog—with the critical changes of the deletion of the Farmers’ allegations and the insertion of the word “I” by someone other than myself.

I sent all this to Chotiner, most of it after he spoke to Carter who had made his assertion the Farmers were not in my first draft. Chotiner told me he believed he had gotten his story wrong, because an email I showed his fact-checker conflicted with that. Chotiner then castigated me for not previously sending over all my numerous emails from 2002. How was I supposed to know, in advance, what Carter would claim about my reporting? I was bewildered, and I knew Chotiner could not possibly have the right facts. Chotiner then asked me to send over all the records that I had.

So I spent an entire weekend and several nights going through old email records and transcripts, trying to piece together from hundreds of old records exactly what the facts said.

As I was undertaking that journey, I occasionally wondered aloud to Chotiner, via email and phone, if there was Possibility A or B in some cases. I was trying, openly, to get to the actual facts for him—a really time-consuming effort for me, but one I thought was important—and yet he turned around and completely mischaracterized that effort as me being inconsistent. I think that is dishonest.

• Vicky Ward Investigates, What the New Yorker Got Wrong, Vicky Ward

 

Washington Post, NFL tells Congress that Commanders are blocking access to documents from workplace probe, Mark Maske and Nicki Jhabvala, Feb. 11, 2022 (print ed.). The NFL told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform in a letter that the Washington Commanders, not the league, are impeding the committee’s access to many documents related to the investigation of the team’s workplace, another sign of increasing tension between the team and league over the handling of the probe.

The letter — dated Wednesday and sent to Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), right, the committee’s chairwoman, and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) — reiterates the league’s assertion that “[d]ecisions related to the findings of the investigation have been made by the NFL, not the team.” The NFL also defended its decision to have attorney Beth Wilkinson, who conducted the investigation, submit only oral findings to the league rather than a written report.

The NFL said that it entered into a “common interest agreement” with the team to avoid having to restart the investigation after taking over the probe from the team. And as the committee now seeks information related to Wilkinson’s investigation, the league wrote that the team is responsible for blocking access to more than 100,000 documents.

In sharp rebuke, NFL plans independent probe of sexual misconduct allegations against Daniel Snyder

The NFL sought approximately 109,000 team documents related to the investigation that were previously shared with Wilkinson’s firm, Wilkinson Stekloff, and are in the possession of a third-party vendor, the league’s attorneys wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

“That vendor refused to provide the NFL or even Wilkinson Stekloff with access to the documents unless the team consented because of its concern that it could be sued by the team or its owner," the attorneys wrote. "The NFL promptly directed the team to provide its consent to the vendor, but the team repeatedly has refused to do so.”

The team denied the allegation.

 

Press Run, Commentary: How Trump gets away with shredding everything, Eric Boehlert, right, Feb. 11, 2022. The consummate bully. We just witnessed another textbook example this week of how Trump gets away with bending rules in his favor, and without having to pay a price from the press or the Beltway establishment.

It’s maddening to watch and it highlights just how unprepared D.C. institutions still are in terms of dealing with an unapologetic authoritarian like Trump who, through his entire adult life, has always assumed rules do not apply to him. And they clearly do not.

The media continue to normalize his criminality, in this case absconding from the White House with classified documents as he readies another presidential run. (And shredding other docs.) It’s the same D.C. press corps that crucified Hillary Clinton for years simply because journalists thought her email story might have a hint of criminality to it. It never did.

What Trump has done since he first arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 2017 was shred longstanding Beltway protocols; traditions that for decades and sometimes centuries were based on a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on the proper way to behave and the ethical course that should be followed while running the government. The consummate bully and liar, Trump didn’t care about any of those rules and began obliterating them immediately. He flooded the zone with crass, outlandish and destructive behavior, which the press tried to keep pace with the first. Shattering Beltway protocols used to carry a penalty, which was handed out by the press.

Eventually, as the years passed, news outlets mostly gave up, especially with the day-to-day transgressions, adopting a Trump-being-Trump view of his chronic rule breaking. Beltway institutions, particularly within the federal government, embraced the same mealy-mouthed approach, which gave Trump the okay to trample norms. “He didn’t think the rules applied to him,” a former White House aide told CNN this week. And he was right.

That’s why he packed up 15 boxes of presidential documents, some of them marked “top secret,” and shipped them off to Mar-a-lago, even though all the contents should have been sent to the National Archives, because the Presidential Records Act requires that all records created by presidents be turned over at the end of their administrations. Previously, Trump spent years destroying presidential documents, which is not allowed by law.

The whole story revolved around “the Trump administration flagrantly violating federal law by removing and destroying protected federal records,” as Media Matters noted. But that’s not how it got played in the press this week.

The Washington Post, which broke the 15-boxes story on Monday, politely carried spin from unnamed Trump advisers saying there had been no “nefarious intent” in keeping the batch of documents, some of which the January 6 committee want as part of its insurrection investigation. Instead, there had been a “frenzied packing process” in the wake of Trump’s defeat, the Post explained.

The newspaper actually granted anonymity to a “former Trump White House official,” so he or she could be quoted as saying that Trump packing up the 15 boxes was just an honest mistake by a man who would never consider breaking the rules — the same Trump who told more than 20,000 lies while in office.

Following up the Post’s credulous reporting, the New York Times managed to be equally obsequious, as it typed up the same spin from the same former Trump officials. Shorter Times: Nothing to see here folks, it was all just a misunderstanding.

Feb. 9

 

Trucks are backed up Monday on both sides of the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit (Photo by Daniel Mears via Associated Press).

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary, Anti-vaxxers are the vanguard of the global fascist movement, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 21 books, including the recent The Rise of the Fascist Fourth Reich: The Era of Trumpism and the Far Right (shown below) and former Navy intelligence officer, Feb. 9, 2022.

The anti-vaxxer truckers' "FREEDOM CONVOY" siege of the Canadian capital of Ottawa and other Canadian cities finally exposed what the entire anti-Covid vaccination movement is all about: providing a cause to united and rally fascists around the world in a multi-pronged attempt to overthrow by force democratically-elected governments.

Opposition to public health requirements during the pandemic was used by fascists the world over to create political instability. First, the fascists opposed lock downs, mandatory masking, and safe distancing prior to a vaccine being fielded to the general population.

In August and September 2020, white supremacist militiamen with the Wolverine Watchmen attempted to storm the Michigan legislature in Lansing, kidnap Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, below right, from her vacation home, assassinate Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, and kill as many Democratic legislators and Michigan State Police officers as possible.

This act followed the April siege of the Michigan legislature by armed protesters opposed to state lock down orders. Similar sieges of state Capitols by anti-vaxxers and the violence-prone far-right took place in Richmond, Virginia; Columbus, Ohio; Atlanta, Georgia; Denver, Colorado; Salem, Oregon; Olympia, Washington; and Salt Lake City, Utah.

The "LIBERATE MICHIGAN" siege would serve as a template for future political disruption, including the January 6, 2021 siege of the U.S. Capitol to prevent the certification of the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The weaponization of lunacy with the rise of conspiracy cults like Qanon and the anti-vaxx cause fed directly into the unsuccessful attempt later in 2021 to recall California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. In these and other political actions, the not-so-hidden hands of Russian, other Eastern European, Israeli, and domestic U.S. "bot farms" and "boiler rooms" were at play in stirring up the far-right on social media platforms, including Facebook, Gab, Instagram, Telegram, and Twitter.

Feb. 8

Washington Post, Peter Thiel to exit Facebook’s board to focus on 2022 midterms, Elizabeth Dwoskin and Michael Scherer, Feb. 8, 2022 (print ed.). Thiel, who backed Trump in his 2016 bid for the presidency, will support two close associates running for Senate.

Longtime investor and board member Peter Thiel (shown in a Noel St. John photo) plans not to seek reelection to Facebook’s board this year, the company announced Monday, ending his tenure as one of the company’s longest-serving board members at a moment of tumult for the social media giant.

Thiel, a right-leaning billionaire and Trump supporter who has also been a close adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, plans to focus his energies on the 2022 midterm elections, according to a person familiar with his thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters. Thiel is supporting two close associates, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, who are running for Senate seats in Ohio and Arizona, respectively. Thiel sees the midterms as a critical moment for the country, the person said, and he is backing a slate of candidates who are allies of former president Donald Trump.

“Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he has done for our company — from believing in us when few others would, to teaching me so many lessons about business, economics, and the world,” Zuckerberg said in a news release.

New York Times, Opinion: Requiem for a Liberal Giant,  Michelle Goldberg, right, Feb. 8, 2022 (print ed.). There’s an indelible scene in Todd Gitlin’s 1987 book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, in which he and other leaders of Students for a Democratic Society — the leading organization of what was called the New Left — meet with old guard democratic socialists from the journal Dissent.

It was the early 1960s (1963, according to Gitlin, 1962, according to Howe). The young activists, with their romantic enthusiasm for revolutions in the developing world, strike the older socialists as feckless and naïve. The socialists seem, to young men who feel themselves on the brink of a radical breakthrough, resigned to their own irrelevance.

But there would be no revolution in the U.S., unless you count the right-wing one that would sweep much of the New Deal away. By the end of the 1960s S.D.S. would implode; the giddily nihilistic Weathermen spun off and became terrorists, albeit mostly ineffectual ones.

A remarkable thing about Gitlin, who died this weekend at 79, was that he never stopped trying to forge that link. The president of S.D.S. in 1963 and 1964, Gitlin eventually became a renowned professor of sociology. He was also a critic, a novelist and a poet — and, to the end, an activist.

I spoke to him many times about the failings of various parts of the left, which became one of his great subjects, but I don’t recall him ever seeming embittered. Some people, disenchanted by the left, make a whole politics out of that disenchantment. But Gitlin’s broad ideals remained consistent, even if his onetime radicalism was chastened by experience. He threw himself into the fight to get universities to divest from fossil fuel corporations. He was excited by Occupy Wall Street and by the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

Something I learned from Gitlin and never forgot was that in 1968, when a majority of Americans had turned against the war in Vietnam, “the antiwar movement was detested still more — the most hated political group in America, disliked even by most of the people who supported immediate withdrawal.”

The Sixties ends with a quote from Rabbi Tarfon, who lived around the first century A.D.: “It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up.” Gitlin never did.

 

Democratic 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, testified for 13 hours before a Republican led House Committee investigating deaths at a State Department facility in the Libyan city of Benhazi. There was never a strong basis for the repeated congressional hearings attacking her since it was Congress that had cut back on funding for defense of State Department facilities and no one could have reasonably expected a Secretary of State, as opposed to military commanders and CIA in the region, to have saved the four American victims from the surprise terrorist attack (CNN screenshot on Oct. 22, 2015).

Palmer Report, Opinion: The media is STILL massively downplaying Donald Trump’s criminal liability, Bill Palmer, Feb. 8, 2022. When it was revealed during the 2016 election cycle that Hillary Clinton had been using a private email server during her time as Secretary of State, the entire mainstream media – left, right, and center – treated it as a national security breach and a criminal scandal. The media spent the entire election cycle implying and often outright insisting that Clinton would end up criminally indicted over her email, even though it was fairly clear from the start that she hadn’t broken any laws.

In fact the media’s coverage of the “Hillary email scandal” – which ended up not even being a scandal once the facts came out – serves as Exhibit A of how the media can collectively lose its mind and resort to fictional coverage of an imaginary scandal in the name of chasing ratings. We’ve long held up the email debacle as an example of everything that’s gone wrong with the media over the past several years, and everything that needs to change.

What’s always been remarkable is that, even as it gradually became more clear that Donald Trump was going to face serious criminal trouble if he lost reelection, the media still had little to no interest in acknowledging as much. When the Manhattan District Attorney’s office went all the way to the Supreme Court to get then-president Trump’s tax returns, it meant he was likely going to end up indicted if he lost, but the media ignored this. The DA’s office has since expanded its criminal probe into Trump and has an active grand jury, but the media mostly ignores this too. The Fulton County DA has a special grand jury and clearly intends to indict Trump, but the media only covers that story briefly and occasionally. And even as more breadcrumbs emerge to suggest that the DOJ may indeed be targeting Trump, the media ignores these breadcrumbs and claims to know that the DOJ is not investigating Trump (even though it can’t possibly know that).

There’s a reason the media almost uniformly refuses to admit that Trump is on track for prison, and it’s the exact same reason the media spent 2016 uniformly pretending Hillary Clinton was on track for prison. It’s not any sort of partisan bias. It’s not an attempt at helping one candidate or hurting the other. It’s simply about the one thing it’s always about: ratings.

The media had no idea how it was going to get ratings out of what would have been a non-competitive Hillary Clinton blowout victory in 2016. So it latched onto her imaginary email scandal, hyped it as if it were some kind of criminal scandal, and managed to get ratings out of it every single day of the election cycle. All it had to do was lie about the nature of the scandal – which the media has disturbingly comfortable doing over the past decade, as everything has become about ratings.

Similarly, once Trump was bounced from office and banned from Twitter, the media lost its ability to get automatic daily ratings by merely obsessing over his ludicrous words that day. So instead the media spent 2021 pretending that Trump was on the verge of some kind of whirlwind comeback and was a lock to take over the country in 2024. Ratings plummeted anyway, perhaps a testament to how few among the public were willing to fall for this baseless nonsense about a Trump comeback. But even as it’s become crystal clear that Trump is on track for indictment in at least two jurisdictions, the media – on the left and right – has still largely been sticking with its “Trump 2024” narrative.

Now the media is facing a potential breaking point. The updates from the Fulton County criminal probe are becoming more frequent, and they keep getting worse for Trump. The January 6th Committee is making clear that it’ll refer Trump for federal criminal prosecution, which will have a strong chance of pushing the DOJ into indicting Trump whether it was already planning to or not. The media may soon have to abandon the fictional “Trump 2024” narrative, simply because no one will believe it anymore, in favor of an honest narrative about Trump being on a path to prison.

Fittingly, even as the media faces this breaking point, we’re all now learning that Donald Trump illegally took crucial presidential records when he left the White House, and stashed them in his private Mar-a-Lago residence. This isn’t merely a violation of the Presidential Records Act. Given that Trump surely knew investigators would come looking for the kinds of records he stole, such as his suspicious private communications with Kim Jong-Un, Trump may have also committed felony obstruction of justice.

So now we have a story about Trump illegally mishandling government communications, in an attempt at hiding those communications from the public record. This is exactly what the media spent the entire 2016 election cycle falsely accusing Hillary Clinton of having done. You’d think the media would cover this Trump scandal in the same manner, right?

Well, in a word, no. The New York Times, which broke the story, has gone out of its way to characterize Trump’s actions as “improper,” not illegal. Sure, the story acknowledges that Trump violated the Presidential Records Act. But the Times goes out of its way to avoid acknowledging the fact that Trump’s violation of this particular law is indeed a crime. That’s remarkable given that this same New York Times once published an article that was so aggressive in falsely accusing Hillary Clinton of criminal behavior with her emails, the Times ended up having to publish two different sets of retractions just to walk it all back.

It’s not just the New York Times. MSNBC’s Morning Joe is also painting Trump’s stolen records scandal as mere weird behavior on the part of a “weird” man, instead of acknowledging that it’s a criminal scandal that could result in Trump’s prosecution. What we’re seeing is yet another attempt by the media at pretending Trump isn’t actually facing any criminal trouble, so that it can continue to milk the “Trump 2024” nonsense for ratings a bit longer. After all, if the public figures out that Trump is on track for prison, it’s not going to stay glued to scary news coverage about how Trump is somehow going to take over the country.

It’s not as if people aren’t noticing how dishonest the media is being with these stories. The words “improperly” and “illegally” have been among the top trends on Twitter today, because just that many people have been calling out the media for continuing to massively downplay Donald Trump’s criminal liability. Of course if the media isn’t the real world, neither is Twitter. When the media collectively decides to push ratings-driven false narratives, it’s only forced to change its mind when audiences at large begin to see through it.

So if you want this kind of behavior by the media to stop, and you want the media to shift into a more honest gear, you’ll have to get out and push, so to speak. Your job as a political activist is to not only educate yourself on what’s factually goin on, but to also educate those around you so that they’re not prone to falling for the media’s ratings-driven false narratives. When the media sees that a given narrative isn’t working anymore, it’ll shift to a new one. And if we can make sure that audiences are sufficiently educated on what’s really going on, the media will inevitably conclude that it has to stick to honest narratives if it indeed wants to hit its ratings marks.

Feb. 6

New York Times, Joe Rogan Apologizes for ‘Shameful’ Past Use of Racial Slur, Ben Sisario, Feb. 6, 2022 (print ed.). His apology came as listeners said that as many as 70 episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast had been quietly taken off Spotify; the company has yet to comment on the reported removals.

As pressure has intensified on Spotify and Joe Rogan, its star podcaster, listeners reported that the company had quietly removed dozens of episodes of his show, while Rogan apologized early Saturday for his use of a racial slur in past episodes.

In an Instagram video, Rogan — whose talk show, “The Joe Rogan Experience,” is Spotify’s most popular podcast, and has been available there exclusively for more than a year — addressed what he called “the most regretful and shameful thing that I’ve ever had to talk about publicly.” A compilation video showed Rogan using the slur numerous times in past episodes of his show; it had been shared by the singer India.Arie, who removed her catalog from Spotify in protest of what she called Rogan’s “language around race.”

Rogan said the compilation was drawn from “12 years of conversations” on his show, and that it looked “horrible, even to me.” The clips, he said, had been taken out of context, which he said included discussions about how it had been used by comedians like Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx, who were Black, and Lenny Bruce, who was white. Rogan said he has not spoken the slur “in years.”

When posting the clip compilation, Arie said that Rogan “shouldn’t even be uttering the word. Don’t say it, under any context.” This week, Arie joined a small but influential boycott of Spotify led by the musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, who had cited complaints by health professionals that guests on Rogan’s show had spread misinformation about the coronavirus.

Rogan, a comedian and sports commentator, began his show in 2009 and built a huge following on YouTube before signing an exclusive licensing deal with Spotify in 2020, for a reported $100 million or more. According to the website JRE Missing, which tracks the show, a total of 113 episodes — out of more than 1,700 since the podcast began — have been removed from Spotify since Rogan’s show became an exclusive offering there.

Since Young called for his music to be removed from Spotify on Jan. 24, the company has come under growing pressure from musicians and other podcasters over Rogan’s show; the dispute has also resurfaced musicians’ longstanding complaints over low royalty payments.

Spotify responded by publishing its content policies and said that Rogan must abide by them. But Daniel Ek, right, the company’s chief executives, has resisted calls to drop Rogan, and also pushed back against arguments that Spotify acts as Rogan’s publisher, saying that Spotify is rather a “platform” that lacks any advance editorial control over Rogan’s show.

“We are still learning things the government covered up.”

Washington Post, Perspective: I’m disgusted by Joe Rogan’s weak apology. My former colleague’s death at 47 makes it worse, Margaret Sullivan, Feb. 6, 2022. People are dying because of covid misinformation that Spotify packages as glib podcast fodder.

What I didn’t hear from Rogan was any remorse that he might have done harm when he held forth about his own bogus belief that healthy young people don’t need to get vaccinated, or when he failed to challenge a guest who promised that the drug ivermectin would extinguish the virus altogether or when he allowed another guest to spout theories about how Americans are essentially being hypnotized about covid by the media, and comparing the situation to Nazi Germany.

He didn’t address the 270 medical professionals whose powerful open letter warned, about one of Rogan’s episodes, that “mass-misinformation events of this scale have extraordinarily dangerous ramifications.”

New York Times, Where Fox News and Donald Trump Took Us, Jeremy W. Peters, right, Feb. 6, 2022 (print ed.). Roger Ailes understood the appeal Mr. Trump had for Fox viewers. He didn’t foresee how together they would redefine the limits of political discourse.

When Roger Ailes ran CNBC in the mid-1990s, he gave himself a talk show called “Straight Forward.” It long ago vanished into the void of canceled cable programs and never received much attention after the network boss moved on to produce more provocative and polarizing content as chairman of Fox News. But “Straight Forward” was a fascinating window into what kind of people Mr. Ailes considered stars.

Donald Trump was one of them. In late 1995, Mr. Ailes invited Mr. Trump, then a 49-year-old developer of condos and casinos, on the show and sounded a bit star-struck as he asked his guest to explain how a Manhattan multimillionaire could be so popular with blue-collar Americans.

“The guy on the street, the cabdrivers, the guys working on the road crews go, ‘Hey, Donald! How’s it going?’” Mr. Ailes observed while the two men sat in front of a wood-paneled set piece that gave the studio the appearance of an elegant den in an Upper East Side apartment. “It’s almost like they feel very comfortable with you, like you’re one of them. And I’ve never quite figured out how you bridge that.”

Mr. Trump answered by flipping his host’s assertion around. It was because of who hated him: other people with money. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people. It’s a funny thing. They can’t stand me,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I sort of love it.”

What Mr. Ailes sensed about Mr. Trump’s popularity with middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s would stay with him, because he identified with it. “A lot of what we do at Fox is blue collar stuff,” he said in 2011.

His understanding of those dynamics helped shape the coverage he directed for decades and led to an embrace of grievance-oriented political rhetoric that the Republican Party, and a further fragmented right-wing media landscape, is grappling with as it looks toward elections this fall and the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to politics.

Mr. Ailes was eventually ousted from Fox after several women at the network came forward to say he had sexually harassed them. But before that, his intuition about what audiences wanted — and what advertisers would pay for — helped Fox News smash ratings records for cable news. He could rouse the viewer’s patriotic impulses, mine their darkest fears and confirm their wildest delusions. Its coverage of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, often laced with baseless speculation about his past, helped propel the network in 2008 to the highest ratings it had ever recorded in its 12 years of existence. Mr. Ailes earned $19 million that year.

As he looked to assemble a dynamic cast of right-wing media stars to channel the rage and resentment of the budding Tea Party insurgency, Mr. Ailes’s instincts pushed Fox News ratings even higher.

Jeremy W. Peters, who covers politics and the media for The Times, is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” from which this article is adapted.

The photo above portrays a 2022 book burning by conservative zealots in Nashville, Tennessee (Photo by Tyler Salinas).

WMR's Hollywood, Film-Politics Commentary: Filmdom on book burning, Wayne Madsen, Feb. 5, 2022. With the current fascist Republican spate of book burning and banning across the country, it is instructive to re-discover how Hollywood has treated the subject. The Nazi book burning in Germany in the 1930s and America's Victorian value system in dealing with controversial book titles has made a definite impact on the films produced over the years by the motion picture industry.

The 1966 film "Fahrenheit 451," based on Ray Bradbury's eponymously titled novel about a dystopian future where books are banned, co-stars Austrian-born actor Oskar Werner, who plays Guy Montag. Known as a "fireman," Montag has the duty to burn books, which auto-ignite at the temperature of 451 degrees. "Fahrenheit 451," the first color film by director François Truffaut, also starred Julie Christie and Cyril Cusack.

Both in real life and in movies, Werner dealt with Nazi totalitarian events.

Feb. 5

Dr. Cyril Wecht was the first non-governmental forensic pathologist to gain access to the National Archives to examine the assassination materials on JFK in 1972. He discovered that Kennedy's brain was missing as well as many shocking lapses in the official probe into his death. NY Post photo composite

New York Post, JFK assassination expert: Lee Harvey Oswald lone gunman theory is ‘bulls–t,’ Heather Robinson, Feb. 5, 2022. Dr. Cyril Wecht was the first non-governmental forensic pathologist to gain access to the National Archives to examine the assassination materials on JFK in 1972. He discovered that Kennedy’s brain was missing as well as many shocking lapses in the official probe into his death.

Dr. Cyril Wecht distrusts the US government. And he’s proud of it.

The forensic pathologist — who declared in 1978 that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy — is now 90 and still sticking to his story.

Wecht’s latest book, The JFK Assassination Dissected (Exposit Books), summarizes his six decades of research into the subject, and pokes holes in the conclusion made by the seven-man Warren Commission that Oswald, without any help, shot and killed Kennedy when his motorcade drove past the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

“Young people are still being taught that the 35th president was murdered by a lone gunman, and that is simply bulls–t,” Wecht boomed during an interview at his modest office in downtown Pittsburgh last month.

Nearly 60 years ago, the commission concluded that Oswald killed Kennedy because he was a disaffected, profoundly maladjusted loner with communist sympathies. But Wecht still believes the shooter may have been a hired gun committing murder for the CIA.

Oswald “had almost certainly been a CIA agent of some kind,” says Wecht, but the directive to kill may have come from higher up. Allen Dulles, director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961, had overseen the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and had reason to be disgruntled. Dulles also ended up in prime position to participate in a coverup, Wecht conjectured.

“Kennedy had fired Allen Dulles because he was really pissed off about what the CIA was doing,” said Wecht. “Then who gets appointed to the Warren Commission? Dulles. It stinks to high heaven.”

Tanned, vigorous and dressed sharply in a black jacket and red necktie, Wecht said he wrote his book now for the sake of the truth — and his advancing age.

“I don’t intend to live forever, just for a long time,” said Wecht, who has a wife, Sigrid Wecht, and four children. “I felt I wanted to lay out all the things I’ve experienced and done and the people I’ve met, and it was time. I’ve been working on the book for six years.”

The former coroner of Allegheny County, Pa., Wecht is both a trained lawyer and doctor who has conducted more than 17,000 autopsies and also provided expert testimony on high-profile cases including the deaths of Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Elvis Presley, JonBenet Ramsey and Laci Peterson.

The first non-governmental forensic pathologist to gain access to the National Archives to examine the assassination materials in 1972, Wecht discovered and exposed the ghastly fact that the 35th president’s brain had vanished.

“As we sit and talk today, the president’s brain remains missing. Unaccounted for,” he said.

Interest in the assassination — and speculation about a conspiracy — has simmered for decades, gaining steam after Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK” disputed the belief that Oswald acted alone. (Wecht consulted on Stone’s film and dedicated a chapter to his experience on the movie set. Stone, in turn, wrote the book’s foreword).

In 1992, after a public outcry, Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act requiring release of all JFK assassination files by 2017. The deadline has come and gone with US presidents citing national security concerns Biden has scheduled release of the final documents for December 2022.

Wecht is dubious that all the relevant documents will be released but predicts that if they are, it could be revelatory.

“There might be something supporting more than one gunman, evidence of witness manipulation, or failure to call key witnesses,” he said.

In the decades since the assassination, most Americans have continued to believe that Oswald did not act alone. In 1976, one year after the public release of the Zapruder film, a 1963 home movie made by Dallas clothier Abraham Zapruder capturing the moment JFK was shot, 81 percent said they believed more than one gunman was involved.

By 2017, that figure was still high at 60 percent.

‘Young people are still being taught the 35th president was murdered by a lone gunman. That is simply bulls–t.’

Wecht’s book contains never-before published details of his meetings with Oswald’s widow, Marina, left, who, although unhappily married to Oswald, validated her husband’s claim that he was “just a patsy,” as well as of Wecht’s meeting with George de Mohrenschildt, a shadowy CIA-connected figure who befriended the Oswalds prior to the assassination and, before committing suicide himself in 1977, corroborated Marina’s assessment of Oswald as a fall guy.

The book describes the defection of Oswald, a trained marksman, Marine, and fluent Russian speaker, to the USSR for two-and-a-half years, and his trouble-free return to the US with bride Marina, niece of a high-ranking KGB officer, at the height of the Cold War. (The implication is that Oswald had friends in high places).

After a 10-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald fired three times. One shot missed, another hit Kennedy in the back, and the third hit him in the head. Rather than explain the sequence of the hits, the commission presented three slightly different scenarios, but each scenario ended with the conclusion that just one gunman killed the president.

In 1978, Wecht, as a member of the forensic pathology panel assembled by the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), testified in favor of a second gunman. He was the lone dissenter.

“I really stood alone,” he said.

For one, the gunshot wound in Kennedy’s back — which the Warren Commission said had an upward trajectory — couldn’t have been caused by Oswald as the sole assassin firing from above, Wecht said.

“Under the single bullet theory, Oswald is the sole assassin, he’s firing from the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository building, so the bullet is moving from up, downward, right? So how the hell could it go upward?”

Wecht believes an additional shot, from a second gunman, was “fired from the front, behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll” and that “two bullets hit Kennedy . . . one from the rear, one from the front.”

He also recounts that the chief medical examiner for the Dallas Coroner’s office, Dr. Earl Rose, whose office was located at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas where JFK received treatment and died, was manhandled by the Secret Service to prevent him from conducting the autopsy.

“The agent . . . put his arms under Rose’s armpits, lifted him into the air, and set him down gently against a wall. It wasn’t an action designed to hurt Dr. Rose but to show him who was boss,” Wecht writes.

“They swore, they put Dr. Rose up against the wall,” he added.

Instead, JFK’s corpse was flown to Washington, DC, where an autopsy was done by two physicians, neither of whom was board certified in forensic pathology, and neither of whom “had ever done a gunshot wound autopsy in their entire careers,” he said.

The autopsy materials, “including clothing, X-rays, bullet,” “amazingly, belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy,” who donated them to the National Archives in Washington, DC, with the proviso that nobody could see those effects for 75 years, except that after five years, a “recognized expert in the field of pathology with a serious historic purpose” could apply to examine them, Wecht said.

Wecht fought to fill that slot and was given permission to conduct the probe in 1972. That’s when he discovered that JFK’s brain, despite being listed in the inventory of assassination materials, was “no longer available.”

“If they had dissected the brain, they would’ve seen there were two bullets that hit Kennedy in the brain, one from the rear, and one from the front,” said Wecht. His theory that the president was hit in the head twice is “based on witness testimony, the Zapruder film, and medical evidence.”

Critics argue that professionals like Wecht questioning the Warren Commission’s findings have contributed to a general erosion of trust in authority and spawned an industry of conspiracy-theorizing, prompting potentially harmful doubts about everything from vaccines to elections.

But Wecht doesn’t mind the term “conspiracy theorist.”

“I am amused by the audacity and hypocrisy of people calling me a conspiratorialist,” he said. “I have always had a majority of Americans on my side. How many things are there that maintain a majority consensus?

“Go back and talk with older people, before Watergate and Vietnam,” he says. “Pretty much what the government said, that was it, you did not question.

“Go back and talk with older people, before Watergate and Vietnam,” he says. “Pretty much what the government said, that was it, you did not question.

“We are still learning things the government covered up.”

New York Times, Where Fox News and Donald Trump Took Us, Jeremy W. Peters, Feb. 5, 2022. Roger Ailes understood the appeal Mr. Trump had for Fox viewers. He didn’t foresee how together they would redefine the limits of political discourse.

When Roger Ailes ran CNBC in the mid-1990s, he gave himself a talk show called “Straight Forward.” It long ago vanished into the void of canceled cable programs and never received much attention after the network boss moved on to produce more provocative and polarizing content as chairman of Fox News. But “Straight Forward” was a fascinating window into what kind of people Mr. Ailes considered stars.

Donald Trump was one of them. In late 1995, Mr. Ailes invited Mr. Trump, then a 49-year-old developer of condos and casinos, on the show and sounded a bit star-struck as he asked his guest to explain how a Manhattan multimillionaire could be so popular with blue-collar Americans.

“The guy on the street, the cabdrivers, the guys working on the road crews go, ‘Hey, Donald! How’s it going?’” Mr. Ailes observed while the two men sat in front of a wood-paneled set piece that gave the studio the appearance of an elegant den in an Upper East Side apartment. “It’s almost like they feel very comfortable with you, like you’re one of them. And I’ve never quite figured out how you bridge that.”

Mr. Trump answered by flipping his host’s assertion around. It was because of who hated him: other people with money. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people. It’s a funny thing. They can’t stand me,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I sort of love it.”

What Mr. Ailes sensed about Mr. Trump’s popularity with middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s would stay with him, because he identified with it. “A lot of what we do at Fox is blue collar stuff,” he said in 2011.

His understanding of those dynamics helped shape the coverage he directed for decades and led to an embrace of grievance-oriented political rhetoric that the Republican Party, and a further fragmented right-wing media landscape, is grappling with as it looks toward elections this fall and the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to politics.

Mr. Ailes was eventually ousted from Fox after several women at the network came forward to say he had sexually harassed them. But before that, his intuition about what audiences wanted — and what advertisers would pay for — helped Fox News smash ratings records for cable news. He could rouse the viewer’s patriotic impulses, mine their darkest fears and confirm their wildest delusions. Its coverage of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, often laced with baseless speculation about his past, helped propel the network in 2008 to the highest ratings it had ever recorded in its 12 years of existence. Mr. Ailes earned $19 million that year.

As he looked to assemble a dynamic cast of right-wing media stars to channel the rage and resentment of the budding Tea Party insurgency, Mr. Ailes’s instincts pushed Fox News ratings even higher.

Jeremy W. Peters, who covers politics and the media for The Times, is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” from which this article is adapted.

New York Times, Guest Essay: The Jeff Zucker Mess Isn’t Some Mere Office Romance, Joanne Lipman and Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, Feb. 5, 2022 (print ed.). Ms. Lipman is the author of “That’s What She Said: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together.” Mr. Sonnenfeld is a professor at the Yale School of Management.

The headlines about the resignation of CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker, above, over his romantic relationship with a colleague, are electrifying CNN’s defenders and antagonists alike, and fueling endless speculation about possible corporate power plays behind the scenes. For those, like us, who have been writing for years about men, women and the workplace, this unfolding scandal also points out how difficult it is to regulate office romance and how unevenly corporate policies around consensual relationships are enforced.

Mr. Zucker’s relationship with Allison Gollust, CNN’s head of marketing, was, by many accounts, an open secret in the media world. It was also an explosive secret. Under WarnerMedia’s ownership of CNN, Ms. Gollust reported to Mr. Zucker in her marketing role but not as head of communications. As Mr. Zucker acknowledged in a memo to his colleagues, “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t.”

What’s so baffling is, why not disclose it? Both are divorced and the relationship is consensual. Had they been transparent, it’s possible that Mr. Zucker, CNN and its parent company could have dealt with this without precipitating a crisis. What’s more, if rumors were swirling internally that Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust were violating company policy, why didn’t the bosses at WarnerMedia investigate earlier? This is an unforced error by CNN, causing confusion and anger among some staff members.

There is some speculation that Mr. Zucker’s office-romance resignation is simply a cover story to allow the company to get rid of him before WarnerMedia’s planned merger with Discovery later this year. CNN is facing likely litigation surrounding its firing of Chris Cuomo for aiding his brother, the embattled former New York governor. Meanwhile, John Malone, the chair of a firm that owns a major stake in Discovery, has publicly criticized CNN’s programming under Mr. Zucker’s leadership.

Whatever the boardroom drama, this is yet another chapter in the tortured history of companies’ bungled attempts at dealing with office romance. The rules are all over the place. Enforcement is inconsistent. This isn’t just an issue for chief executives. A 2021 survey for the Society for Human Resource Management found that more than a third of Americans have had or currently have a workplace relationship, and the majority of them did not disclose it to their superiors. Offices romances have turned into enduring partnerships for prominent figures from Michelle and Barack Obama to Tina Brown and Harry Evans and on a less happy note, Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates.

Yet companies still haven’t figured out how to navigate these waters. The #MeToo movement shined a light on the egregious cases of male bosses preying on subordinate women, leading to the firings or resignations of dozens of prominent men. Other men in power have been forced out for consensual relationships that they concealed, including McDonald’s former chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, in 2019 and Intel’s former chief executive, Brian Krzanich, in 2018.

There is no consensus in corporate America, however, about what is considered acceptable.

Feb. 4

 

 

In one scene from the Capitol riot, an Arkansas man, Peter Francis Stager (shown at center in a screengrab, the man with a beard and holding a flag), was arrested last week on charges of beating a Capitol Hill policeman being stomped by the mob.

 

Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and former President Trump (file photos).

New York Times, G.O.P. Declares Jan. 6 Attack ‘Legitimate Political Discourse,’ Jonathan Weisman and Reid J. Epstein, Feb. 4, 2022. The moves were an extraordinary statement about the attack, in which Trump supporters stormed the complex, brutalized officers and sent lawmakers into hiding.

The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.

The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.

On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”

After the vote, party leaders rushed to clarify that language, saying it was never meant to apply to rioters who violently stormed the Capitol in Mr. Trump’s name.

“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said in a statement. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”

But the censure, which was carefully negotiated in private among party members, made no such distinction. It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable.

It came days after Mr. Trump suggested that, if re-elected in 2024, he would consider pardons for those convicted in the Jan. 6 attack and for the first time described his goal as aiming to “overturn” the election results.

The day’s events, which were supposed to be about unity, only served to divide Republicans as their leaders try to focus attention on what they call the failings of the Biden administration.

Washington Post, Opinion: Jeff Zucker’s legacy is defined by his promotion of Donald Trump, Margaret Sullivan, right, Feb. 4, 2022 (print ed.). After his shocking exit from CNN, the TV executive's legacy will come into focus. And his most fateful decision will be the attention given to Donald Trump and its lasting fallout.

Many questions still swirl around Wednesday’s startling announcement that, after nine years, Jeff Zucker’s reign as CNN president was over.

Was his ouster really all about his failure to disclose to his corporate bosses a consensual relationship with another top network executive? How much of a factor was the continuing mess over former host Chris Cuomo’s firing in December? To what extent were the network’s flagging ratings part of the calculation?

It will all eventually be revealed — teams of reporters are racing to dig into one of the biggest media stories in recent memory. But we already know one thing: When the dust settles, Zucker’s relationship with Donald Trump will define his legacy.

Zucker, as much as any other person in the world, created and burnished the Trump persona — first as a reality-TV star who morphed into a worldwide celebrity, then as a candidate for president who was given large amounts of free publicity.

The through line? Nothing nobler than TV ratings, which always were Zucker’s guiding light, his be-all and end-all and, ultimately, his fatal flaw.

Two decades ago, as an NBC executive searching for a way to goose the floundering network’s popularity, he gave the green light to a reality show, “The Apprentice,” featuring a flashy mogul whose soon-to-be-famous tagline was “You’re fired.” Trump had a checkered history of bankruptcies, racism and failed real estate projects, but his confident bluster made him a natural on television.

“The show was built as a virtually nonstop advertisement for the Trump empire and lifestyle,” Washington Post journalists Marc Fisher and Michael Kranish wrote in their 2016 book, “Trump Revealed.” The stunning rise of Donald Trump had begun.

Zucker created Trump the TV sensation, which was the necessary foundation for Trump the candidate. Years later, after moving from NBC to CNN, Zucker recollected very well that Trump was a self-proclaimed “ratings machine” — a rare instance of Trumpian truth-telling.

Washington Post, After Zucker’s ouster, CNN staffers raise questions about a Cuomo connection, Jeremy Barr, Feb. 4, 2022 (print ed.). News stars loyal to the CNN president are frustrated that his resignation was triggered by a looming legal showdown with the scandal-plagued former anchor.

Jeff Zucker’s surprise ouster Wednesday left CNN with a leadership void and an irresistible mystery: How did a personnel investigation into Chris Cuomo, the network’s scandal-plagued former prime-time host, also end up toppling its president?

In staff meetings Wednesday night and Thursday, employees pelted CNN’s remaining leadership with questions, many openly skeptical of the bare-bones account the company has so far given: that Zucker resigned after his romantic relationship with another top executive, Allison Gollust — a longtime open secret at CNN — was uncovered by lawyers originally hired to investigate Cuomo.

“For a lot of us, the feeling is the punishment didn’t fit the crime,” chief political correspondent Dana Bash told corporate executives during a heated newsroom meeting in D.C. on Wednesday night, according to a recording of the session obtained by The Washington Post.

For many, the confusion seemed to lie with the dawning awareness that Zucker’s departure was triggered by a looming legal showdown with Cuomo, the star anchor and erstwhile friend he fired in December over Cuomo’s involvement in the crisis-management activities of his politician brother. An investigation into Cuomo’s tenure had pivoted into a broader review of CNN’s handling of the matter, during which Zucker and Gollust were asked about and acknowledged their relationship. Cuomo’s legal team, meanwhile, had signaled an interest in seeing some of the couple’s email correspondence as they sought a more generous financial settlement for the deposed anchor.

In the CNN staff meetings, some colleagues seemed to view Zucker’s downfall as an act of revenge.

Washington Post, Sarah Palin’s libel case against New York Times opens, a culture clash with lasting legal potential, Sarah Ellison, Feb. 4, 2022 (print ed.). The former Alaska governor (shown in a portrait at right by David Shankbone) claims the paper defamed her with a 2017 editorial that was later corrected, in a case that tests long-standing protections for publishers.

A century ago, the publisher of the New York Times scolded an attorney for the newspaper who had just settled a libel lawsuit that had looked as though it would be hard for the paper to win.

“I would never settle a libel lawsuit to save a little money,” Adolph Ochs wrote in a letter to the lawyer. “If we have damaged a person we are prepared to pay all he can get the final court to award.”

That sensibility has guided the newspaper ever since, with the Times generally refusing to settle libel lawsuits for money in this country. Yet it’s also rare for one of these cases to go to trial because of the broad legal protections afforded publishers in the United States.

But the trial that opened on Thursday morning, pitting the Times against former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in a high-stakes showdown over First Amendment principles, could put those protections to the test.

“What am I trying to accomplish? Justice, for people who expect the truth in the media,” Palin told reporters as she entered the Manhattan federal courthouse for the trial over a 2017 editorial she claims defamed her.

But in his opening statements to the jury, an attorney for the New York Times tried to turn down the temperature of the debate, casting the matter as a simple error in presentation that the paper’s editors moved “as quickly as possible” to correct.

Though several editors had reviewed the essay, “no one saw the way some readers would interpret two sentences in that editorial,” said David Axelrod, the Times’s attorney (not to be confused with the same-named adviser to former president Barack Obama).

The case — promising a voyeuristic look inside one of the world’s most powerful news organizations — is a legal tinderbox with the potential to alter more than a half a century of legal precedent granting broad protections to news organizations writing about public figures. But inside the courtroom of U.S. District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff, it is also part culture war and media spectacle as the firebrand former Alaska governor claims the largest platform she has enjoyed since she accepted the nomination for vice president at the 2008 Republican convention.

Washington Post, Sixteen Penn swimmers say transgender teammate Lia Thomas should not be allowed to compete, Matt Bonesteel, Feb. 4, 2022 (print ed.). Sixteen members of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team sent a letter to school and Ivy League officials Thursday asking that they not take legal action challenging the NCAA’s recently updated transgender policy. That updated directive has the potential to prevent Penn swimmer Lia Thomas from competing at next month’s NCAA championships, and the letter indicates the 16 other swimmers believe their teammate should be sidelined.

Thomas, a transgender woman who swims for the Quakers women’s team, competed for the Penn men’s team for three seasons. After undergoing more than two years of hormone replacement therapy as part of her transition, she has posted the fastest times of any female college swimmer in two events this season. The letter from Thomas’s teammates raised the question of fairness and said she was taking “competitive opportunities” away from them — namely spots in the Ivy League championship meet, where schools can only send about half of their rosters to compete.

“We fully support Lia Thomas in her decision to affirm her gender identity and to transition from a man to a woman. Lia has every right to live her life authentically,” the letter read. “However, we also recognize that when it comes to sports competition, that the biology of sex is a separate issue from someone’s gender identity. Biologically, Lia holds an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category, as evidenced by her rankings that have bounced from #462 as a male to #1 as a female. If she were to be eligible to compete against us, she could now break Penn, Ivy, and NCAA Women’s Swimming records; feats she could never have done as a male athlete.”

A transgender college swimmer is shattering records, sparking a debate over fairness

Thomas’s teammates did not identify themselves in the letter. It was sent by Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a 1984 Olympic swimming gold medalist, lawyer and chief executive of Champion Women, a women’s sports advocacy organization. She said in a telephone interview that she sent the letter on the swimmers’ behalf so they could avoid retaliation; in the letter, the swimmers claim they were told “we would be removed from the team or that we would never get a job offer” if they spoke out against Thomas’s inclusion in women’s competition.

Washington Post, Gov. Noem signs transgender athlete ban into law in South Dakota, John Wagner, Feb. 4, 2022. South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem (R), right, signed legislation Thursday that bans transgender girls and college-age women from playing on female sports teams, calling it “an act to protect fairness in women’s sports.”

With Noem’s signature, South Dakota became the 10th state nationwide to enact such a ban, some of which are now facing legal challenges. She was the first governor this year to sign one into law.

“This bill has been an important priority for a lot of the people behind me,” Noem said during a signing ceremony at the state Capitol in Pierre, where she was flanked by bill advocates, “and I appreciate all of their hard work in making sure that girls will always have the opportunity to play in girls sports in South Dakota and have an opportunity for a level playing field, for fairness, that gives them the chance to experience success.”

Opponents have derided such legislation as discriminatory and harmful to the development of transgender children.

“The governor’s eagerness to pass a bill attacking transgender kids reveals that her national political aspirations override any sense of responsibility she has to fulfill her oath to protect South Dakotans,” Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director and senior counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “Gov. Noem and South Dakota legislators need to stop playing games with vulnerable children. Transgender children are children. They deserve the ability to play with their friends.”

Feb. 3

Washington Post, Facebook loses users for the first time in its history, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Will Oremus and Rachel Lerman, Feb. 3, 2022. Facebook parent Meta’s quarterly earnings report on Wednesday revealed a startling statistic: For the first time ever, the company’s growth is stagnating around the world.

Facebook lost daily users for the first time in its 18-year history — falling by about half a million users in the last three months of 2021, to 1.93 billion logging in each day. The loss was greatest in Africa and Latin America, suggesting that the company’s product is saturated globally — and that its long quest to add as many users as possible has peaked.

Meta’s stock price plummeted more than 20 percent in after-hours trading following the news, dropping to about $249 per share and threatening to wipe about $200 billion off its market value. The company is facing challenges on multiple fronts, as competitor TikTok booms, federal and international regulators scrutinize its business practices, and it begins a lofty transition to focus on the “metaverse.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, right, made the announcement at Connect, the company’s annual hardware event where it talks about products like the Portal video devices and Oculus headsets.

The rebranding — pegged to a virtual world and hardware known as the “metaverse” — comes amid a broader effort to shift attention away from revelations that it knew its platform was causing a litany of social harms. The Facebook social network is not changing its name.

“From now on, we’re going to be the metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said in his keynote. “Right now, our brand is so tightly linked to one product that it can’t possibly represent everything we are doing.”

New York Times, A Change by Apple Is Tormenting Internet Companies, Especially Meta, Kate Conger and Brian X. Chen, Feb. 3, 2022. Meta’s stock prices plunged after the company reported that Apple’s privacy features would cost it billions this year. It’s not the only tech giant to take a hit.

Apple’s vision of a more private web is not necessarily a more profitable one for internet companies that depend on advertising revenue.

That lesson was clear on Wednesday in an earnings report from Meta, the company that Mark Zuckerberg, right, founded as Facebook. Meta said that privacy features introduced by Apple last year could cost Mr. Zuckerberg’s company $10 billion in lost sales this year.

The news, along with increased spending as Meta tries to focus on the new idea of a metaverse, dropped Meta’s stock price more than 26 percent on Thursday morning. Mr. Zuckerberg said Wednesday that Apple’s changes and new privacy regulations in Europe represented “a clear trend where less data is available to deliver personalized ads.”

Meta’s warning and its cratering stock price were reminders that even among tech giants, Apple holds extraordinary sway because of its control of the iPhone. And the tech industry received a clear notice that a long-planned shift in how people’s information may be used online was having a dramatic impact on Madison Avenue and internet companies that have spent years building businesses around selling ads.

“People can’t really be targeted the way they were before,” said Eric Seufert, a media strategist and author of Mobile Dev Memo, a blog about mobile advertising. “That breaks the model. It’s not just an inconvenience that can be fixed with a couple of tweaks. It requires rebuilding the foundation of the business.”

Other internet companies that depend on ads felt the tremors, too. But smaller outfits appear to have been more nimble than Meta in their response to Apple’s changes.

Apple’s changes have far-reaching repercussions that may hurt consumers’ wallets, Mr. Seufert said, though consumers are overwhelmingly choosing not to be tracked.

Apple made significant changes to the privacy settings of its mobile operating system last year, allowing iPhone users to choose whether advertisers could track them. Since Apple introduced the feature, a vast majority of iPhone users have opted to block tracking.

Only 24 percent of iPhone users around the world have consented to being tracked by advertisers, according to data published in December by the analytics company Flurry. That means that a broad swath of iPhone users are evading the personal tracking preferred by advertisers.

It has been a dismaying shift for advertisers, which have for years tracked people online in order to determine how many sales their clients were making. Advertisers also rely on tracking to resurface products that consumers have viewed but not yet purchased, reminding them that it might be time to buy. But for privacy activists, the change is a welcome check against surveillance that puts power back into the hands of everyday technology users.

Google has also made moves that disrupt the advertising industry. Last month, it announced a proposal for how Chrome, the world’s most widely used web browser, might eventually eliminate traditional tracking mechanisms for serving ads. It introduced a new system, Topics, which would inform advertisers of a user’s areas of interest — such as “fitness” or “autos and vehicles” — based on the last three weeks of the user’s web browsing history.

Washington Post, Opinion: Lawsuit alleges D.C. police leaders flagged FOIA requests from journalists and activists, Radley Balko, right, author of Rise of the Warrior Cop, shown below, Feb. 3, 2022. In March 2019, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department held a public hearing for officer Sean Lojocano, who was accused of performing unneeded and unnecessarily invasive genital searches of city residents.

Among the attendees was Amy Phillips, an MPD critic and public defender in the District. Three days later, Phillips filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for a transcript of the hearing. Within less than 90 minutes, the department denied her request, arguing that releasing the transcript would “constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

That seemed odd to Phillips. The hearing was public, so the transcript should have been public, too. She appealed the denial to the Mayor’s Office of Legal Counsel, which directed the department to produce the transcript, but allowed some redactions. Almost three years after the public hearing, the department still hasn’t provided an unredacted transcript.

In the police department’s actions, Phillips had noticed a pattern: The police had stonewalled or denied her other FOIA requests, too — and the denials were usually quick. In 2020, she learned why, courtesy of a whistleblower: Vendette Parker, the department’s head FOIA officer from October 2017 until her retirement in January 2020.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in D.C. federal district court, Phillips — citing a sworn declaration from Parker — alleges that then-D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham instructed the department’s FOIA compliance officers to inform him of all incoming requests, and to flag any requests that could embarrass Newsham or the department. The chief and other senior officials would then meet with the FOIA officers to discuss strategies on how to delay, deny or otherwise frustrate those requests. (Disclosure: Phillips is a friend. She also says her lawsuit is not related to her job with the D.C. Public Defender Service.)

According to her declaration, Parker says that on her first day as a FOIA officer, she was told to flag any requests from reporters who had written or aired negative stories about the police department, any people or groups engaged in litigation against the department, any requests for the personal emails of Newsham or D.C. Police Chief Operating Officer Leeann Turner, and any other requests that could reflect poorly on the department or its leadership.

Parker’s declaration provides examples of people and groups whose requests received added scrutiny, including Phillips, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Anti-Defamation League, and reporters with the city’s CBS and Fox affiliates. Parker alleges she was also told to flag any requests for information related to stop-and-frisk policies, disciplinary hearings and the city’s controversial Gun Recovery Unit.

According to Parker, Turner told her not only to flag such requests, but to also write up possible responses that would justify the department denying or obstructing those requests. In other instances, she was asked to just delay potentially damaging requests until D.C. police officials could formulate a response. She claims she was also told to bring her proposed responses in hard copy form so there would be no record of them.

“While we haven’t been formally served with the suit, MPD will not discuss specific allegations due to the pending litigation,” said Officer Hugh Carew, a police spokesman. “We do acknowledge the serious nature of the claims. Transparency with our community partners is necessary to maintaining trust and agency accountability. A thorough review of the assertions will be completed and appropriately acted upon.”

 

New York Times, Jeff Zucker Exits CNN After Relationship With Senior Executive, Michael M. Grynbaum, Feb. 3, 2022 (print ed.). The relationship came up during the network’s investigation into the former anchor Chris Cuomo. “I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t,” Mr. Zucker wrote in a memo to colleagues.

Jeff Zucker resigned on Wednesday as the president of CNN and the chairman of WarnerMedia’s news and sports division, writing in a memo that he had failed to disclose to the company a romantic relationship with another senior executive at CNN.

Mr. Zucker, 56, is among the most powerful leaders in the American media and television industries. The abrupt end of his nine-year tenure immediately throws into flux the direction of CNN and its parent company, WarnerMedia, which is expected to be acquired later this year by Discovery Inc. in one of the nation’s largest media mergers.

In a memo to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Zucker wrote that his relationship came up during a network investigation into the conduct of Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor who was fired in December over his involvement in the political affairs of his brother, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.

“As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years,” Mr. Zucker wrote. “I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong.”

“As a result, I am resigning today,” he wrote.

Mr. Zucker was referring to Allison Gollust, right, CNN’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer and one of the highest-ranking leaders of the network, who is closely involved in major business and communications decisions.
Daily business updates The latest coverage of business, markets and the economy, sent by email each weekday. Get it sent to your inbox.

Ms. Gollust said in a statement on Wednesday that she was remaining in her role at CNN.

“Jeff and I have been close friends and professional partners for over 20 years,” she wrote. “Recently, our relationship changed during Covid. I regret that we didn’t disclose it at the right time. I’m incredibly proud of my time at CNN and look forward to continuing the great work we do everyday.”

Both Mr. Zucker and Ms. Gollust are divorced.

In a memo to WarnerMedia employees, Jason Kilar, the company’s chief executive, acknowledged that he had accepted Mr. Zucker’s resignation, adding, “We will be announcing an interim leadership plan shortly.”

Washington Post, Four men arrested in connection with overdose death of Michael K. Williams, Justice Department says, Sonia Rao, Feb. 3, 2022 (print ed.). Four men were arrested this week in connection with the actor Michael K. Williams’s fatal drug overdose, New York authorities announced Wednesday. Williams, best known for his critically acclaimed turn as Omar Little in HBO’s “The Wire,” died in September at age 54.

The men were part of a drug trafficking group based in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, according to a Department of Justice news release. All four were charged with conspiracy to distribute fentanyl and heroin, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison and a maximum of 40. The man seen handing Williams the fentanyl-laced heroin in surveillance footage was also charged with causing his death, which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years in prison and a maximum life sentence.

“This is a public health crisis. And it has to stop,” Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement. “Deadly opioids like fentanyl and heroin don’t care about who you are or what you’ve accomplished. They just feed addiction and lead to tragedy. The Southern District of New York and our law enforcement partners will not give up. We will bring every tool to bear.”

Williams, also lauded for his roles in shows such as “Boardwalk Empire” and “Lovecraft Country,” was found dead Sept. 6 in his Brooklyn apartment. The New York City chief medical examiner’s office ruled his death accidental later that month.

“The Wire” co-creators David Simon and Ed Burns hadn’t intended for Omar to figure into the Baltimore-set show for as long as he did, but kept him on because of Williams’s powerful performance. Simon wrote in an essay published after Williams’s death that he “gave us an astounding gift — an act of faith from a magnificent actor who could have played his hand very differently.”

New York Times, NBC Opens Olympics With ‘Worst Hand Imaginable,’ John Koblin, Feb. 3, 2022. Last year, NBC Sports executives called the Tokyo Olympics their most challenging undertaking ever.

Now that experience is starting to look like a cakewalk.

For this month's Winter Games in Beijing, NBC confronts an even trickier mix of challenges, threatening to diminish one of the network’s signature products and one of the last major draws to broadcast television.

The list of headaches is long: an event nearly free of spectators, draining excitement from the arena and ski slopes; the threat of star athletes testing positive for Covid, potentially dashing their Olympic dreams; and the vast majority of its announcers, including Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski, offering color commentary from a network compound in Stamford, Conn., instead of China.

The rising political tensions between the United States and China, including over China’s human rights abuses, add a troubling cloud to a typically feel-good spectacle.

Feb. 2

 Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary, ANTIFA Week: Day Three -- Turning America into a massive Bebelplatz, Wayne Madsen, left, author of 21 books, including the recent The Rise of the Fascist Fourth Reich: The Era of Trumpism and the Far Right (shown below) and former Navy intelligence officer, Feb. 2, 2022. No visit to Berlin is complete unless a visit is paid to the Night of Shame Memorial on the Bebelplatz, formerly called Opera Square.

On May 13, 1933, university students, who were coaxed by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, burned some 25,000 books that were considered to be "un-German." To the accompaniment of bands playing Nazi martial music, the book burners had succumbed to the raving and ranting of Goebbels and his Nazi cohorts.

The plaque at the Night of Shame Memorial bears a mindful warning: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." ("That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people)." The prophetic words were written by German poet and writer Heinrich Heine in 1820.

The few surviving veterans of America's and the civilized world's battle against the forces of fascism in World War II would have ever believed that Nazi-style book burning -- along with book banning, which the Nazis also practiced -- would ever occur in the United States. However, this very core principle of fascist ideology has been unleashed by America's inheritor of Adolf Hitler's demagoguery and fanaticism -- Donald Trump.

The state of Tennessee has become a mini-Bebelplatz for fascist book burners and banners.

The book banners and burners have been incentivized by Republican racist and fascist governors like Greg Abbott of Texas, Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, and others who have decided that by attacking public schools, colleges, and universities they can further their standing with the pro-Trump political ranks.

If Trump, like Goebbels and Hitler, gives the word that he wants certain books banned or burned, expect nighttime bonfires to spread across the nation and the world. The fascist and Nazi threat is now so much of a clear and present danger, the testament on the plaque on the Bebelplatz now has as much meaning as it did on May 13, 1933.

HuffPost, Rudy Giuliani Revealed As Masked Singer Contestant: Reports, Lydia O'Connor, Feb. 2, 2022. Horrified judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke reportedly walked off in protest.

Rudy Giuliani, the man who tried to help Donald Trump overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election, has taken on a new gig as a contestant on Fox’s “The Masked Singer,” Deadline and TMZ reported Wednesday.

During last week’s taping for the upcoming season, Giuliani ― concealed in a costume that could be anything from a giant taco with a tomato for a head to some glittering, disembodied lips ― reportedly took off his disguise and revealed himself to the judges, who weren’t all pleased to see the former Trump adviser involved in the production.

Judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke walked off the stage in protest before eventually returning, Deadline reported, but the two other judges, Jenny McCarthy and Nicole Scherzinger, remained and “bantered” with Giuliani, who was recently subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Giuliani was one the speakers at Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, rally contesting the 2020 election results that Congress was getting ready to certify. The former New York City mayor told the crowd that voting machines were rigged and that the matter needed to be settled with “trial by combat.”

If Giuliani appears as reported ― singing and dancing before a panel of celebrities attempting to guess his identity ― he’ll be following in the footsteps of the GOP’s former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who competed in the show in 2020 as a pink and purple tie-dye bear.

Does Giuliani even sing? Does he dance? There aren’t many examples of either, but he was spotted swinging a napkin around in the air while a Major Lazer song played at a restaurant in Israel in 2018.

Feb. 1

 

Washington Post, NSO offered ‘bags of cash’ for access to U.S. cell networks, whistleblower claims, Craig Timberg, Feb. 1, 2022. 
Rep. Ted Lieu asks the Justice Department to investigate after hearing the account of what he called ‘fishy’ behavior.

The surveillance company NSO Group offered to give representatives of an American mobile-security firm “bags of cash” in exchange for access to global cellular networks, according to a whistleblower who has described the encounter in confidential disclosures to the Justice Department that have been reviewed by The Washington Post.

The mobile-phone security expert Gary Miller alleges that the offer came during a conference call in August 2017 between NSO Group officials and representatives of his employer at the time, Mobileum, a California-based company that provides security services to cellular companies worldwide. The NSO officials specifically were seeking access to what is called the SS7 network, which helps cellular companies route calls and services as their users roam the world, according to Miller.

Surveillance companies try to access cellular communication networks to geolocate targets and provide other spying services. Cellular companies seek to prevent such intrusions by restricting access to the SS7 network and using firewalls to block computer queries that seek personal information on their customers.

Miller’s allegations are becoming public at a time when the Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation into NSO over allegations that its clients have illegally hacked phones and misused computer networks with the company’s technology, according to four people familiar with the probe who described elements of it on condition of anonymity to discuss matters not authorized for public disclosure. These people did not know what role, if any, Miller’s allegation is playing in that investigation or whether charges ultimately will be filed against NSO, which is based in Israel.

Washington Post, The New York Times buys Wordle, the ultra-popular online word game, Elahe Izadi, Feb. 1, 2022 (print ed.). The New York Times announced Monday it has bought Wordle, the free once-a-day online word game that exploded in popularity in recent months.

The Times spent an undisclosed figure on the game, but described it in the “low-seven figures.” The company said in a statement that “at the time it moves to The New York Times, Wordle will be free to play for new and existing players, and no changes will be made to its gameplay.” The migration will happen “very shortly,” a spokesman said.

It’s a notable acquisition for the news organization, which has a goal of reaching 10 million digital subscribers by 2025 and has singled out the games and cooking parts of its business as “a key part” of its strategy. As of December 2021, New York Times Games and Cooking had 1 million subscribers each.

Software engineer Josh Wardle created the game in January 2021 for his partner Palak Shah, who loved word puzzles, particularly the Times’s “Spelling Bee” and daily crossword.

The Wrap, Fox News Notches 20 Straight Years as Top-Rated Cable News Network, Lindsey Ellefson, Feb. 1, 2022. January ratings are in and, per Nielsen Media Research data, Fox News just set a big record: The network officially capped off 20 straight years as the top-rated cable news channel.

Notably, “The Five” continued its ratings success, ending the month as the most-viewed show in cable news, which is a unique feat for a non-primetime program. Tucker Carlson’s 8 p.m. ET juggernaut led the way in the advertiser-coveted age demographic of 25 to 54.

Fox News ended January as the top cable news channel in both total day viewers and primetime viewers. It has been the most-watched cable news network by both metrics since 2002. “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy told TheWrap in October of last year that when he started with the network at its inception 25 years ago, “it didn’t look good” and the team thought “market leader” CNN was tough competition. Five years later, the channel took the lead and never let it go.

Here’s how the numbers for January break down, per Nielsen: Fox News nabbed 1.414 million total-day viewers, on average, with 226,000 of those in the key demo. MSNBC took second place in total average viewers, pulling in 656,000, but took third place in the demo with 74,000. CNN was in last place in total viewers, averaging 493,000, but in second place in the demo with 101,000.

In primetime, Fox News brought in 2.242 million average total viewers, with 338,000 in the demo. Again, MSNBC took second place in total average primetime viewers, pulling in 1.15 million, but last place in the demo, securing 130,000. CNN nabbed 633,000 total average viewers between 8 p.m. ET and 11 p.m. ET, of whom 140,000 were between 25 and 54.

The top five cable news programs in total viewership and demo viewership all belonged to Fox News. In total average viewers, “The Five” led the way with 3.573 million, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged 3.414 million, “Hannity” took in 2.862 million, “Special Report with Bret Baier” nabbed 2.616 million and the 7 p.m. ET hour brought in 2.385 million, on average. “Jesse Watters Primetime” premiered in the 7 p.m. hour during the final week of January. Prior to Watters’ ascension to his own pre-primetime solo gig, the hour was helmed by rotating hosts. Watters’ program nabbed 3.3 million average viewers and 490,000 demo viewers, on average, in its first week.

The top five programs in the demo for the month were “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with an average of 560,000 viewers between 25 and 54, “The Five” with 504,000, “Hannity” with 433,000, the 7 p.m. ET hour with 388,000 and “Special Report with Bret Baier” with 387,000. Watters’ first week hosting “Primetime” drew 490,000 viewers in the demo, on average.

 

January 2022 Update

Jan. 31

BBC News, Fact Check on Joe Rogan: Four claims from his Spotify podcast fact-checked, Reality Check team, Jan. 31, 2022. The Joe Rogan Experience is Spotify's most popular podcast.

Joe Rogan has been criticised for helping spread misinformation on his podcast. Spotify reportedly paid $100m (£75m) in 2020 for rights to The Joe Rogan Experience, which is the streaming service's top podcast. It is reportedly downloaded almost 200 million times a month.

On the show, the US broadcaster hosts a wide variety of guests who discuss their views on a range of topics - but some episodes have featured false and misleading claims.

Here are four of them fact-checked.

Claim: A vaccine can alter your genes

Mr Rogan said: "This is not a vaccine, this is essentially a gene therapy." But this is not true. None of the Covid vaccines change your genetic material or DNA - essentially the recipe book containing the instructions of how to build your body.

Claim: Ivermectin can cure Covid

This claim was made on an episode last year featuring Bret Weinstein, an American author and professor of biology, who said: "Ivermectin alone is capable of driving this pathogen to extinction."

BBC Reality Check looked at a series of research papers claiming to show the effectiveness of this drug in treating Covid. Many were very low quality, and in some cases the data had been clearly manipulated. If you look only at rigorously carried out studies, there is no evidence of the drug's effectiveness.

Campaigners often cherry-pick positive examples and ignore the fact that many countries which relied heavily on ivermectin, like Brazil and Peru, had some of the worst death tolls from the virus.

The world-leading experts on reviewing medical evidence, Cochrane, concluded based on just these reliable trials that there was "insufficient evidence" to recommend the drug.

Claim: If you get vaccinated after having had Covid, you're at greater risk of harmful side effects

One of Mr Rogan's most controversial guests has been the virologist Robert Malone. Mr Malone was banned from Twitter in December last year for violating its Covid misinformation policies. He appeared on Mr Rogan's podcast shortly afterwards.

Among the misleading claims made in this podcast episode was one suggesting people who are vaccinated after having Covid-19 are at greater risk of adverse side effects. Following his appearance, more than 270 doctors and healthcare professionals signed a letter to Spotify, calling for Covid misinformation to be addressed.

Robust studies so far have shown that a very small number of conditions -- blood clots, heart inflammation -- are slightly more likely after certain vaccines, although are still very rare. In one UK study, researchers found that vaccine after effects were more common in those who already had Covid.

However, this study only looked at mild after effects, such as fatigue, chills and headaches.

Claim: For young people, the health risks from the vaccine are greater than from Covid

Mr Rogan said: "I don't think it's true there's an increased risk of myocarditis from people catching Covid-19 that are young, versus the risk from the vaccine."

Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle that has been raised as a rare side effect of vaccination.

However, research has shown that this condition, which can lead to shortness of breath, chest pain and in very rare cases to heart failure, is considerably more common after a Covid infection than after vaccination -- as is also the case with blood clots.

It also appears that cases of myocarditis post-vaccination are generally milder and shorter-lasting.

Mr Rogan later corrected himself, but has made several other comments suggesting young people shouldn't be vaccinated as they are at low risk from Covid-19.

It's certainly the case that younger people are at much lower risk of serious illness from Covid, but they are not at zero risk of developing complications. Covid itself has been found to be a bigger risk than the vaccines in every age group for which they have been approved. The vaccines, particularly after a booster, can also reduce your chances of catching the virus and therefore passing it on to others.

New York Times, Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S., Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter, Jan. 31, 2022 (print ed.). Challenges to books about sexual and racial identity are nothing new in American schools, but the tactics and politicization are.

In Wyoming, a county prosecutor’s office considered charges against library employees for stocking books like “Sex Is a Funny Word” and “This Book Is Gay.”

In Oklahoma, a bill was introduced in the State Senate that would prohibit public school libraries from keeping books on hand that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity or gender identity.

In Tennessee, the McMinn County Board of Education voted to remove the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus” from an eighth-grade module on the Holocaust because of nudity and curse words.

Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades. The American Library Association said in a preliminary report that it received an “unprecedented” 330 reports of book challenges, each of which can include multiple books, last fall.

“It’s a pretty startling phenomenon here in the United States to see book bans back in style, to see efforts to press criminal charges against school librarians,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of the free-speech organization PEN America, even if efforts to press charges have so far failed.

Such challenges have long been a staple of school board meetings, but it isn’t just their frequency that has changed, according to educators, librarians and free-speech advocates — it is also the tactics behind them and the venues where they play out. Conservative groups in particular, fueled by social media, are now pushing the challenges into statehouses, law enforcement and political races.

“The politicalization of the topic is what's different than what I’ve seen in the past,” said Britten Follett, the chief executive of content at Follett School Solutions, one of the country’s largest providers of books to K-12 schools. “It’s being driven by legislation, it’s being driven by politicians aligning with one side or the other. And in the end, the librarian, teacher or educator is getting caught in the middle.”

Among the most frequent targets are books about race, gender and sexuality, like George M. Johnson’s “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” Jonathan Evison’s “Lawn Boy,” Maia Kobabe’s “Gender Queer” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye.”

National Catholic Reporter, 2 Catholic school teachers fired over student journalist's pro-choice essay, Brian Fraga, Jan 31, 2022. The Dec. 16, 2021, issue of the student magazine Elevate had just published when Maria Lynch, a faculty journalism adviser at Regis Jesuit High School received an email from Principal Jimmy Tricco.

"Provocative piece for sure, which makes for good conversation," Tricco wrote in reference to "The Battle for [Our] Bodies," an opinion essay that a female student at the Catholic school in Aurora, Colorado, had written in favor of abortion rights.

In that email, a copy of which Lynch provided to NCR, Tricco twice thanked her and Nicole Arduini, the other faculty journalism adviser, for their work in publishing the latest issue of Elevate. Tricco also said he appreciated the student sharing her thoughts and added that he would reach out to her after the winter break to get her take on the Catholic approach to life issues and the school's mission.

Less than a week later, Tricco and the school's human resources director notified Lynch in an email that she was being fired for "poor judgment" and "personal misconduct" that they said had brought scandal to the school and "seriously damaged" its reputation. They also accused her of "not supporting the Mission and faith dimensions of Regis Jesuit High School."

"It's surprising," Lynch told NCR about the termination notice she received six days after Tricco's original email. Arduini was also fired amid complaints lodged with the school and the Archdiocese of Denver. Regis' administration "retracted in full" Elevate's Dec. 16 issue and is overhauling the school's journalism program.

"I think appropriate corrective action would have been to work with us to edit the editorial policies rather than to fire two teachers who had just started in the position this year," Lynch said.

The editorial policies — which have since been removed from Regis Jesuit's website — stated that faculty advisers could not censor student-written stories and editorials with the exception of content relating to crimes and legal matters, obituaries and termination of school employees. Lynch provided NCR a copy of those policies.

Lynch, who told NCR that she is pro-life and that she "frequently and fearlessly" shared those beliefs with her students and colleagues, said she followed the school's editorial policies.

Jan. 30

Washington Post, Perspective: Trump declared war on the media. Now proxy battles are being waged in American courts, Margaret Sullivan, right, Jan. 30, 2022. But none of these landmark cases are as potentially consequential as Sarah Palin’s suit against the New York Times.

From the start of his presidential bid, Donald Trump took full advantage of the public’s growing mistrust of the mainstream press. The journalists tirelessly chronicling the near-daily scandals erupting from his White House were “scum,” he taunted. They were dishonest, he insisted. They were “the enemy of the people.”

HIs adviser Stephen K. Bannon memorably called the media “the opposition party.” Plenty of Americans agreed: These days, even local TV reporters are likely to be blasted as “fake news” as they try to cover school board meetings.

Now, more than a year after Trump’s presidential term ended, three volatile lawsuits forged in the culture-war fire he stoked are making their way through the legal system.

All are defamation suits, and the mere names involved suggest just how hot those flames may get: Sarah Palin, the right-wing lightning rod who gleefully slammed the “lamestream media”; Project Veritas, the hidden-camera “sting” outfit that targets journalists and liberals; Fox News, the conservative cable network that morphed into the Trump White House’s propaganda office; and the New York Times, the pillar of elite journalism that became the object of some of Trump’s most scalding attacks — and is now the defendant in two of the cases.

Washington Post, Spotify responds after Joni Mitchell and others join Neil Young and demand the platform remove their content, Travis M. Andrews, Jan. 30, 2022. Spotify broke its silence on Sunday and announced slight changes to its policies around content concerning covid-19, after facing a week of criticism for allowing its creators — particularly podcaster Joe Rogan — to spread misinformation about the pandemic.

“You’ve had a lot of questions over the last few days about our platform policies and the lines we have drawn between what is acceptable and what is not,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, right, wrote in a news release. “We have had rules in place for many years but admittedly, we haven’t been transparent around the policies that guide our content more broadly.”

The new changes include publicly publishing the company’s internal rules for what is allowed on the platform, “testing ways to highlight” those rules to its creators and “working to add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19.”

“We know we have a critical role to play in supporting creator expression while balancing it with the safety of our users,” Ek wrote. “In that role, it is important to me that we don’t take on the position of being content censor while also making sure that there are rules in place and consequences for those who violate them.”

The controversy began last week, when rocker Neil Young posted a letter on his website demanding that his music be removed from Spotify in response to “fake information about vaccines” on the platform. He singled out Rogan, who hosts “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, as part of his issue with Spotify, writing: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Two days later, Spotify began the process of pulling Young’s music, saying in a statement that they “regret” Young’s decision “but hope to welcome him back soon.”

Days later, others began joining Young. Others, including Howard Stern and “The View” host Joy Behar, have argued that while they don’t agree with Rogan, they don’t think the platform should remove his podcast, equating such a move to censorship.

The resulting fallout, according to Variety, found Spotify’s market share falling more than $2 billion last week.

Spotify’s newly published platform rules shed light on why Rogan — who has suggested healthy, young people shouldn’t get vaccinated; praised ivermectin, a medicine used to kill parasites in animals and humans that has no proven anti-covid benefits; and invited prominent conspiracy theorists onto his show — has not been heavily penalized.

The rules include disallowing “content that promotes dangerous false or dangerous deceptive medical information that may cause offline harm or poses a direct threat to public health,” such as asserting that covid-19 is a hoax or “promoting or suggesting that vaccines approved by local health authorities are designed to cause death.”

Rogan doesn’t quite do any of that. He often argues that he’s merely asking questions and has insisted that he’s “not anti-vax.” And he’s particularly skilled at insulating himself from criticism by arguing that he knows nothing, so he can’t tell anyone anything. “I’m not a respected source of information, even for me,” he said.

Palmer Report, Opinion: The real problem with Joe Rogan and Spotify, Lorraine Evanoff, Jan. 30, 2022. American Rock Hall of Fame legend Neil Young has had enough of COVID misinformation. This week Young challenged Spotify to choose between his music, or the podcast of the mendacious Joe Rogan. Spotify opted to keep The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (JRE), causing a public backlash. So many users unsubscribed, Spotify had to freeze cancellations because their system was overwhelmed. Also, Spotify stock is down 10-25%, depending on when you mark the price.

The fallout continues, with Spotify drawing unwanted attention to its refusal to create a policy banning misinformation. JRE, the most popular podcast in the world, has been condemned for having several anti-vax guests, including discredited doctor Robert Malone, who was banned from Twitter for promoting Covid-19 misinformation. Rogan and his guests use their notoriety and academic backgrounds to give the appearance of credibility to manipulate listeners into thinking they are being informed, when, in fact, they are being dangerously misinformed. Note that 90% of hospitalizations and deaths due to COVID are the unvaccinated.

This incident has also refocused attention on social media regulation. The Internet is protected under Section 230 of Title 47 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act, which gives social media platforms immunity from contributors’ content, “even when they encourage illegal action, deliberately keep up manifestly harmful content, or take a cut of users’ illegal activities,” according to legal experts Citron & Franks.

The extreme right has already highjacked cable television and radio allowing Fox News and other rightwing programmers to skirt FCC regulations. The rightwing extremists have now used Section 230 to highjack the Internet. But they may have gone too far and reform is on the table. According to The Atlantic, Fox News, JRE, and other rightwing influencers promoting dangerous anti-vaccine campaigns to “save the economy,” no longer can use that argument under the booming Biden economy.

Portals such as Wikipedia, who post unsubstantiated claims about public figures, in what normally would be considered “unfair representation” generally actionable in all other media formats, may no longer be considered an ‘interactive computer service’ protected under Section 230 against defamation, when published on an Internet platform. The 1st Amendment states that Congress can make no laws hindering freedom of speech. But Congress and the courts can use current laws to protect U.S. citizens.

 Jan. 29

Washington Post, Joni Mitchell pulls music from Spotify, saying she stands with Neil Young in protesting misinformation, Adela Suliman, Jan. 29, 2022. Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell has become the latest artist to demand that her work be removed from music streaming service Spotify, in protest over coronavirus misinformation she said was being featured there.

She said she stood in solidarity with fellow artist Neil Young, who made headlines this week when he posted a letter on his website demanding that his catalogue of songs be removed from Spotify in response to “fake information about vaccines” on the platform.

“I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify,” Mitchell, shown above and at right on two of her major albums, wrote in a brief statement on her website on Friday. “Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”

The singer, who last year celebrated the 50 year anniversary of her album “Blue,” also linked to an open letter signed by medical and scientific professionals calling on Spotify to “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.”

• Washington Post, Analysis: Spotify chose Joe Rogan over Neil Young because it’s not a music company
• Digital Music News, Spotify Stock (SPOT) Has Lost Nearly 25% of Its Value In 2022 and 45% Over the Past Year — What’s Going On?

 

New York Times, Joe Exotic Is Resentenced to 21 Years for ‘Tiger King’ Murder-for-Hire Plot, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Jan. 29, 2022 (print ed.). Last year, a federal appeals court vacated the initial sentence for the plot, which was featured in the Netflix series “Tiger King.” Petitions for pardons from two presidents have also failed.

Joe Exotic, shown above, the former Oklahoma zoo owner who was the central figure in the 2020 Netflix documentary series “Tiger King,” was resentenced to 21 years in prison on Friday for the failed murder-for-hire plot targeting Carole Baskin, a self-proclaimed animal-rights activist who had criticized his zoo’s treatment of animals, his lawyers said.

The new sentence reduces his punishment by one year. The original sentence, for 22 years in prison, was vacated as improper by a federal appeals court last summer.

John M. Phillips, a lawyer for Joe Exotic, whose real name is Joseph Maldonado-Passage, said in a statement, “We are unsatisfied with the court’s decision and will appeal.” At a news conference, he said that Mr. Maldonado-Passage was disappointed.

In court documents on Friday, Mr. Maldonado-Passage said, “Please don’t make me deal with cancer in prison waiting on an appeal.”

Jan. 28

Press Run, Commentary on Media: 3 Covid stories the press is getting wrong right now, Eric Boehlert, right, Jan. 28, 2022. Pandemic of the unvaccinated. We knew there would be organized and partisan vaccine skeptics. But key portions of the Republican Party, as well as Fox News’ entire primetime lineup, urging people not to get vaccinated; warning them the shots might kill them?

The press never anticipated that type of mass, delusional behavior, and today it’s still not sure how the cover the surreal phenomena that continues to unfold.

Nervous about offending Republicans and Fox News by depicting anti-science conservatives as flat-earth deniers who would rather risk the welfare of themselves and families than get a vaccine (developed under Trump!), the press tiptoes around the obvious insanity.

If Covid is a uniquely American problem today, it’s only because one of the two political parties wants it to be.

New York Times, Opinion: How Can We Publish Good Science Quickly and Keep Bad Science in Check? Peter Coy, right, Jan. 28, 2022. Peer review is both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of the scientific research system. It filters out bad work and makes good work better. But it can also slow down the dispersal of new ideas, which is a big problem when it comes to tackling fast-changing challenges like the Covid-19 pandemic.

And, of course, peer review can fail. Retraction Watch, a website, maintains a list of more than 100 Covid-19 research papers that were peer reviewed, published and then had to be retracted.

On the whole the scientific community has done a good job of managing the peer review challenge. Most research today is released originally in the form of preprints, which are articles that are made widely available even though they haven’t been peer-reviewed. The major scholarly journals, which used to insist on exclusivity, have agreed not to deem a preprint as having been published, which means they will consider it for publication. That way the work gets out quickly and still has a chance to appear in a journal, which entails closer scrutiny (through peer review) and earns the authors a measure of academic repute.

But dissemination of scientific knowledge could be done better. “The limitation is that any idiot can publish any idiotic stuff on a platform that doesn’t have pre-publication peer review,” says Robert West, an emeritus professor of behavioral science and health at University College London and a past editor in chief of Addiction, a scholarly journal. The trick is to develop a system that keeps the speed while reducing the risk that bogus ideas such as treating Covid-19 with ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine will slip through.

In an early stab at collecting and publicizing early-stage work, the National Institutes of Health created a registry for preprints of biology research, but discontinued it in 1967 after the scholarly journals in the field refused (at the time) to consider submissions that had previously posted as preprints, according to a 2020 article in JAMA.

Washington Post, Analysis: Spotify chose Joe Rogan over Neil Young because it’s not a music company, Travis M. Andrews, Jan. 28, 2022. In one corner was Joe Rogan, the stand-up comedian and former “Fear Factor” host turned provocative podcaster.

In the other stood Neil Young, the multi-Grammy-winning rock legend with a lifelong passion for progressive causes.

The battle lasted two days, and Rogan won without making a peep.

Young started the scuffle when he posted a letter to his website Monday, addressed to his manager and an executive at his record label, demanding that his music catalogue be removed from Spotify in response to “fake information about vaccines.”

Specifically, Young cited Joe Rogan — who hosts “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast — and has suggested healthy, young people shouldn’t get vaccinated. After catching the coronavirus, Rogan also praised ivermectin, a medicine used to kill parasites in animals and humans that has no proven anti-viral benefits. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Two days later, without a word from Rogan, Spotify began the process of removing the famed rocker’s music, including his best-known hits such as “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

The speed of Spotify’s decision to sideline Young was jarring. So why did the company do it?

The answer is simple: This isn’t really a story about Rogan or Young. It’s a story about Spotify. And, despite public perception, Spotify isn’t a music company. It’s a tech company looking to maximize profits.

The company hasn’t been shy about its desire — in 2019, Spotify announced it was planning to spend up to $500 million to acquire companies “in the emerging podcast marketplace.”

That year it purchased Gimlet Media, home of podcasts such as “Reply All,” “Homecoming” and “Where Should We Begin? With Esther Perel,” for an estimated $230 million. It also spent more than $100 million on Anchor, a platform that lets users create and share their own podcasts.

The next year, Spotify spent nearly $200 million to acquire the Ringer and its suite of popular podcasts, such as “Binge Mode,” “The Press Box” and its founder’s “The Bill Simmons Podcast.” And, of course, it reportedly spent more than $100 million to acquire exclusive rights to a single show: the extremely popular, rabble-rousing “Joe Rogan Experience.”

“I think it comes down to, just frankly, business,” said John Simson, the program director for the business and entertainment program at American University. “In the music side of things, [Spotify is] paying out roughly 70 percent of all the revenue that comes in. It goes right back out as royalties. They’re looking for other places where the revenue split isn’t that dramatic. … Podcasts were certainly their go-to.”

• Digital Music News, Spotify Stock (SPOT) Has Lost Nearly 25% of Its Value In 2022 and 45% Over the Past Year — What’s Going On? Dylan Smith, Jan. 25, 2022.

Washington Post, Opinion: Salt Lake Tribune alerts police to threats to staffers after covid-19 editorial, Erik Wemple, Jan. 28, 2022. The Salt Lake Tribune alerted police to threats that the newspaper received after publishing a Jan. 15 editorial that ripped state leaders for their response to covid-19, according to an email from executive editor Lauren Gustus to subscribers. “Sean Hannity and FoxNews — in addition elected leaders in Utah — talked about the editorial, and we received dozens of threats. Some went to every journalist at The Tribune,” Gustus wrote.

The editorial — “Utah leaders have surrendered to COVID pandemic” — criticized Gov. Spencer Cox (R) and state epidemiologist Leisha Nolen for their handling of a test shortage. “We’re recommending people who have symptoms, they really should stay home, act as if they have covid and not necessarily need to go get tested,” Nolen said at a Jan. 14 news conference.

Although the Tribune praised Cox and other leaders for urging citizens to get vaccinated, it wrote that they “have so proudly stood against the kind of vaccine mandates that civilized society has used for generations to effectively wipe out everything from polio to diphtheria to the measles.”

To all that, the editorial attached a nutty idea: “Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere,” reads the editorial. Governors have used the National Guard to enforce curfews and otherwise patrol areas where unrest has taken root; the National Guard deployed for months in D.C. after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

There’s a difference, however, between securing the Capitol perimeter and restricting freedom of movement across a state measuring nearly 85,000 square miles. How would the plan even work?

“Wow. That’s tyranny, authoritarianism, you name it, and downright terrifying,” Hannity said on his Jan. 18 program.

Dwight Stirling, chief executive of the Center for Law and Military Policy, tells the Erik Wemple Blog via email that no governor could deploy the National Guard to restrict the movement of unvaccinated people. “This would constitute an extraordinary imposition of martial law, one of the most extreme in American history (if not the most extreme),” Stirling writes. “There is nothing in federal or state law that allows National Guard personnel to restrict civilians’ freedom of movement outside of a major civil disturbance.”

According to Gustus, the majority of the threats received by Tribune reporters were not local. Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson tweeted about the piece, and that’s when “it took off,” says Gustus, referring to the backlash. A couple of the threats were severe enough that the paper sent them to the Salt Lake City police department. A spokesperson with the department told the Erik Wemple Blog that she would get back to us if there’s anything to report. The newspaper also brought “abusive followers” to the attention of Twitter.

At a Jan. 6 protest at the Utah Capitol, Salt Lake Tribune photographer Rick Egan was pepper-sprayed by a protester, who had taunted him by saying, “Look at you in your f---ing mask, you p---y.” Gustus wrote, “Rick has worked for The Tribune for more than 36 years. He’s the photographer who shows up at an event on his day off because he believes so deeply in what he does.”

The Tribune has devoted more time and funds to security precautions in recent months, according to Gustus. One of her concerns is that staffers’ addresses and other personal information might linger on the Internet, so the newspaper has advised them to engage services that scrub that material from public view and expense the cost to the newspaper. She has also had conversations with some reporters about enhancing security at their homes.

The Tribune in 2019 switched to nonprofit status after finding itself in a “precarious” financial position. Last November, Gustus declared the paper “sustainable” and noted that the newsroom was 23 percent bigger than a year before. In her letter to subscribers, Gustus included a donation appeal. “And so despite the death threats, we will continue to serve as a check against those in power. Every day. Our resolve is stronger than ever,” she wrote.

“Misinformation is seeping down into the cracks of our daily lives because of what’s happened over the past two years,” Gustus told the Erik Wemple Blog, “and we’ve got to be stronger than ever in our resolve to do local journalism.”

MSNBC, TikTokers spam Virginia GOP governor's tip line for snitching on teachers, Ja'han Jones, Jan. 28, 2022. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin clearly thought a tip line (read: snitch line) that would allow conservative parents to rat out educators accused of teaching critical race theory would go over well. In light of recent news, I have to agree.

After Youngkin, right, on Monday announced a new email address for parents to send in their complaints, zealous Gen Zers on TikTok banded together with a plot to flood the inbox with trolling emails. The result was glorious. The advocacy group Gen-Z for Change created a website that allows users — in just a few clicks — to send prewritten emails containing song lyrics to Youngkin’s tip line.

“I’m indescribably angry with right-wing pundits trying to stoke nonexistent division while the U.S. is actively being labeled a backsliding democracy,” Sofia Ongele, the creator of the website, told Insider. “Seeing that Glenn Youngkin was trying to vilify educators, I thought I would do everyone a favor and take that tip line down.”

Youngkin ran a campaign that sought support from white parents in Virginia by playing to their outrage over school lesson plans about inequality. But many Gen Zers don’t share that warped view of the world, and Youngkin is quickly learning they have a variety of ways to make that known.

Washington Post, Conspiracy theorists, banned on major social networks, spread message on newsletters, podcasts, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Jan. 28, 2022 (print ed.). Newsletter company Substack is making millions off anti-vaccine content, according to estimates.

Joseph Mercola, right, a leading anti-vaccine advocate whose screeds have been restricted by YouTube and Facebook, this month warned that the unvaccinated might soon be imprisoned in government-run camps. The week before, he circulated a study purporting to use government data to prove that more children had died from covid shots than from the coronavirus itself.

Shut down by major social media platforms, Mercola has found a new way to spread these debunked claims: on Substack, the subscription-based newsletter platform that is increasingly a hub for controversial and often misleading perspectives about the coronavirus.

Substack, which researchers from the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate say makes millions of dollars off anti-vaccine misinformation, on Wednesday defended its tolerance for publishing “writers with whom we strongly disagree.”

Prominent figures known for spreading misinformation, such as Mercola, have flocked to Substack, podcasting platforms and a growing number of right-wing social media networks over the past year after getting kicked off or restricted on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Now these alternative platforms are beginning to face some of the scrutiny that has imperiled social media services. But there’s a fundamental difference in the architecture of newsletters and podcasts when compared to that of social media companies. Social networks use algorithms to spread content — sometimes misinformation — to users who don’t want to see it. Newsletters and podcasts don’t.

These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints — potentially making the services less responsible for spreading harmful views, some misinformation experts say. At the same time, the platforms are exposing tens of thousands of people to misinformation each month — content that can potentially lead people to engage in behaviors that endanger themselves and others.

Washington Post, Opinion: Current weather: Snowflakes in the red states, Dana Milbank, right, Jan. 28, 2022. If we see any more snowflakes appear in red states, the National Weather Service is going to have to issue a blizzard warning.

Tennessee made news this week when it was reported that rural McMinn County took the initiative of banning from classrooms the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel “Maus,” by Art Spiegelman, which teaches children about the Holocaust by portraying Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.

So the state once celebrated for Davy Crockett’s bravery now fears a cartoon mouse exposing teens to indecorous language. Can’t get more snowflakey than that.

Spiegelman joins the good company of Nobel-laureate Toni Morrison (whose debut novel, “The Bluest Eye,” was banned in Wentzville, Mo., on Jan. 20), “The Daily Show” host Trevor Noah (whose memoir survived a ban attempt in Osseo, Minn., last month) and Margaret Atwood (whose “The Handmaid’s Tale” was targeted in Goddard, Kan., in November) — as well as scores of other books, the vast majority of which have protagonists who are Black, or LGBTQ, or perceived as being anti-police.

McMinn County’s banning of Spiegelman’s mice comes almost a century after Tennessee tried to ban Darwin’s monkeys in the Scopes trial. The Volunteer State, apparently, is not evolving. And the political right, it seems, has undergone reverse evolution. Its new theory: survival of the fussiest.

The American Library Association tells me that there were 330 “challenges” in the three months between Sept. 1 and Dec. 1, 2021, with December still to be tallied. That compares with just 156 in all of 2020, and 377 in 2019, the last pre-pandemic year. This means book bannings are happening at roughly quadruple the previous pace.

Jan. 27

 

New York Times, Analysis: Republican Rift on Ukraine Could Undercut U.S. Appeals to Allies, Jonathan Weisman, Jan. 27, 2022 (print ed.). G.O.P. leaders are attacking President Biden for what they call a weak response to Russian aggression, but their far-right flank is questioning U.S. involvement, and even its alliance with Kyiv.

As President Biden tries to forge a united allied response to Russian aggression in Ukraine, unity on the home front is strained by a Republican Party torn between traditional hawks in the leadership and a wing still loyal to Donald J. Trump’s isolationist instincts and pro-Russian sentiment.

Republican leaders, by and large, have struck an aggressive posture, encouraging Mr. Biden to get tougher on Russia, through immediate sanctions on Russian energy exports and more lethal aid to Ukraine’s military. But that message has been undermined by the party’s far right, which has questioned why the United States would side with Ukraine at all, and has obliquely suggested with no evidence that the president is bolstering his son Hunter Biden’s business interests.

Driven by a steady diet of pro-Russian or anti-interventionist rhetoric from the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, the Republican right has become increasingly vocal in undercutting not only U.S. foreign policy but also the positions of the party’s leaders.

The Republican representatives Matt Rosendale of Montana, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; the Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance; and Donald Trump Jr. have weighed in to oppose confronting Russia or to suggest nefarious intentions on Mr. Biden’s part. Mr. Trump told the conservative podcast host Lou Dobbs that Mr. Biden’s reported plan to send as many as 50,000 troops to bolster Europe’s defenses was “crazy.”

Representative Michael R. Turner of Ohio, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, went on Fox News to confront Mr. Carlson.

“Why would we take Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s side?” Mr. Carlson pushed. “It’s a sincere question.”

Mr. Turner responded: “Ukraine is a democracy. Russia is an authoritarian regime that is seeking to impose its will upon a validly elected democracy in Ukraine, and we’re on the side of democracy.”

Such confrontations have muddied the Republican response, but more concerning are worries that the right could prompt U.S. allies to question Washington’s resolve. On a conference call on Wednesday with Ukrainian Americans, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, expressed alarm about “the rhetoric of the far right.”

“Our allies are watching closely for signs of division here,” he said in an interview after the call. “The good news is, I detect no real traction of those messages from my Republican colleagues.”

Washington Post, Mexico offers bodyguards and bulletproof vests to vulnerable journalists. It hasn’t been enough, Alejandra Ibarra Chaoul and Kevin Sieff, Jan. 27, 2022. Veteran news reporter María de Lourdes Maldonado López knew there were people who wanted her dead, so she applied for the only protection she knew: an unusual Mexican government program that promised to defend vulnerable journalists with state-funded bodyguards, bulletproof vests and other protection.

Maldonado López seemed certain to qualify. She was a well-known broadcast journalist in Tijuana, where for years she had received threats, including two attacks on her car and multiple promises to hunt her down.

More than 140 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, making it one of the deadliest countries in the world for members of the news media. A decade ago, authorities attempted a solution: the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a government-funded private security service for reporters, photographers and activists under threat.

At least 467 journalists are registered in the $23 million-a-year program, which offers a range of safeguards: full-time bodyguards, antiballistic gear, at-home panic buttons and surveillance cameras. In some cases, the government relocates journalists to different parts of the country, a kind of witness protection program for reporters.

Maldonado López applied for protection through the state of Baja California. Her colleague Alfonso Margarito Martínez Esquivel, a freelance photographer in Tijuana who had become the target of a Facebook smear campaign, was in the process of applying.

Both knew the dangers of reporting in Tijuana. Sometimes the threats came from organized crime. Sometimes they came from government officials. Applying for protection from the state was not ideal, but it was the only affordable protection they could find.

 

Washington Post, Spotify pulls Neil Young’s music after his ultimatum against Joe Rogan and vaccine misinformation, Travis M. Andrews, Jan. 27, 2022 (print ed.). Spotify is in the process of removing Neil Young’s music two days after Young posted a letter on his website demanding that his catalogue be removed in response to the “fake information about vaccines” on the platform.

“We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators,” a Spotify spokesman told The Washington Post in a statement. “We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon.”

Young’s letter, which has since been deleted, was addressed to his manager and an executive at his record label and cited Joe Rogan by name as part of his issue with Spotify. “I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” he wrote in the letter, according to Rolling Stone. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”

“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” the letter continued. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

• New York Times, Neil Young Posts and Removes a Letter Demanding Spotify Remove His Music, Jenny Gross

Washington Post, YouTube permanently bans Fox News host Dan Bongino for posting covid misinformation, Gerrit De Vynck, Jan. 27, 2022 (print ed.). The conservative media figure already has a bigger following on video streaming platform Rumble. Google-owned YouTube said it had permanently banned prominent conservative media figure Don Bongino from its site after he repeatedly broke its rules on posting coronavirus misinformation.

Bongino, right, who hosts a show on Fox News in addition to talk radio shows and online broadcasts, had been given a strike and a week-long suspension from YouTube earlier in January for saying in one of his videos that masks were useless. He uploaded another video later in the month that also broke the platform’s rules on coronavirus misinformation. When he tried to upload a third video, the company banned him permanently.

Pro-Trump influencers flocked to alternative social networks. Their follower counts stalled soon after.

YouTube has had rules against posting false or misleading information about the coronavirus and vaccines since the beginning of the pandemic, although critics have said the company enforces its rules unevenly. In September, it took down the accounts of several anti-vaccine influencers after years of research from misinformation researchers suggesting the platform played a role in the growth of vaccine hesitancy.

Bongino did not respond to a request for comment, but a Twitter account associated with one of his shows posted a tweet saying, “Good riddance to YouTube.” Bongino had around 870,000 subscribers on YouTube but has over 2 million on Rumble, a video platform popular with right-wing figures who say Big Tech is censoring them. He had threatened to leave YouTube before the ban.

Dan Bongino threatened to quit his radio show over a vaccine mandate. So, why hasn’t he?

Bongino is one of a small handful of conservative figures who have been handed permanent suspensions from the big social media companies. President Donald Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Twitter also permanently banned Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) this month after she also repeatedly posted false information about the coronavirus, though she is still able to use her official congressional Twitter account. For the most part, the social media companies have instead opted for short-term suspensions. Trump is also banned from Facebook and YouTube, but the companies have both left the door open to letting him return.

Bongino and other conservative media figures have used the bans and suspensions to promote alternative social media networks that purport to have fewer rules about what can and can’t be said, such as Gettr, Gab, Telegram and Rumble. A Washington Post analysis of audience data for 47 right-wing influencers showed that when they moved to one of the alternative networks, their follower counts jumped but then quickly stagnated and stopped growing at the same speed as they had on the more mainstream networks.

Jan. 26

 

Washington Post, Bannon was deplatformed. Now an obscure media mogul keeps him on air, Isaac Stanley-Becker, Jan. 26, 2022 (print ed.). ‘War Room’ is at the center of a fledgling network monetizing what some employees saw as ‘Trump propaganda.’

Two years after being cast out of the White House, Stephen K. Bannon (shown above in a file photo) spoke from a steep, dusty hill outside El Paso, asking for donations. The former investment banker and Hollywood producer wanted cash in 2019 for his latest quest, to privately build President Donald Trump’s stalled border wall.

Not many news outlets were paying attention — except for one focusing on his every word.

It wasn’t Fox News or Newsmax. It wasn’t even Breitbart News, the far-right website Bannon once led, using it to help remake the GOP and elect Trump.

The coverage came from an upstart network run by a little-known media mogul in Colorado, a felon with a record of unpaid taxes and a family history marked by tragedy and violence. The mogul, Robert J. Sigg, left, and shown below right in a mug shot, found news value in Bannon’s mission to the desert, which ultimately resulted in fraud charges.

When Bannon launched his own talk show in the fall of 2019, calling it “War Room,” he quickly handed over its distribution to Sigg.

More than two years later, the arrangement has paid off for both men. Sigg used “War Room” as a springboard for an expanded network of conservative hosts — bringing him the commercial opportunity he sought.

The network, Real America’s Voice, helped sustain Bannon despite his removal from YouTube, Spotify and other mainstream platforms. It brings his show into as many as 8 million homes hooked up to Dish satellite television, many in rural, conservative areas without reliable cable coverage.

The rise of Real America’s Voice, built around Bannon and distant from the traditional power structures of cable television and talk radio, reveals how the country’s fractured media landscape has empowered unconventional actors following market incentives toward more and more extreme content.

“We were told fairly regularly we were Trump propaganda,” said a former Real America’s Voice producer, who, like about a dozen other current and former employees of Sigg’s business, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. “That is what our role was. That was the message from the top: ‘We’re a Trump propaganda network.’ That’s where the money was.”

That market was left open when Fox News and Newsmax pulled back from topics most motivating to Trump’s base, said Bannon, such as resistance to vaccines, cries of voter fraud and unproven ideas about federal agents provoking the pro-Trump riot at the Capitol.

“War Room” focuses on those topics. Its influence comes not just from the number of people watching, which is difficult to measure across platforms, but also from the audience’s willingness to take political action, whether marching against vaccine mandates or running for local office. The show, broadcast live six days a week from Bannon’s Capitol Hill townhouse, is the gathering point for the pro-Trump movement — with Bannon embracing the role of a wartime general leading followers into 2022, or what he calls the “valley of decision.”

New York Times, Neil Young Posts and Removes a Letter Demanding Spotify Remove His Music, Jenny Gross, Jan. 26, 2022 (print ed.). A letter briefly appeared on Monday on Neil Young’s website that asked to remove his music from Spotify, according to Rolling Stone, in protest of the platform’s streaming of the podcaster Joe Rogan, who has been dismissive of the coronavirus vaccine.

“I am doing this because Spotify is spreading fake information about vaccines — potentially causing death to those who believe the disinformation being spread by them,” Mr. Young wrote, according to Rolling Stone. “Please act on this immediately today and keep me informed of the time schedule.”

He wrote: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

The letter was addressed to his manager and an executive at his record label, Rolling Stone reported. It no longer appeared on the website on Tuesday morning.

Spotify did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Frank Gironda, Mr. Young’s manager, told The Daily Beast that Mr. Young published the letter on Monday. “It’s something that’s really important to Neil,” Mr. Gironda told The Daily Beast. “He’s very upset about this disinformation.”

Mr. Young’s letter appeared to add to the pressure on Spotify to take a stronger stance on vaccine misinformation. This month, hundreds of scientists, professors and public health professionals asked Spotify, which is based in Stockholm, to develop a policy to handle misinformation about Covid-19 on its platform.

In a letter published online, the experts wrote about a Dec. 31 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” that featured Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease researcher who they said promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines.”

“By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions, Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research and sow doubt in the credibility of data-driven guidance offered by medical professionals,” the letter said.

It also said Spotify should “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.”

The company, which says its podcast platform has more than 299 million monthly listeners, has previously said in a written statement that it prohibits dangerous, false or deceptive material about Covid-19 and that it has removed content that violate its policies. But episodes that appear to violate those terms still appear on the platform.

New York Times, Can CNN’s Hiring Spree Get People to Pay for Streaming News? John Koblin and Michael M. Grynbaum, Jan. 26, 2022. The network’s boss, Jeff Zucker, has tried to make up for lost time by signing Chris Wallace, Audie Cornish and Eva Longoria.

A couple of months ago, CNN’s forthcoming streaming channel was perceived as little more than a curiosity in the television news business: just another cable dinosaur trying to make the uneasy transition into the digital future.

In fact, the plan to start CNN+, which is expected to go live by late March, amounted to a late arrival to the subscription-based streaming party, more than three years after Fox News launched Fox Nation.

Then the hirings began.

Washington Post, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologizes for saying the unvaccinated have less freedom than Anne Frank did, Andrew Jeong, Jan. 26, 2022 (print ed.). Robert F. Kennedy Jr. apologized Tuesday for invoking Anne Frank to imply Jews had more freedoms during the Holocaust than unvaccinated Americans do today — remarks that drew a public backlash and criticism from Kennedy’s wife.

Kennedy had referenced Frank, a child who died in a Nazi concentration camp, while speaking in front of the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday at an anti-vaccine rally. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” said Kennedy, a longtime opponent of vaccines who has spread unsupported claims about shots shown to protect against covid-19.

On Tuesday, after intense criticism, he tweeted that to “the extent my remarks caused hurt, I am truly and deeply sorry.”

“I apologize for my reference to Anne Frank, especially to families that suffered the Holocaust horrors,” wrote Kennedy, right,the son of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) and nephew of President John F. Kennedy. “My intention was to use examples of past barbarism to show the perils from new technologies of control.”

Even before the pandemic, Kennedy’s statements on vaccines and support for conspiracy theories put him at odds with family members, health professionals and historians. Some social media platforms have banned him. But his speech Sunday drew especially strong condemnation.

The Auschwitz Memorial expressed anger at his comments in a tweet without naming him. “Exploiting … the tragedy of people who suffered, were humiliated, tortured & murdered by the totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany — including children like Anne Frank — in a debate about vaccines & limitations during global pandemic is a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum released a similar statement.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted that the statements were “deeply inaccurate, deeply offensive and deeply troubling.”

Kennedy’s wife, actress Cheryl Hines (shown with him at left), also distanced herself from his remarks. “My husband’s opinions are not a reflection of my own,” she tweeted. “While we love each other, we differ on many current issues.”

In a statement sent Monday to the Associated Press by a spokeswoman for Kennedy, he said he “compared no one to the Nazis or Adolf Hitler.”

“I referred to Anne Frank’s terrible two year ordeal only by way of showing that modern surveillance capacity would make her courageous feat virtually impossible today,” Kennedy said.

It was not the first time Kennedy has invoked the Holocaust in reference to vaccines. In 2015, he said of vaccinations: “They get the shot, that night they have a fever of a hundred and three, they go to sleep, and three months later their brain is gone. This is a holocaust, what this is doing to our country.”

For years, Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and author, has publicly supported the claim that vaccines cause autism. They do not.

In 2005, Kennedy incorrectly wrote in an article published in Rolling Stone and Salon that an ingredient in some new vaccines, thimerosal, was dangerous and that the government was hiding its links to autism. Rolling Stone issued several corrections. Salon retracted the story from its website. Kennedy expanded the article into a book published in 2014.

Such views have invited rebukes from other family members, including one from niece Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, an internal medicine resident physician. In an opinion piece for the New York Times in December 2020, when coronavirus vaccines were first being rolled out, Meltzer said she loved her uncle. “But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong,” she wrote.

In a 2019 opinion piece for Politico Magazine, Kennedy’s siblings and a different niece noted how President Kennedy had signed the 1962 Vaccination Assistance Act, to highlight that his nephew’s inaccurate statements on vaccines were worsening a measles outbreak in the country at the time.

Barbara A. Perry, director of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and a Kennedy family scholar, said she suspected Robert Kennedy Jr.’s opposition to vaccine mandates came from his work as an environmentalist.

He has campaigned against pollutants, such as mercury, that contaminate food sources, Perry said in an interview. “Clearly he doesn’t want people poisoned in the environment by pollutants,” she said. “In his mind, I guess, it’s a pretty easy step to [think] not poisoning the body through vaccination.”

Jan. 25

Washington Post, Severe chip shortage could force companies to shut factories if deliveries are disrupted, Commerce Dept. says, Jeanne Whalen, Jan. 25, 2022. Wafer-thin inventories leave factories vulnerable to shutdowns if their chip deliveries are interrupted by weather events or covid-19 Manufacturers and other buyers of computer chips had less than five days’ supply of some chips on hand late last year, leaving them vulnerable to any disruptions in deliveries, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday as it pushed Congress to endorse federal aid for chipmakers.

The report highlighted the severity of a global shortage that has hobbled manufacturing and fueled inflation for more than a year, and that defies easy solutions.

Manufacturers’ median chip inventory levels have plummeted from about 40 days’ supply in 2019 to less than five days, according to a survey of 150 companies worldwide that the Commerce Department conducted in September 2021.

“This means a disruption overseas, which might shut down a semiconductor plant for 2-3 weeks, has the potential to disable a manufacturing facility and furlough workers in the United States if that facility only has 3-5 days of inventory,” the Commerce Department concluded in a six-page summary of its findings.

Digital Music News, Spotify Stock (SPOT) Has Lost Nearly 25% of Its Value In 2022 and 45% Over the Past Year — What’s Going On? Dylan Smith, Jan. 25, 2022. Spotify stock (NYSE: SPOT) dipped by nearly five percent during Tuesday’s trading hours and has parted with almost one-quarter of its value since the start of 2022. All of which is prompting Wall Street — and previously high-flying stakeholders — to discuss the downturn’s potential causes.

Having finished at $193.52 per share on Monday, Spotify stock was worth $184.04 per share when the market closed on Tuesday – a 4.92 percent decrease on the day, a 13.59 percent decline across the last five days, and a full 23.50 percent falloff over the past six months.

Furthermore, as mentioned at the outset, SPOT’s present value represents a 24.62 percent slip since 2022’s beginning, when the stock was worth north of $244 per share.

The broader slide is stunning: back in late January of 2021, SPOT was hovering around $337 a share. Since that point, SPOT has witnessed a $152 plunge, which translates into a 45% drop in just one year. Tuesday’s price represents a modest 24.42 percent gain from the Stockholm-based company’s 2018 public offering.

Of course, it’s impossible to pinpoint the precise factors that are dragging SPOT down, but the movement arrives amid broader market corrections and a shift away from unprofitable and/or tech stocks.

The S&P 500 is down about 9.2 percent on the year.

Bringing the focus back to recent developments concerning Spotify specifically, a number of issues are emerging. After years of surging subscriber growth, the numbers are plateauing in wealthier nations like the US. Diversifications into arenas like podcasting also remain speculative: just recently, Spotify shut down its pioneering podcast studio – and laid off some of the division’s 10 to 15 employees. Though the move appears inconsequential in the context of Spotify’s multibillion-dollar bet on podcasts, it doesn’t seem to spell confidence in the format.

Jan. 24

 

Demonstrators protesting mask and Covid-19 vaccination mandates participated in a "Defeat the Mandates" march on Sunday, Jan. 23 in Washington, DC (Photo by Stefani Reynolds via AFP and Getty Images).

Salon, Commentary: Insurrection by other means: The far right is using anti-vaxx sentiment to radicalize Republicans, Amanda Marcotte, Jan. 24, 2022.
The weekend's anti-vaccine rally in D.C. was heavy on violence-inspiring rhetoric and fascist recruitment.

The "Defeat the Mandates" rally on Sunday in Washington D.C. was not exactly the blockbuster event, size-wise, organizers had hoped to turn out. The event's planners had predicted 20,000 people, but more reasonable estimates suggested it was fewer than half that who actually showed. But despite the paltry turnout, the event was deeply troubling to experts who monitor the far-right.

The tone and tenor of the occasion were so hyperbolic and self-aggrandizing, creating exactly the sort of conditions that will further radicalize ordinary Republicans and stoke more right-wing violence.

Disgustingly, one of the main speakers was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, the son of the Democratic scion who was assassinated in 1968. Kennedy has spent the past few years becoming an increasingly unhinged anti-vaccine activist — but his presence on Sunday was even more alarming considering the role that the Kennedy family plays in the imaginations of the QAnon cult.

Many QAnoners believe that JFK and JFK Jr. — Kennedy's deceased uncle and first cousin, respectively — are still alive and secretly supporting Donald Trump. Simply by showing up, Kennedy validated these kinds of fringe beliefs. The situation got much worse when he actually spoke and told the crowd that anti-vaxxers have it worse than Jews did during the Holocaust.

"Even in Hitler Germany (sic), you could, you could cross the Alps into Switzerland. You could hide in an attic, like Anne Frank did," Kennedy said. "I visited, in 1962, East Germany with my father and met people who had climbed the wall and escaped, so it was possible. Many died, true, but it was possible."

Kennedy's analogy is incoherent for obvious reasons — does he think East Germany was a Nazi state or not know that Frank died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp? — and was widely criticized for being offensive. The Auschwitz Memorial responded with a tweet describing Kennedy's speech as "a sad symptom of moral & intellectual decay."

But the speech wasn't just offensive — it's also dangerous.

It doesn't matter that Kennedy didn't come right out and call on people to commit violence. It's inciting to tell anti-vaxxers they are victims of oppression worse than what the Jews faced under the Nazis. It justifies violence as a form of self-defense. This is why experts on far-right organizing and violence were alarmed. Ben Collins, an NBC reporter who has been covering the rise of American fascism, was especially concerned.

Kennedy was just one of many who made the comparison Sunday, both onstage and in the crowd. There was also a lot of comparing the plight of anti-vaxxers to that of Black Americans living under segregation. Meanwhile, rally organizers pretended theirs was a message of diversity and tolerance.

In reality, however, as Will Carless of USA Today wrote, hate groups and far-right activists are using the anti-vaccine movement to recruit, both online and off. Brian Hughes of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University explained to Carless that the far-right sees "anti-vaccine sentiment and COVID denialism as a market that they can exploit for views, for clicks and for merchandise sales." Indeed, these kinds of groups were heavily represented in the crowd at the rally.

As Salon alum and current Daily Beast reporter Zachary Petrizzo noted, "Far-right fanatics were out in full force, from the extremist members of the hate group Proud Boy to rank-and-file supporters who consume everything that conspiracy theorist Alex Jones utters."

But it was also true that more ordinary Republicans also showed up. There were even people claiming to be disillusioned Democrats, although this is a common enough lie on the right and should always be taken with a grain of salt. Either way, what is crucial to understand is that the far-right and hate groups are plugging into the anti-vaccine discourse to lure conservatives into becoming even more fascistic and more supportive of the violent rejection of democracy.

Amanda Marcotte is a senior politics writer at Salon and the author of "Troll Nation: How The Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set On Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself."

Politico, “Stupid son of a …”: Biden makes plain his opinion of Fox reporter’s question, Myah Ward, Jan. 24, 2022. The president didn’t appear to be speaking directly to Peter Doocy but was bluntly sarcastic after being asked about the political implications of inflation.

President Joe Biden on Monday called a reporter a “stupid son of a bitch” after he was asked whether inflation was a “political liability in the midterms.”

It wasn’t just any reporter. It was Fox News’ Peter Doocy, the network’s rising star who is known for needling the president and for his clashes with White House press secretary Jen Psaki during daily briefings. Doocy has covered Biden from the start of his presidential campaign and was named a White House correspondent in early 2021.

It didn’t seem as if Biden was speaking directly to Doocy, though it’s unclear whether the moment was a hot-mic mistake or meant for the room to hear. The exchange happened during Biden’s meeting with the White House Competition Council, where he discussed his work to lower rising prices.

Following Biden’s remarks, journalists began shouting questions at the president as they were ushered out of the room.

“Do you think inflation is a political liability ahead of the midterms?” Doocy asked, according to the official White House transcript, which included the full exchange.

The president, who is known for having a short temper and not the cleanest of vocabularies during heated moments, spoke right above his microphone. “No, it’s a great asset — more inflation,” Biden said, shaking his head. “What a stupid son of a bitch.”

Last week, Biden took questions from reporters for 111 minutes at the White House, answering on everything from Covid missteps and his Build Back Better agenda to Russia and Ukraine. When it was Doocy’s turn, Biden joked that the reporter always asked him the “nicest questions.”

“I got a whole binder full,” Doocy said.

“I know you do,” Biden said. “None of them make a lot of sense to me.”

Jan. 23

Washington Post, Opinion: How Fox News and Republican officials devised one Biden smear, Dana Milbank, right, Jan. 23, 2022 (print ed.). For three months, Republican officeholders and Fox News personalities have been shouting it from the rooftops.

“The attorney general announced the FBI would investigate moms who dared to complain at school board meetings as potential terrorists,” Fox’s leading prime-time host, Tucker Carlson, announced last week.

“Biden and his cronies are calling the parents domestic terrorists,” contributed Florida’s lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nuñez, on Fox News last Sunday.

There’s just one wee problem with the whole Biden-says-parents-are-terrorists claim, reported dozens of times on Fox News airwaves and echoed at each link down the Republican media food chain: It’s horse excrement. Biden never said it. Attorney General Merrick Garland never said it. No senior (nor even junior) official in the Biden administration has ever been shown to have said it. Yet Fox News presents it as unchallenged fact, week after week. (In response to my request, a Fox News spokeswoman provided me no instance of a Biden official calling parents domestic terrorists.)

It would be easy to overlook this one drizzle of disinformation in the torrent of falsehood the GOP-Fox axis produces. The network, which “informs” the majority of Republican voters, has painstakingly constructed a parallel universe in which vaccines kill you, Biden stole the election, Biden is senile, grade schoolers are being force-fed critical race theory, the FBI orchestrated the Jan. 6 insurrection, and the country is in an apocalyptic spiral of open borders, rampant crime and runaway inflation.

“Parents don’t like being told that they’re domestic terrorists,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) tells Fox.

Indeed not. But thanks to Republicans and Fox News, millions of Americans can now add this to their long menu of lies digested.

Washington Post, Opinion: If local journalism survives, give Evan Smith some credit for it, Margaret Sullivan, right, Jan. 23, 2022. The Texas Tribune founder has been a “true pioneer” in finding ways to cover local communities as a non-profit.

Jan. 22

Washington Post, Pro-Trump influencers flocked to alternative social networks. Their follower counts stalled soon after, Jeremy B. Merrill, Jan. 22, 2022 (print ed.). After a short surge following the Jan. 6 riot last year, the number of people following noted right-wing personalities on services such as Telegram has barely grown over the past year, a Washington Post analysis found.

Pro-Trump commentators’ hopes of developing major followings on right-leaning websites after they left Facebook and Twitter have run up against a harsh reality: Their audiences on those sites have stagnated.

A Washington Post analysis of audience data for 47 prominent right-wing influencers who flocked last year to alternative social networks Gab and Gettr, the video-streaming site Rumble and the chat service Telegram found that their followings surged immediately after President Donald Trump was banned on the mainstream sites.

But those audiences have barely grown in the year since. In some cases, they even declined.

The influencers previously had seen steady growth on Twitter and other big platforms that distributed their messages to a broad audience. But after their jump to the niche sites, the analysis indicates, they largely failed to continue attracting new followers who weren’t already engaged fans.

Their biggest moments for gaining followers came when they voiced outrage at other high-profile conservatives getting kicked off mainstream sites, such as earlier this month, when Twitter booted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for repeatedly tweeting false information about coronavirus vaccines.

How we tracked right-wing influencers’ audience numbers

“Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth,” she said on Telegram and Gettr, where her audience quickly grew to exceed the following for her suspended personal Twitter account.

Since Jan. 6, the pro-Trump Internet has descended into infighting over money and followers

The data helps strengthen the case for supporters of “deplatforming,” who argue that banning the accounts of people known for distributing lies can have a powerful impact on their ability to win mainstream attention or political influence.

It also calls into question whether this new and polarized online ecosystem — possibly to be joined soon by Trump’s long-promised social network, Truth Social — can build a sustainable business solely by catering to a radicalized right.

Jan. 21

 

Media Matters, OAN airs testimonial from its owner confirming it was dropped by AT&T and begging viewers to reach out to other cable providers, John Whitehouse, Jan. 21, 2022. Earlier this week, my colleague Bobby Lewis looked at One America News Network's future after the deranged conspiracy theory channel was dropped by AT&T / DirecTV. He pointed out that OAN has been asking viewers to reach out to cable providers like Spectrum. Now, OAN owner Robert Herring, Sr., has taken it a step further, recording a testimonial that begs viewers to reach out to Charter and Dish. He also complains that AT&T dropped him.

Herring's remarks about AT&T and its Chairman William Kennard, right, come after on-air remarks from an OAN host asking viewers to dig up dirt on Kennard. (The same host is now asking viewers to call AT&T and DirecTV and threaten to drop them if OAN is removed.)

Hello, my name is Robert Herring, left, and I'm owner and CEO of One America News Network. I'm sure by now a lot of you have heard the news that AT&T and DirecTV have decided to take us off their service. It was a major surprise to me when I read it in the news last Friday night, as I'm sure it was to you.

I have worked with AT&T in one capacity or another starting when I was 20 years old. I started out as a chauffeur, driving their executives around town; and later in life, this little news network that I built with my family and a small group of the hardest working individuals I know found its way into the AT&T channel lineup. Our dedicated group of investigative journalists, writers, producers and directors, and everyone else that helps this place run, spent the last several years bringing you, the American people, straight-shooting hard-hitting news that you just don't find anywhere else. And you, the viewers, have been great. Our viewership has grown so much year after year, and we read every single one of your viewer emails. We take the time to talk to you when you approach us on the streets. We listen to you, and that's why we know that you keep watching our network because we tell it like it is.

In the past, we have worked with a man named John Stankey at AT&T, and we always appreciate the great working relationship we had with him. But just recently, the new head of the board of AT&T, by the name of William Kennard, let us know that he and the rest of the board simply do not want to carry us anymore. It was a complete surprise to us, given how great our viewership has been.

Now we don't know exactly what we are going to do yet. But don't worry, we have a lot of options. We have always been and are still more than happy to talk to the cable providers throughout the country. We would also like to ask you, our viewers, to please reach out to the cable provider in your area -- whether it's Spectrum, Dish, or any of the other great providers -- and let them know that you would like for them to carry One America News. We only charge 10 cents per household per month. That is a great deal by any standard, giving all of the amazing content our team puts out.

Press Run, Biden's getting doomsday press — just like Obama did, Eric Boehlert, right, Jan. 21, 2022. Here we go again.  It wouldn’t be surprising if President Joe Biden felt a strong sense of déjà vu as he marked his first year in office and the D.C. press eagerly writes him off as a failure buried by a mountain of crises, while at the same time erasing his accomplishments. (Record job gains, ending the Forever War.)

Reading from GOP talking points, journalists remain in hyperventilation mode, obsessively detailing Biden’s soft polling numbers while loudly — and falsely —claiming he can’t get his key legislative initiatives passed into law.

Biden’s lurking sense of been-here-before would be driven by the fact that as Barack Obama’s vice president, he watched the same media story play out under a different Democratic administration. Hounded by a D.C. press corps that was often obsessed with tagging Obama as a failure, depicting him as overwhelmed and outsmarted by Republicans, and occasionally just losing its mind over relatively minor unfolding stories (remember Ebola and the glitchy Obamacare website?), the press misjudged one of the most successful and popular presidents of the last half century.

Today, the Beltway media remains in groupthink mode (CNN headline: “Is Biden's Presidency Doomed?”), with everyone eagerly hitting the same points regardless of the facts. "For now, virtually none of the groups that fueled Biden’s 2020 victory are happy,” the Associated Press recently reported, despite the fact that polling shows 80-plus percent of Democratic voters approve of Biden’s performance in office.

The Washington Post published a long obituary on Biden’s presidency this week, casting his first year in office as a failure. (“Disarray,” “tensions,” “worry,” “stumbled.”) Left unmentioned in the article’s 43 paragraphs was the fact that a record 6.4 million new jobs have been created since Biden took office, and that the U.S. now enjoys full employment with workers earning all-time high wages.

The Post article indicated that Biden’s polling numbers (“stuck in the low 40s”) were a key part of his presidency. Yet after one year in office, Trump’s approval rating was in the 30s and the press rarely obsessed over it. His historically unpopular standing simply became the new norm, as journalists instead marveled as Trump’s loyal base.

HuffPost, Personal Essay: My Gentle, Intelligent Brother Is Now A Conspiracy Theorist And His Beliefs Are Shocking, Sue Muncaster, Jan. 21, 2022. My brother is a modern conspiracy theorist.

He calls himself an “Evolutionary Linguist-Spiritual Warrior Fighting for Human Free Will on Earth” on his TikTok account, which has 12,500 followers. He uses hashtags like #zombe #apocolypse #weare #freedom and #1111. The latter, as far as I can tell from doing a little Googling, is a symbol that often represents interconnectedness and synchronicity, and that inspires individuals to attempt to manifest their intentions and take action to turn their visions into reality. On the surface, this sounds sedate, even inspiring — especially as we come out of COVID isolation. None of us seem to want to “go back to normal” because normal didn’t serve us.

Last April, my sister-in-law texted me to warn me that my brother was heading, unannounced, to my doorstep in Idaho, where I care for our elderly father. I knew he believed “everyone on the planet who received the vaccine will be dead in a few years,” but I had no idea of the depth of his fantastical beliefs.

Our evening together started with him mansplaining why cryptocurrencies are our only hope and how he had the idea for Amazon before Jeff Bezos did and how he would be the richest man in the world if not for some bad breaks along the way. Although he wasn’t physically at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., he referred to the Jan. 6 rioters as “we.”

Later that night, my brother announced, “The real reason I’m here is I’ve come to warn you that over the next two weeks, a lot of shit is going to come out about what’s been going on for the past 50 years, 100 years, 4,000 years. It is going to shock you to your core. All the conspiracy theories ― everyone you ever heard from politics to Big Oil to wars in Afghanistan to Biden not being president ― this pulls it all together.”

At this point, I excused myself to go to the restroom, turned on the Voice Memos app on my iPhone, and tucked it in my back pocket in case he divulged any plans for violence, which, thankfully, he did not. The following is a transcribed summary of the main points he “knows with certainty” that “the media won’t tell us about.”

Sue Muncaster is a freelance writer living in Teton Valley, Idaho. Through her platform Teton Strong, she explores the intentional mental, physical, social and spiritual practices and rich experiences that bring us alive and are characteristic of a values-driven outdoor lifestyle. Just last week she dipped her toes into local politics when she joined the Victor city council as a councilmember. You can find her on Facebook and Medium.

Washington Post, Opinion: Sarah Palin v. NYT: Exploring the line between bad journalism and libelous journalism, Erik Wemple, Jan. 21, 2022. First Amendment watchers, take note: Sarah Palin’s defamation claim against the New York Times will go to trial starting Jan. 24 in a New York federal courthouse. At issue is the elasticity of the protections that allow news organizations to present tough coverage of public figures.

Or, to put things a bit more sharply, the case will help demarcate the line between really bad journalism and libelous journalism.

The case got its start nearly five years ago on one of the darkest days in American political memory: James T. Hodgkinson on June 14, 2017, fired on a group of Republican lawmakers at a baseball practice in Alexandria, Va., injuring several people.

In a deadline frenzy to comment on the matter, the New York Times published a piece titled, “America’s Lethal Politics.” The editorial attempted to draw a parallel between the Hodgkinson attack and the 2011 shooting attack in Arizona by Jared Lee Loughner that killed six and injured 12 others.

“[T]he link to political incitement was clear,” wrote the Times editorial board of the Arizona shooting, which targeted then-Rep. Gabby Giffords. “Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.”

There was, in fact, no “link” between the ad of the Palin committee and the Loughner crimes. So the Times editorial board ran a correction, but it didn’t even mention Palin. She quickly sued. In August 2017, Judge Jed Rakoff tossed the suit. An appeals court subsequently reinstated the complaint and sent it to Rakoff for further consideration. He ruled in August 2020 that the case could proceed to a jury trial.

From the start, the Palin case has been a square-off over the most fundamental of media protections — namely, the “actual malice” standard. The 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan and subsequent rulings established that if public figures wished to prevail in defamation actions against news organizations, they’d need to establish that the outlet knowingly published a falsehood or did so with “reckless disregard” to its truth or falsity. “In our view, this was an honest mistake,” New York Times deputy general counsel David McGraw told this blog in 2019. “It was not an exhibit of actual malice.”

There was never any dispute that Palin — a former Alaska governor, former vice presidential candidate, Fox News contributor and reality-TV person — qualified under the law as a public figure.

Her lawyers, however, argued that the actions of James Bennet, who at the time served as editor of the Times’s editorial board, met the stringent evidentiary standards of actual malice. “Mr. Bennet had actual knowledge that the false and defamatory statements he wrote and The Times published about Mrs. Palin were untrue,” argues Palin’s amended complaint. “Alternatively, Mr. Bennet and The Times published the Palin Article with reckless disregard for and a purposeful avoidance of the truth.” (Elizabeth Williamson, then a member of the Times editorial board, wrote the first draft of the editorial, though Bennet inserted the passage at issue in the suit, according to the factual record developed on the motion to dismiss.)

Jan. 20

WhoWhatWhy, Why Does the Media Keep Blaming the Russians for JFK’s Assassination? Brian Baccus, Jan. 20, 2022. This story is part of our series revisiting the JFK assassination. To understand why we’re doing this, read our introduction.

In mid-December, the Biden administration released nearly 1,500 documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Out of all the intelligence agencies memoranda, dossiers, and interview transcripts, the media has seized upon one: a CIA memo about Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposed in-person meeting with Valery Kostikov, a notorious KGB official, in Mexico City in September 1963.

There’s nothing new about the memo in question. The same is true for most of the JFK records released in December. But as a round of fresh press coverage indicated, the encounter suggests Oswald was working for the Soviets, and that America’s Cold War nemesis was responsible for Kennedy’s killing — not the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, or the military-industrial complex.

The theory that Oswald was a KGB asset has persisted for decades, despite a lack of evidence. Even the CIA concluded that any contact Oswald had with KGB-affiliated Russians was a “grim coincidence.” (A man claiming to be Oswald did contact the Soviets in Mexico City — but that man was an impostor.)

This most recent recycling of the “Oswald and the Russians” story — the JFK assassination’s very own Russiagate — follows a predictable pattern that appears every time there’s a release of JFK records. It happened in 2017 and during the 1990s.

So, what gives? Why does the media gravitate toward the Oswald/KGB “revelation” every few years rather than any of the other more plausible theories?

This reliable rhythm suggests reporters are being encouraged to push this story, which also steers the conversation firmly away from potential domestic conspirators. The likeliest suspect behind any media manipulation — the entity that stands to benefit the most from misdirection — also happens to be the main suspect many researchers believe was involved in the assassination: the CIA.

Blame It on the Dead

With Oswald long dead and the USSR collapsed, purported “proof” that Oswald was working with the Soviets wraps up the case in the easiest way. The killer and the plotters are all long gone. Nothing else needs to be done.

This theory also exonerates the Warren Commission for its inadequate investigation, as well as the national security agencies that have refused to disclose all they know about JFK’s assassination. It also ignores the many signs that suggest Oswald may indeed have been an intelligence asset — but the CIA’s, an agency whose very existence was threatened by John F. Kennedy.

Oswald was almost certainly an agent for someone. As former Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-PA) once said, “Everywhere you look with him, there are fingerprints of intelligence.”

Circumstantial evidence suggests Oswald was recruited into the US intelligence community while in the Marines. Through this lens, everything Oswald did, including learning Russian while a teenaged Marine and “defecting” to the Soviet Union at 19 in 1959, was carefully choreographed.

Regardless of his actual allegiance, as a former defector, Oswald was well known to domestic intelligence and closely monitored.

Yet the FBI, CIA, and other federal agencies suppressed this information from the Warren Commission, important context most of the recent news coverage omits.

But much of the misdirection focuses on Oswald’s supposed activities in Mexico City.

The truth about what really happened in the Mexican capital remains elusive, but even conspiracy skeptics believe Oswald’s presumed actions there may hold the solution to the entire puzzle.

“It is startling to discover how many credible government officials — beginning with Ambassador Mann and CIA station chief Scott — have suggested that evidence was missed in Mexico that could rewrite the history of the assassination,” observed A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination author Philip Shenon, who is considered a Warren Commission shill. “The list includes the late former FBI Director Clarence Kelley and former FBI Assistant Director William Sullivan, as well as David Belin, a former staff lawyer on the Warren Commission.”

New York Times, Chicago Public Media is set to acquire The Chicago Sun-Times, Katie Robertson, Jan. 20, 2022 (print ed.). In an unlikely media deal, the big-city tabloid would become a subsidiary of the nonprofit organization that brings listeners “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me.”

The hard-hitting tone of tabloid journalism and the measured voice of public radio make for an unlikely combination, but the two are coming together in a novel media deal that is likely to shape how news is covered in Chicago for years to come.

On Tuesday night, the board of Chicago Public Media, the nonprofit organization behind the noncommercial radio station WBEZ, moved significantly closer to acquiring The Chicago Sun-Times, the tabloid that was once home to the film critic Roger Ebert and the columnist Mike Royko.

In a special meeting, the board voted to go forward with its planned acquisition of The Sun-Times, a deal that would make Chicago Public Media one of the largest nonprofit news organizations in the nation. It is expected to close by Jan. 31.

“This is an important step to grow and strengthen local journalism in Chicago,” Matt Moog, the chief executive of Chicago Public Media, said in a

WBEZ, which carries National Public Radio shows and co-produces “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me,” and The Sun-Times will share some content while working in separate newsrooms under the Chicago Public Media banner. Together, they will reach an audience of more than two million people a week, the organizations said in a news release.

The Sun-Times, which has changed hands numerous times in recent years, is owned by a patchwork group of unions, philanthropists and businesspeople, including Rocky Wirtz, the owner of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, and Michael Sacks, an investor. The coalition came about to block a bid from Tribune Publishing, the company that operates the tabloid’s broadsheet rival, The Chicago Tribune.

Struggling papers these days face a range of options: Hope for a billionaire to swoop in, as Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and his family did for The Los Angeles Times and other California papers in 2018; await the arrival of hedge-fund-backed ownership, as happened with The Tribune when its parent company became the property of Alden Global Capital last year; or try a fresh approach, like the nonprofit route.

New York Times, Top Editor Files Discrimination Suit Against The New York Post, Katie Robertson, Jan. 19, 2022 (print ed.).  In the lawsuit, Michelle Gotthelf said the tabloid’s longtime top editor, Col Allan, had retaliated against her after she turned down a sexual proposition. A former high-level editor at The New York Post claimed in a discrimination lawsuit filed on Tuesday that she had endured “several years of sex-based harassment” during her more than two decades at the tabloid, saying its longtime editor in chief retaliated against her after she reported to company officers that he had sexually harassed her.

The former editor, Michelle Gotthelf, who joined The Post as a reporter in 2000 and was the editor in chief of its website until she was dismissed last week, said in the suit that she had been fired without cause. Ms. Gotthelf’s suit names News Corporation, the Rupert Murdoch-owned company that operates The Post, and New York Post Holdings. It also names Keith Poole, the current editor in chief of the New York Post Group, and Col Allan, the former longtime top editor of The Post who spent more than 40 years leading Murdoch publications in Australia and the United States.

In the legal complaint, Ms. Gotthelf said Mr. Allan began to harass her in 2013, claiming that he “delighted in degrading Ms. Gotthelf, and women generally, in front of her mostly male peers.” She complained to The Post’s publisher and chief executive at the time, Jesse Angelo, who told her that there was not much he could do, according to the suit.

Jan. 19

WhoWhatWhy, Investigative Commentary: Why Can’t the Media Get the Story of the JFK Documents Right? Robert Smith, Jan. 19, 2022. Thousands of documents related to the JFK assassination remain under lock and key in government archives, but you wouldn’t know that — nor the obvious problems with the official story — by reading the news.  This story is part of our series revisiting the JFK assassination. To understand why we’re doing this, read our introduction.

On December 14, the Biden administration released 1,500 documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. By most estimates, another 10,000 documents still remain secret — either partially redacted or withheld in their entirety.

The 1992 JFK Records Act mandated that all secret government material on the assassination be released no later than October 2017. Only documents that the president declared a threat to national security would be exempted. That year, President Donald Trump began what is now an annual ritual: the executive branch’s failure to comply with the deadline.

Trump dutifully followed instructions from intelligence and law enforcement agencies — the very “deep state” he would rail against during his later impeachment investigation and trial — and declared approximately 18,000 documents too harmful to national security to share, and accepted the heavy redactions on documents that were released.

“Certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns,” the president said. “I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our Nation’s security.”

Trump also allowed the CIA and FBI to continue deliberating whether to release documents at all — despite the congressionally mandated deadline — for another six months, an extension later pushed back further to a year.

It’s hard to credit any genuine national security risks in the contents of documents from half a century ago. But along with generations-long stonewalling by the government, this charade also highlights the failings of mainstream media.

Major news outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, loyal defenders of the Warren Commission Report, fail to tell the public the full story behind the JFK records non-release. Moreover, they continue to mischaracterize other key aspects of the assassination and subsequent investigations.

Washington Post, Wireless carriers to limit 5G near airports after airlines warn of major disruptions, Ian Duncan and Lori Aratani, Jan. 19, 2022 (print ed.). AT&T and Verizon are planning to activate new high-speed networks Wednesday but agreed to concessions.

Wireless companies AT&T and Verizon said Tuesday they would limit the rollout of new high-speed 5G networks near airports, a step the Federal Aviation Administration said should avert possible flight disruptions and much of the potential for interference with airplane safety technology.

Airlines had begun preparing employees for a wave of disruptions tied to the rollout, while some international operators canceled flights to the United States. Tuesday’s deal marked another temporary fix in a dispute that has put different parts of the federal government at loggerheads, while leaving two of the nation’s major industries at odds.

The White House helped broker the deal, which President Biden said would still enable 90 percent of new wireless towers to launch as planned.

“This agreement protects flight safety and allows aviation operations to continue without significant disruption and will bring more high-speed internet options to millions of Americans,” Biden said in a statement.

• New York Times, Airlines Warn of Chaos if 5G Mobile Service Is Deployed This Week

New York Times, Analysis: Government agencies should have worked together while introducing new wireless technology, Peter Coy, Jan. 19, 2022. The snafu over 5G cellular service at U.S. airports is unfortunate and unnecessary. From what I can tell, most of the blame falls on a bureaucratic battle between sister agencies, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission. Politics trumped economics.

The latest: On Tuesday, AT&T and Verizon said they would scale back Wednesday’s scheduled debut of new fifth-generation cellular service near airports to address concerns that the technology would interfere with airplane equipment. They had already postponed the rollout by two weeks after airline executives had warned of chaos at airports and cargo hubs from 5G interference with their own wireless communications.

It’s possible that the airlines are exaggerating the risks of interference, as the former F.C.C. chairman Ajit Pai and others contend, but that’s not an argument I want to make. If there’s even a remote risk that planes will fall from the sky, it makes sense to dial back the rollout of 5G until the situation can be rectified.

The real question is why this interference controversy has been allowed to fester, unresolved.

Remember, a rapid rollout of 5G is a national priority for the United States. With its greater speed and capacity and quicker response, 5G will enable an array of new digital services such as telemedicine, autonomous driving and precision agriculture. There’s a geopolitical aspect as well. The United States trails China in the race to supply 5G and is laboring to catch up.
The F.C.C. auctioned off frequencies for 5G last February, raising $81 billion. The winning bidders spent another $13 billion to compensate existing users of the spectrum that needed to move to other frequencies. The auctioned frequencies were in a portion of the spectrum near — though not adjacent to — frequencies used by radar altimeters of airplanes and helicopters to measure their height above the ground. Those radar altimeters help aircraft land and are especially useful in fog and low clouds.

The problem is that the radar altimeters, also sometimes called radio altimeters, are based on designs from the 1960s or 1970s, when the airwaves were less crowded. They weren’t designed to filter out interference from devices transmitting at neighboring frequencies because the neighbors at the time were whisper-quiet.

So why didn’t the Federal Aviation Administration order the industry to install better equipment to filter out interference? Since 1930, radio engineers have been familiar with filter devices that can silence signals that come from outside a desired frequency band. Now there are digital signal processing chips that do the same thing in a more sophisticated way. The airlines are using neither.

“This is very, very easily solved technically,” said Theodore Rappaport, a developer of 5G technology who is a professor at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. “It’s frustrating as an engineer” to see the old technology still in use, he said.

The F.A.A.’s argument is that it couldn’t issue a new standard for radar altimeters without knowing in detail the design of the 5G equipment.

The F.A.A. also argues that it was excluded from decisions about 5G. In 2020, the F.A.A. administrator, Stephen Dixon, prepared a letter to Ajit Pai, then the chair of the F.C.C., expressing concerns about 5G interference, but the letter was not passed along byAdam Candeub, the acting director of the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Larry Kudlow, who headed President Donald Trump’s National Economic Council, even bragged about blowing off the F.A.A., saying on his Fox Business show, “We ignored them because the science said don’t worry about it.” He added later, “We actually fought the F.A.A. and we won.”

It appears now that the Trump administration won the battle but not the war.

This dispute isn’t stopping the rollout of 5G; more than 90 percent of it will proceed as scheduled.

Two elements make this an economics story. One is how this dispute is disrupting the rollout of a technology that’s vital to America’s technological future. The other is how bureaucracy is messing up the results of the auction, casting doubt on the ability of the government to deliver on its promises.

But auctions don’t work if the government undermines them. “You have to have a government speaking with one voice,” Thomas Hazlett, right, a professor of economics at Clemson University who was an early proponent of airwave auctions, told me.

Two things might have made the 5G process run better, Hazlett said. One would have been strong leadership from the White House to stop the bureaucratic infighting. Another would have been payments to the aircraft industry to help it foot the bill for upgrading its technology. There’s precedent for that in the $13 billion in payments that were made to satellite and terrestrial microwave operators to relocate to new frequencies.

At the moment, Hazlett said, “The system is broken.”

Washington Post, China warns foreign Olympic athletes against speaking out on politics at Winter Games, Eva Dou, Jan. 19, 2022. A member of China’s Olympics organizing committee warned that foreign athletes may face punishment for speech that violates Chinese law at the 2022 Winter Games, spotlighting concerns about the country’s restrictions on political expression.

“Any expression that is in line with the Olympic spirit I’m sure will be protected," Yang Shu, deputy director general of international relations for the Beijing Organizing Committee, said in a news conference Tuesday. “Any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment.”

In broad strokes, China’s stance falls in line with the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) established rule against political protest at the Games. The IOC also announced before last year’s Summer Games in Tokyo that athletes who staged protests there would be punished, ignoring U.S. calls to allow respectful protest for human rights.

Jan. 18

Washington Post, David S. Ferriero, archivist of the United States, is retiring, Michael E. Ruane, Jan. 18, 2022 (print ed.). David S. Ferriero, who has been the archivist of the United States for more than a decade under three presidents, is planning to retire in April. Ferriero, 76, has been head of the National Archives and Records Administration since he was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate in 2009.

“It has been the honor of a lifetime,” Ferriero, below left, wrote in a note to his staff. “My time here has been filled with opportunities, challenges, and awesome responsibilities. … I am humbled and awestruck and so deeply grateful — grateful to all of you.”

In addition to housing national treasures such as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the National Archives holds 13 billion pages of text, 10 million maps, charts and drawings, as well as tens of millions of photographs, films and other records.

The archives is also responsible for the nation’s 13 brick-and-mortar presidential libraries.

Before coming to the agency, Ferriero was director of the New York Public Libraries and served in top positions at the libraries of the Massachusetts Institution of Technology and Duke University. A native of Beverly, Mass., he served as a Navy hospital corpsman during the Vietnam War.

A self-described introvert, he is reserved and has a dry sense of humor. On his watch in 2014, the National Archives held its first sleepover.

He has pushed the digitization of the archives, and he embraced social media. In November, he noted in a blog post, “We know that not everyone can come to our facilities [for research] and providing these records online democratizes access.”

He has also promoted the role of “citizen archivists” who volunteer to transcribe and review historic documents online.

“I have met or known half of all Archivists of the United States … and none has done better” than Ferriero, historian Michael Beschloss tweeted.

One of the items framed in Ferriero’s office is a copy of a letter he wrote to President John F. Kennedy when he was in high school. The letter had been found at the Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

The future archivist asked about the Peace Corps and requested a photo of JFK.Later, the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library found two letters Ferriero had written to President Eisenhower as a youngster, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library found one he had written to President Johnson. Ferriero had them framed in his office, too.

 

Washington Post, Israeli police accused of using Pegasus spyware on opponents of Netanyahu, Shira Rubin, Jan. 18, 2022. Israeli police have used NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to remotely access, control and extract information from cellphones belonging to Israeli citizens, including leaders of a protest movement against former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to an investigation published Tuesday in the Israeli outlet Calcalist.

The military-grade software developed by the private Israeli company NSO was also used to target a number of people who were not suspected of involvement in a crime, including mayors, former government employees and at least one person close to a senior politician, according to the report.

“As a general policy, we do not comment on current or potential clients,” the NSO Group said in a statement published by Israeli media. “We would like to clarify that the company does not operate the systems in its customers’ possession and is not involved in their operation. The company sells its products under license and supervision for the use of security bodies and state law enforcement agencies, to prevent crime and terrorism legally, and according to court orders and local law in each country.”

Israeli police denied the allegations, saying that “all police activity in this field is done in accordance with the law, on the basis of court orders and strict work procedures.”

The Calcalist investigation said police began using the software in 2020 to remotely surveil the phones of prominent activists of the “Black Flag” protest, whichcalled for the ouster of Netanyahu, above right, who was then prime minister, amid a surge of coronavirus cases, an economic crisis and an ongoing corruption trial.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, left office in June 2021 but remains embroiled in a corruption trial.

Washington Post, Microsoft to acquire embattled video game publisher Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, Mikhail Klimentov, Jan. 18, 2022. The publisher of Call of Duty, Warcraft and Candy Crush has faced crises relating to allegations of workplace misconduct.

Microsoft Gaming will acquire Activision Blizzard — the embattled video game publisher behind such hit franchises as Call of Duty, Warcraft, Overwatch and Candy Crush — in a $68.7 billion deal, the company said in a blog post Tuesday.

The announcement from Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer comes as Activision Blizzard faces a series of crises: In July, the publisher was sued by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing; the state agency’s suit alleging widespread gender-based discrimination and sexual harassment at the company. Activision Blizzard also faces a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation, as well as a class-action lawsuit instigated by shareholders and an unfair labor practices complaint filed by workers and the media labor union Communications Workers of America. The publisher’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, has faced repeated calls by employees to step down.

WhoWhatWhy, Investigative Commentary: On JFK: Washington Post Deserves Pinocchio Award, Peter Janney, Jan. 18, 2022. Introduction by Milicent Cranor.

Glenn Kessler, the chief writer of The Washington Post Fact Checker and presenter of the Pinocchio Awards, relies on the public for his column. As he explains:

It’s a big world out there, and so we will rely on readers to ask questions and point out statements that need to be checked. The success of this project depends, to a great extent, on the involvement of you — the reader. We will rely on our readers to send us suggestions on topics to fact check and tips on erroneous claims.

But what happens if a reader sends in a letter to the editor pointing out erroneous claims published in the Post itself?

On December 27, a reader did send in such a letter. And it wasn’t just any reader. It was Peter Janney — son of a high-level CIA officer — who happens to have expert knowledge of the subject in question: the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

To date, the Post has not published that letter. Since we have worked with Janney in the past — we published excerpts from his book, mentioned below — he shared the letter with us.

We thought you should see it for yourself, and the document that accompanied it. They are self-explanatory.

Jan. 15

Washington Post, DirecTV says it will sever ties with far-right network One America News, Timothy Bella, Jan. 15, 2022. The conservative channel’s contract with DirecTV expires in early April. DirecTV announced Friday evening that it will sever ties with One America News later this year, pulling the conservative news channel from millions of homes and dealing a significant blow to the pro-Trump network.

The channel, which rose to prominence during the Trump administration and has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election and coronavirus pandemic, will be dropped from DirecTV in early April when its contract expires. OAN’s sister channel, A Wealth of Entertainment, will also be removed from the satellite provider. Both channels are owned by Herring Networks and founded by Robert Herring Sr., below left.

“We informed Herring Networks that, following a routine internal review, we do not plan to enter into a new contract when our current agreement expires,” a DirecTV spokesperson said in a statement to The Washington Post.

The move figures to be a big financial loss for the fringe network. An OAN accountant reported in 2020 that 90 percent of the channel’s revenue in the previous year stemmed from subscriber fees paid by DirecTV and other AT&T-owned platforms, according to Reuters. AT&T has been repeatedly criticized for playing a foundational role in building up OAN into a Trump-friendly alternative to Fox News. Though DirecTV is now its own company, AT&T owns 70 percent of the satellite provider.

Without the estimated tens of millions of dollars in revenue from AT&T, an OAN accountant said in sworn testimony that the network’s value “would be zero,” reported Reuters.

Related story:

Reuters, Special Investigative Report: How AT&T helped build far-right One America News, John Schiffman, Oct. 6, 2021 (First of two stories). As it lauded former President Donald Trump and spread his unfounded claims of election fraud, One America News Network saw its viewership jump. Reuters has uncovered how America’s telecom giant nurtured the news channel now at the center of a bitter national divide over politics and truth.

One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world's largest communications company.

A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.

OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr. has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives. “They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”

Since then, AT&T has been a crucial source of funds flowing into OAN, providing tens of millions of dollars in revenue, court records show. Ninety percent of OAN’s revenue came from a contract with AT&T-owned television platforms, including satellite broadcaster DirecTV, according to 2020 sworn testimony by an OAN accountant.

Herring has testified he was offered $250 million for OAN in 2019. Without the DirecTV deal, the accountant said under oath, the network’s value “would be zero.”

New York Times, A Bill Proposed a New Way to Teach History. It Got the History Wrong, Maria Cramer and Amanda Holpuch, Jan. 15, 2022 (print ed.). A Republican legislator in Virginia who campaigned against critical race theory introduced a bill with incorrect information on the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Amid a flurry of bills nationwide that seek to ban the teaching of critical race theory in schools, one such proposal in Virginia stood out.

Tucked inside a bill introduced by Wren Williams, a Republican delegate, was a glaring error: Among the concepts that school boards would be required to ensure students understood was “the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.”

But as scholars, Mr. Williams’s colleagues in the House of Delegates and others on social media noted, that debate was between not Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist, but Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois.

“The gross mistake in this bill is indicative of the need to have scholars and teachers, not legislators/politicians, shaping what students at every level learn in the classroom,” Caroline Janney, a professor of Civil War history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said in an email.

Washington Post, These mass shooting survivors were called journalism heroes. Then the buyouts came, Emily Davies and Elahe Izadi, Photos by Ricky Carioti, Jan. 15, 2022 (print ed.).

In the years since the shooting, these journalists had become family — and not just because of what they had survived. They had helped each other through a series of attacks: the physical one in their newsroom and the PTSD that made it hard to get through each day. And together they had faced the existential threat to their industry that compelled longtime colleagues to take buyouts, permanently shuttered their newsroom and, finally, led to their newspaper’s acquisition by a hedge fund with a reputation for deep cost-cutting.

“It felt like death all over again in a lot of ways when people would leave to take buyouts,” said Selene San Felice, a former Capital Gazette reporter who had hidden under a desk during the attack. “We could feel each other being ripped apart when all we wanted to do was stay.”

The survivors have confronted these intersecting traumas daily, but perhaps never as directly as throughout the criminal responsibility trial of Jarrod Ramos, which took place in Annapolis three years after he attacked their newsroom and days after Alden Global Capital acquired their paper.

Before the Capital Gazette became nationally associated with the terror of June 28, 2018, it was primarily known as the daily paper of record for Maryland’s capital, with roots dating back to pre-Revolutionary War America. It was also a trailblazer, launching one of the first newspaper websites in the country. But newspaper industry tides changed in the mid-2000s with the steep decline in ad revenue. By 2014, the paper’s longtime local owner had died, and it was sold to the Baltimore Sun Media Group — which was owned by the legendary yet financially troubled publisher Tribune.

The reporters moved from their old, bustling newsroom to a smaller alternative, and the staff of the Annapolis paper began to shrink. By 2017, there were roughly 30 journalists covering a community of more than 500,000.

In response to questions for this story, Alden offered a single-sentence response: “The Capital Gazette is a prized jewel in American journalism and we are proud supporters and owners of its critical mission to provide valued local news and information that subscribers rely on.”

White House Chronicle / Inside Sources, Joe Madison Thinks Voting Rights Are Worth Risking His Life For, Llewellyn King (Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle" on PBS), Jan. 15, 2022. Election Day isn’t celebrated, and for most of us, voting is inconvenient. So much so that only presidential elections draw a decent turnout. In 2020, a record year, 66.8 percent of the electorate voted.

The ballot box towers in significance in its consequence, but it seems banal when you traipse to a church hall, an armory, or a high school to do the deed.

Also, people in line to vote act strangely, suspecting each other of being a supporter of the rascals who have either made a mess of things or the rascals who will make a mess of things.

Given these things, and without regard to the present standoff in Congress over the For the People Act, it would seem to me that voting by mail, or even electronic voting, makes sense. We do most things of consequence electronically. The failsafe ID for voting in most states is a driver’s license. The Republicans are against voting by mail and electronic voting, but in most states, you can renew a driver’s license by either means. Kafkaesque?

For Joe Madison, the legendary Black broadcaster and human and civil rights activist, voting is vital, and the ability to cast your vote easily and without duress is sacred. Further, he believes that contrived exclusion from the polls is a major felony against people of color.

Madison is prepared to put his life where his mouth is: He began a hunger strike for voting rights on Nov. 8, 2021.

During his college days, Madison was an all-conference running back on the football team, but now he is emaciated. He is following a liquid diet like one his friend Dick Gregory, the late comedian and civil rights activist, developed for his hunger strikes.

Madison told me he falls asleep at odd times and wakes up during the night. There is physical discomfort. Although he is getting to the point where the stress is showing, he plans to continue his hunger strike.

I have known Madison for over 20 years. I can hear the weakness in his voice. He is still doing his live radio talk show on SiriusXM Radio daily from 6 a.m. until 10 a.m. Eastern Time. As someone who has done four hours straight on radio, I can attest that in the best of health, it is a workout.

Madison sees the current battle over voting rights in the Senate and the Republican-controlled state legislatures’ push to restrict voting rights as reminiscent of the end of Reconstruction when the South began to push back against Black voting rights granted at the end of the Civil War. “It included poll taxes, literacy qualifications, and property ownership, and led to lynching and the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan,” Madison said.

He told me he is worried for the future of his children and grandchildren if voting rights should be abridged again. He has three daughters, a son, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. He wants the vote to be free and fair for them and their children. That is why he is staring death in the face and hoping that the Democrats will prevail, and good sense will triumph, he told me.

Madison studied sociology at Washington University in St. Louis where, in addition to being a football player, he sang solo baritone in the college chorus. On graduating, Madison went into civil rights work. At age 24, he became the youngest director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Detroit.

Madison began his broadcasting career in Detroit in 1980 and moved to Washington in the 1990s, where he mixed broadcasting with activism in a slew of causes.

I met Madison when he was protesting slavery in Africa and went to Sudan to free slaves. He wants the world to know how critical the voting rights legislation is to the African American community. “If we don’t get that bill, it could cost the Democrats both houses and the White House. African Americans may just be so fed up that they stay home and don’t vote,” he said.

Madison supports moves to modify the filibuster to bring about Senate passage. He is very hopeful the legislation will pass, and recalcitrant Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (W. Va.) and Krysten Sinema (Ariz.) will vote for changes to the filibuster.

You don’t have to agree with Madison to admire him: A man with the courage of his convictions, measured by the endangerment of his health.

New York Times, The Saturday Profile: Bosnian Film Director Is Vilified in Serbia and ‘Disobedient’ at Home, Andrew Higgins, Updated Jan. 15, 2022. Jasmila Zbanic, who won best director for “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” insists on blaming individuals, not ethnic groups, for atrocities committed as Yugoslavia imploded, a stance that can anger all sides.

A celebrated Bosnian film director always knew her latest movie, the harrowing drama of a mother trying unsuccessfully to save her husband and two sons from the Srebrenica massacre in 1995, would be panned by Serb nationalists.

But the filmmaker, Jasmila Zbanic, was still taken aback when Serbian media invited a convicted war criminal to opine on the movie, “Quo Vadis, Aida?,” for which she recently won Europe’s best director award.

The chosen critic? Veselin Sljivancanin, a former Yugoslav army officer sentenced to prison by a tribunal in The Hague for aiding and abetting the murder of prisoners in Croatia in the Vukovar massacre.

While asking such a notorious figure to comment on the movie was a surprise, his reaction to it wasn’t: He denounced it as lies that “incite ethnic hatred” and smear all Serbs.

“He, a war criminal, wants all Serbs, most of whom had nothing to do with his crimes, to feel attacked for his crimes,” Ms. Zbanic said in a recent interview at her production company atop a hill overlooking Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. “He is putting his guilt on all Serbs.”

Ms. Zbanic’s unwavering belief that the guilt for the atrocities committed as the former Yugoslavia split apart belongs to individuals, not whole ethnic groups, has also made her a difficult cultural icon for some in her own community of Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, to embrace.

When the European Film Academy last month gave her the award of best director and selected “Quo Vadis, Aida?” as Europe’s best film of the year, a few Bosniak politicians congratulated her on their personal Facebook pages, but there were no official celebrations of the kind held whenever Bosniak athletes triumph abroad.

“I did not even get any flowers,” she said.

Fiercely independent and a self-declared feminist, Ms. Zbanic has for years kept her distance from Bosnia’s dominant and male-dominated political force, the Party of Democratic Action, or S.D.A., a Bosniak nationalist group. Like Serb parties on the other side of the ethnic divide, the S.D.A. now wins votes by stirring animosity toward, and fear of, other groups.

New York Times, Cambodia’s Internet May Soon Be Like China’s: State-Controlled, Charles McDermid, Jan. 15, 2022. Under a new decree, all web traffic will be routed through a government portal. Rights groups say a crackdown on digital expression is about to get worse.

The day Kea Sokun was arrested in Cambodia, four men in plainclothes showed up at his photography shop near Angkor Wat and carted him off to the police station. Mr. Kea Sokun, who is also a popular rapper, had released two songs on YouTube, and the men said they needed to know why he’d written them.

“They kept asking me: ‘Who is behind you? What party do you vote for?’” Mr. Kea Sokun said. “I told them, ‘I have never even voted, and no one controls me.’”

The 23-year-old artist, who says his songs are about everyday struggles in Cambodia, was sentenced to 18 months in an overcrowded prison after a judge found him guilty of inciting social unrest with his lyrics. His case is part of a crackdown in which dozens have been sent to jail for posting jokes, poems, pictures, private messages and songs on the internet.

The ramped-up scrutiny reflects an increasingly restrictive digital environment in Cambodia, where a new law will allow the authorities to monitor all web traffic in the country. Critics say that the decree puts Cambodia on a growing list of countries that have embraced China’s authoritarian model of internet surveillance, from Vietnam to Turkey, and that it will deepen the clash over the future of the web.

Jan. 14

Hays Post, Opinion: In banishing reporters, Kan. Senate joins destructive trend, Clay Wirestone, Jan. 14, 2022. Kansas Senate leadership’s decision to bar reporters from the floor during debate should trouble everyone who values a free and fair press in the Sunflower State. Unfortunately, the ramifications spread further and should trouble concerned citizens across the country.

To put it bluntly, this move appears to be part of a multistate effort on behalf of Republican powerbrokers to target the news media. In Iowa, for example, the state senate has done the same thing as Kansas — evicting reporters from the floor, where they had co-existed more or less peacefully with legislators for more than 140 years.

“The new rule denies reporters access to the press benches near senators’ desks, a proximity current and former statehouse reporters told The Washington Post is crucial for the most accurate and nuanced coverage,” the Post reported last week, while also summarizing why the access is so important. “The position allows reporters to see and hear everything clearly on the Senate floor and to get real-time answers and clarifications during debates.”

Both states have launched a coordinated attack on accurate information.

The Republican National Committee has gotten into the act too, according to The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman. The GOP has complained for years that its presidential candidates are treated unfairly in debates. By that, of course, they mean asked tough questions by impartial moderators in front of a national audience.

Thus, the RNC “is preparing to change its rules to require presidential candidates seeking the party’s nomination to sign a pledge to not participate in any debates sponsored by the Commission on Presidential Debates.”

These attacks make sense as the once proud Republican Party remakes itself in the shape of former President Donald Trump. Remember, it was Trump who called our nation’s free press — one of its proudest accomplishments — “the enemy of the American people.”

Conservatives have created a separate information ecosystem, one based on partisan hyperbole and outright falsehoods, to feed their sense of grievance and entitlement. As traditional news media has raced to adapt to the challenges of social media and changing reading and viewing habits, these alternative outlets have been more than happy to warp our country’s information landscape.

Traditional media, and the kind of rigorous reporting and informed commentary that we provide, challenges those who would bamboozle the public. No matter the party or the legislation, we report the news. What’s happened in Kansas, Iowa and on the national stage will make that tougher.

That, sadly, appears to be the point.

Clay Wirestone has written columns and edited reporting for newsrooms in Kansas, New Hampshire, Florida and Pennsylvania. He has also fact checked politicians, researched for Larry the Cable Guy, and appeared in PolitiFact, Mental Floss, cnn.com and a host of other publications.

Jan. 12

Daily Beast, Kayleigh McEnany Reportedly Meets With Jan. 6 Committee, Staff Report, Jan. 12, 2022. The committee subpoenaed the former Trump flack, above right, and current Fox News host back in November, expressing interest in her public statements pushing the Big Lie.

Former White House press secretary and current Fox News host Kayleigh McEnany appeared virtually before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack on Wednesday, according to CNN.

McEnany, who was both then-President Donald Trump’s spokesperson and a senior advisor to Trump’s campaign during the 2020 election, was subpoenaed in November. The committee’s subpoena expressed interest in McEnany’s public remarks pushing Trump’s election lies following President Joe Biden’s electoral victory, stating that her comments contributed to the election denialism that fueled the insurrection.

McEnany did not appear on Wednesday's broadcast of Fox News’ Outnumbered, the midday opinion show she co-hosts. She’s not the only Fox News personality that’s become ensnared in the Jan. 6 probe: the committee has also called on host Sean Hannity to cooperate, citing his many texts with the Trump White House related to the riots and the ex-president’s plans to overturn the election.

 

Daily Beast, Hundreds of Doctors Demand Spotify Stop ‘Menace’ Joe Rogan From Pushing Anti-Vax Misinfo, AJ McDougall, Jan. 12, 2022. More than 200 medical and science professionals have called on Spotify to embrace a misinformation policy after comedian Joe Rogan, right, hosted an anti-vaccine virologist on an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the most popular podcast in the world.

Using Rogan’s platform last month, Dr. Robert Malone, shown above in a separate appearance on Steve Bannon's "War Room" show, spewed baseless and bizarre lies, blaming “mass formation psychosis” for belief in vaccination as a tool to prevent severe illness.

The 3-hour episode went aggressively viral, being shared tens of thousands of times on Spotify alone. In response, 270 doctors, physicians, and science educators signed the open letter fact-checking Malone and demanding accountability from the streaming service, which bought exclusive streaming rights to The Joe Rogan Experience last year.

One doctor who signed the letter called Rogan “a menace to public health.” Speaking to Rolling Stone, Dr. Katrine Wallace condemned platforming people like Malone. His claims “are fringe ideas not backed in science,” she said, “and having it on a huge platform makes it seem there are two sides to this issue. And there are really not. The overwhelming evidence is the vaccine works, and it is safe.”

  The Guardian, Opinion: Anti-vaxxers are touting another new Covid ‘cure’ – drinking urine. But they are not the only obstacles to ending the pandemic, Arwa Mahdawi, Jan. 12, 2022 (print ed.). Those spreading misinformation are doing real damage. But big pharma and rich countries need to stop hoarding vaccines.

I am starting to think that common sense really is not that common after all – we live in exceedingly stupid times. Exhibit 874: US anti-vaxxers are now urging people to drink their own urine to fight coronavirus. Over the weekend, Christopher Key, the leader of an anti-Covid-19 vaccine group called the “Vaccine Police”, posted videos online extolling the health benefits of what he described as “urine therapy”. According to the wizard of wee, there is “tons and tons of research … [and] peer-reviewed published papers on urine”; so if you do your own pee-search you will discover it is God’s own antidote to Covid-19. “This vaccine is the worst bioweapon I have ever seen,” Key said. “I drink my own urine!”

That is not the only questionable thing he does. Key was recently arrested for refusing to wear a mask and filming proceedings during a court hearing. The reason he was in court? He was arrested in April for refusing to wear a mask at a Whole Foods store. In August he made headlines for suggesting that pharmacists should be executed for administering coronavirus vaccines; in December he also set off on a road trip across the US with a fake badge and firearms, in a mission to arrest a Democratic governor over vaccine mandates. Very busy man, our Mr Key! I cannot help thinking that if his name was Mohammed his shenanigans would have had him locked up in Guantánamo Bay by now.

Key’s “urine therapy” is far from the only experimental – and highly dubious – Covid “cure” to be promoted during the pandemic. We all remember the former US president’s comments on the benefits of injecting bleach. Last year saw a prolonged bout of Ivermectin-mania.

Now, along with urine, the right seems to be fixated on Viagra and colloidal silver. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who has repeatedly questioned the efficacy and safety of Covid vaccines, recently dedicated a portion of his show to hyping the potential of Viagra as a potential cure. Carlson seized on the story of a British nurse reportedly recovering from a Covid-19 coma, after being given a dose of Viagra, to sing the little blue pill’s praises. “Is there anything [Viagra] doesn’t cure?” Carlson joked. Yes, I am afraid it does not appear to cure stupidity.

Speaking of which, the conservative media personality Candace Owens recently told her social media followers that she takes a “teaspoon a day” of colloidal silver, a product that has also been touted as a Covid cure by the likes of Infowars founder Alex Jones. I am sure I do not need to tell you this but there is zero evidence that colloidal silver can help with Covid. On the contrary, taking too much can turn your skin blue permanently and, in rare cases, can even kill you. (I can never resist an opportunity to big-up my hero Wilkie Collins, so I urge you to read his underrated novel Poor Miss Finch, about a blind woman who falls in love with identical twins, one of whom turns blue after trying to cure his epilepsy with silver. The novel won’t cure Covid but it may provide temporary reprieve from existential ennui.)

The amount of misinformation about Covid cures is highly depressing, and it is important that we hold to account the people spreading dangerous falsehoods, and undermining trust in the vaccine. Still, let us be clear: the biggest obstacle towards ending this pandemic is not kooks such as Key and Owens. The obstacle is the rich countries that have been hoarding vaccines, and the likes of Pfizer and Moderna, who have been slow to license their vaccine technology (developed with taxpayer money) to poor countries. The fact that big pharma is making billions from a public health crisis is unconscionable. I am very pro-vaccine but I am running out of enthusiasm for boosters. The idea of potentially having to get a fourth shot soon, while so much of the world still cannot access a first dose, makes me sick. If only we had a vaccine for greed.

Daily Beast, MAGA App Gettr Bans Right-Wing Pundit Over N-Word, Zachary Petrizzo, Updated Jan. 11-12, 2022. The free speech MAGA-loving social media site Gettr, founded by former Trump advisor Jason Miller, banned former Blaze TV host Jon Miller over using the N-word on their platform.

“Jon Miller was suspended from Gettr because he used the N-word in his profile. This is a clear violation of our terms of service,” a Gettr spokesperson told The Daily Beast on Tuesday evening. “Gettr defends free speech, but there is no room for racial slurs on our platform.”

However, Miller maintains he was booted “for no reason.” “Guess I was too critical of them for suspending others?" he riffed on Twitter. “What does it say when the 1st platform to ban me is the one that sells itself as the free speech alternative?” The move to ban Miller comes as Gettr continues to fight white nationalists on their platform.

Jan. 11

U.S. Justice Dept., Leader of Neo-Nazi group sentenced for plot targeting journalist and advocates, Staff Reports, Jan. 11, 2022. Former Washington resident relocated to Texas after emergency order seizing his firearms

Kaleb Cole, 26, a leader of the Neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, was sentenced today in Seattle to 7 years in prison for his role in a plot to threaten and intimidate journalists and advocates who worked to expose anti-Semitism. At the sentencing hearing U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said, “We cannot tolerate his threats to silence others… To function as a democratic society, we need reliable and truthful journalists.”

In September 2021, a jury in the Western District of Washington convicted Cole of one count of interfering with a federally protected activity because of religion, three counts of mailing threatening communications, and one count of conspiring with other Atomwaffen members to commit three offenses against the United States––interference with federally-protected activities because of religion, mailing threatening communications, and cyberstalking.

“Kaleb Cole helped lead a violent, nationwide neo-Nazi group. He repeatedly promoted violence, stockpiled weapons, and organized ‘hate camps,’” said U.S. Attorney Nick Brown. “Today the community and those Mr. Cole and his co-conspirators targeted stand-up to say hate has no place here. He tried to intimidate journalists and advocates with hate-filled and threatening posters, tried to amplify their fear. Instead, they faced him in court and their courage has resulted in the federal prison sentence imposed today.”

Evidence introduced at trial showed that Cole and other members of Atomwaffen plotted to intimidate journalists and others by mailing threatening posters or gluing the posters to victims’ homes. The group focused primarily on those who are Jewish or journalists of color. Cole created the posters, which warned the recipients that “you have been visited by your local Nazis.” The posters contained threatening images, such as a hooded figure preparing to throw a Molotov cocktail at a house. The threatening posters were delivered to homes in late January 2020.

At trial, the victims described how receiving the posters impacted them. Some moved from their homes for a time or installed security systems. One purchased a firearm and took a firearms safety class. Another started opening her mailbox with a stick due to fear of what might be inside. One left her job as a journalist.

“Threats motivated by religious intolerance are antithetical to American values, even more so when they aim to intimidate journalists and others who are working to expose bigotry in our society.” said Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The defendant led a multi-state plot by a neo-Nazi group to threaten and intimidate journalists and advocates who were doing important work to expose anti-Semitism around the country. The Justice Department will continue to investigate and prosecute these hateful acts.”

“The defendant sought to intimidate journalists and advocates working to expose anti-Semitism, but that effort failed,” said Assistant Director Timothy Langan of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. “Cole’s intended victims fought back but not with threats of violence; they fought back in a court of law. The FBI will continue to do our part by aggressively investigating cases involving threats or acts of violence.”

“Mr. Cole displayed through his actions that his beliefs were more than just rhetoric. No doubt, the exemplary work of our investigators and partners prevented Cole’s targets from becoming victims of violence,” said Donald Voiret, Special Agent in Charge FBI- Seattle.

Daily Beast, Aussie News Anchors Call Djokovic a ‘Lying Sneaky Asshole’ in Leaked Footage, Blake Montgomery, Jan. 11, 2022. Australian news anchors aired out their real feelings about tennis star Novak Djokovic—and it wasn’t pretty.

Footage that leaked of Channel 7’s Rebecca Maddern and Mike Amor during a commercial break showed Maddern saying, “That Djokovic is a lying, sneaky asshole… It’s unfortunate that everyone else stuffed up around him. To go out when you’re COVID-positive—well, I don’t think he even was COVID-positive.”

Amor replied, “I think he got a bullshit fucking excuse and then fell over his own fucking lies… But I think he’s going to get away with it.”

Djokovic, who is unvaccinated against COVID-19, had traveled to Australia to play in the Australian Open, claiming he had received a medical exemption to the country’s vaccine requirement, citing a positive COVID test Dec. 16. Photos showed him in public without a mask on Dec. 17.

After Australian immigration authorities detained him, he won an appeal for release, though an immigration judge must still decide whether he can stay in the country and compete. Maddern has apologized, and Seven Network Director of News and Public Affairs Craig McPherson said in a statement: “The illegal recording was of a private conversation between two colleagues. It was an underhanded, cowardly act.”

Jan. 10

Just Security, Opinion: With Subpoena to a Photojournalist, Jan. 6 Committee Runs Needless Risks to Press Freedom, Grayson Clary and Gabe Rottman, Jan. 10, 2022. The raft of subpoenas issued by the House panel investigating the Capitol riot has prompted, in turn, a raft of suits hoping to block the demands. But alongside the predictable lineup of plaintiffs—former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, or former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows—one stands out.

In Harris v. U.S. House Select Committee, independent photojournalist Amy Harris alleges that the Committee’s subpoena to her phone provider, Verizon, threatens to expose the confidential sources she relies on in connection with her reporting on the Proud Boys. As the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and more than 50 other organizations argued in a recent letter, Harris’s challenge raises important press freedom concerns. The Committee should withdraw the demand, which sets Congress on a dangerous path and will raise thorny constitutional questions if litigation is forced to proceed.

Of course, it should go without saying that the panel’s interest in investigating the events of January 6 is legitimate and important. But there’s likewise little doubt that Harris—in her capacity as a member of the press—has made important contributions to our understanding of that day in her own right. As her complaint details, Harris’s photos of the riot ran in a slew of major news outlets, including the Washington Post, and she was present in the first place to continue reporting a profile on Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. In other words, what distinguishes Harris’s suit from the other subpoena challenges is that the public’s interest in coming to terms with an event of clear public concern appears on both sides of the case caption.

For much the same reason, the subpoena for Harris’s records is a historical anomaly. While collisions between Congress’s investigative powers and the freedom of the press aren’t unheard of, in the modern era clashes have been exceptionally rare.

To our knowledge, the last such confrontation took place fully three decades ago, when the special counsel appointed by the Senate to investigate leaks during Justice Thomas’s confirmation issued subpoenas to Timothy Phelps of Newsday and Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio, as well as a subpoena for their phone records. Both Phelps and Totenberg testified before the special counsel but refused to identify their confidential sources or reveal any unpublished information. Ultimately, the Senate Rules Committee refused to authorize an effort to secure contempt citations, with Chair Wendell Ford of Kentucky explicitly resting the decision on the First Amendment. As he put it, the subpoenas’ chilling effect could “close a door where more doors need opening.”

There have been only a handful of other subpoena conflicts between Congress and the press in the twentieth century. Arguably the most high-profile one was a demand to CBS president Frank Stanton, requiring the production of outtakes from The Selling of the Pentagon, a documentary critical of military public relations activities that some members of Congress and other public officials said were selectively edited. At the same moment the Pentagon Papers case was racing through the courts, Congress was debating holding Stanton in contempt. In early July 1971, the House commerce committee voted 25 to 13 to hold Stanton in contempt, but the full House refused to do so by a vote of 226 to 181. That rare rebuke of a committee by the body as a whole was widely interpreted as a landmark press-freedom precedent.

A few subsequent cases nevertheless marred Congress’s relationship with the press, including an unsuccessful attempt by the House to force CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr to reveal his source for the leaked Pike committee report on intelligence abuses in the mid-1970s, as well a quickly withdrawn subpoena to a Washington Times reporter in the early 1980s. But the key point is that such confrontations have been the exception rather than the rule, and in the modern era have uniformly been resolved in favor of press freedom. That history adds up to what Professor Christina Koningisor, chronicling the emergence of Congress’s sensitivity toward press rights in the nineteenth century, has called a “de facto reporter’s privilege.”

Hopefully the January 6 panel will take this history to heart and withdraw the Harris subpoena. If not, though, Harris’s suit will raise difficult constitutional questions that remain largely unresolved. We know of no case on all fours with this one—a pre-enforcement suit seeking review of a congressional subpoena to a third-party for a reporter’s records. And while actions like this one raise a tangle of complicated legal issues, some road to First Amendment review must exist to prevent an obvious chilling effect on reporter-source contacts.

Jan. 7

 

Sidney Poitier with, from left, Katharine Houghton, Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “Guess Who’s coming to Dinner” (1967). He played a doctor whose race tests the liberal principles of his prospective in-laws (Columbia Pictures photo).

New York Times, Sidney Poitier, Who Paved the Way for Black Actors in Film, Dies at 94, William Grimes, Jan. 7, 2022. The first Black performer to win the Oscar for best actor, he once said he felt “as if I were representing 15, 18 million people with every move I made.”

Sidney Poitier, whose portrayal of determined, dignified heroes in films like “To Sir, With Love,” “In the Heat of the Night” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” established him as Hollywood’s first Black matinee idol and helped open the door for Black actors in the film industry, has died at 94.

His death was confirmed by Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Bahamas, where Mr. Poitier grew up. No other details were immediately provided.

Mr. Poitier, whose Academy Award for the 1963 film “Lilies of the Field” made him the first Black performer to win in the best-actor category, rose to prominence when the civil rights movement was beginning to make headway in the United States. His roles tended to reflect the peaceful integrationist goals of the struggle. Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet resolution. They met hatred with reason and forgiveness, sending a reassuring message to white audiences and exposing Mr. Poitier to attack as an Uncle Tom when the civil rights movement took a more militant turn in the late 1960s.

 

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, The Dilemma of the Journalist Who Talked to the Maxwell Juror, Vicky Ward, Jan. 7-8, 2022. I got a call last night from Australian freelance journalist Lucia Osborne-Crowley. I had gotten to know Lucia, who is 29, while covering the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Lucia was always upbeat; always thoughtful and alert.

Her reporting and work ethic impressed me so much that I wrote to Rolling Stone editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman about her. I suggested she could be a potential star reporter and writer for him.

But, last night, she was very upset.

“I’m in turmoil,” she said. “What do I do?”

Lucia had broken the world-wide exclusive that has had the potential to cause a mistrial in the Maxwell case. In other words, she had done something very difficult, journalistically speaking.

It was Lucia who first reported in Britain’s Independent newspaper that Juror Number 50 (who asked that he be identified with his first and middle names: "Scotty David") had himself suffered sexual abuse and talked about it in the jury room.

Significantly, according to Lucia’s reporting, David said he couldn’t remember the details of the preliminary questionnaire potential jurors had to fill out—which asked jury candidates whether they or family members or friends had been victims of sexual abuse, assault, or harassment—but he was sure he had filled it in correctly.

The consequence of Lucia’s reporting is that Maxwell’s defense team has asked for a new trial, implying—we don’t know for sure—that David answered incorrectly.

David is now lawyered up. And Judge Nathan has asked for motions from both sides in the coming weeks. And the U.S. Attorney General is reportedly now investigating what happened. So we have to wait and see whether there will be a do-over.

But poor Lucia, meanwhile, has been savagely attacked by those who have accused her of deliberately sabotaging the trial, suggesting she is part of a pro-Maxwell conspiracy.

Lucia’s dilemma touches on an incredibly profound issue to do with the difficulty of reporting the truth in a climate in which, given current polarizations, the truth is not always welcome.

Daily Kos, Commentary: NY Times and 11 media organizations file amicus brief supporting Daily Kos in Kennedy Jr. lawsuit, Kos (Markos Moulitsas), Jan. 7, 2022. Anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. is suing Daily Kos, trying to force us to reveal the identity of one of our community members. We’re telling him to go pound sand. Lawyers are involved. You can get the background here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

In short, community member DowneastDem wrote about Kennedy cavorting with Nazis at a Berlin rally. Kennedy then sued in New York court to reveal her or his identity.

Kennedy (shown at right in a photo by Gage Skidmore) claims he wants to sue for defamation, but he’s refused to sue any other media outlet reporting on the Nazi rally, and he’s refused to sue me and Daily Kos, even though I’ve said much worse things about him. Kennedy is attempting to dox a community member for criticizing him, and we’re refusing to let him do it. The great folks at Public Citizen are providing that community member with pro bono legal services.

Kennedy won the first round in New York state court, which allowed him to try and get the blogger’s identity from us. But, we’re in California, and a California court said “nope” and quashed the subpoena, pending the outcome of any New York appeals. So we’re now back in New York, where we have appealed the trial court’s decision. In the final days of 2021, we got unexpectedly great news on that front, as the entire media establishment has filed an amicus brief supporting our First Amendment fight.

The brief was written by The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, joined by 11 media companies and organizations: The E.W. Scripps Company, First Amendment Coalition (the nation’s fourth-largest local TV broadcaster with 61 stations), The Media Institute, MediaNews Group (which owns over 100 newspapers and 200 other assorted news platforms), New York News Publishers Association, New York Public Radio, The New York Times Company, Online News Association, Radio Television Digital News Association, Society of Professional Journalists, and the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University. This means the full weight of the media establishment has joined in on our side. As they write in their brief, “Amici thus have a strong interest in ensuring that New York courts apply a standard for pre-suit disclosure of anonymous online speakers’ identities that appropriately accounts for the First Amendment interests in such speech.”

To recap, the New York trial court ruled that there was no harm in unmasking DowneastDem because she or he could then defend against defamation in court. The judge was unpersuaded by our argument that the unmasking was the sole purpose of Kennedy’s lawsuit, not defamation, and would impact both the diarist, and everyone else’s ability to comment on current events anonymously without fear of public reprisal—a right enjoyed from the very founding of our nation. The media orgs write:

Indeed, as the Supreme Court has underscored, anonymous speech has played an important role throughout U.S. history. Revolutionary writers garnered public support through tracts published under pseudonyms such as “Common Sense” or “Farmer.” After the Revolution, Federalists and anti-Federalists relied on the cloak of anonymity to debate the Constitution, writing under names like “Publius” and “an American Citizen.” As this history demonstrates, anonymous speech has “an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent.” [Citations omitted]

 

Alex Jones, host and founder of the Texas-based Infowars show (file photo).

HuffPost, Alex Jones' Infowars Store Made $165 Million Over 3 Years, Records Show, Sebastian Murdock, Jan. 7, 2022. New court records first obtained by HuffPost illuminate how the conspiracy theorist has built an empire hawking supplements and survival gear.

For years, conspiracy theorist and disinformation peddler Alex Jones has told his supporters that the only thing keeping his media empire afloat is their financial backing.

“As much begging as I do, we can barely pay the bills,” Jones told a caller on Thursday during a segment on his radio show promoting the Infowars store. “I’m not going to stop growth and let them push us backwards. I need your help, Frank. I need your help!”

Despite his pleas for money, Infowars’ store ― where Jones sells an amalgamation of dietary supplements and survival gear ― made $165 million in sales from September 2015 to the end of 2018, according to court filings related to a lawsuit Jones recently lost over his lies about the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre. The records, first obtained by HuffPost, give the clearest picture to date of the financial situation of the Infowars website and Jones himself. The records also provide a window into how vast and powerful Jones’ reach is and may provide clues into how he funds his political activities, including his participation in the U.S. Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021. HuffPost is publishing the full financial records of the store.

“The enemy wants to cut off our funding to destroy us,” Jones said in a 2018 broadcast. “If you don’t fund us, we’ll be shut down.”

That same year, the Infowars store made more than $56 million in sales.

The new financial records were first submitted by Jones’ legal team as part of a discovery request for a court case he recently lost against the parent of a Sandy Hook victim. For years, Jones has used his platform on Infowars to falsely claim the shooting that left 20 children and six adults dead was a “false flag” filled with “green screen” images and “crisis actors.”

Jones lost every case against him levied by Sandy Hook parents after two separate judges delivered default judgments against Jones over his inability to provide internal company documents and emails related to the cases. Juries will be convened in 2022 to determine how much Jones will ultimately owe the parents.

On Dec. 27, lawyers for several Sandy Hook parents filed court depositions with the Travis County district clerk in Austin, Texas, where Jones’ radio show is based. Tucked away among the more than 500 pages of deposition transcripts were more than 30 pages of spreadsheets detailing how much the Infowars store made every day from Sept. 18, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2018, including the number of orders made and items sold. HuffPost first obtained the documents on Tuesday.

Jones’ lawyer, Bradley Reeves, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Mark Bankston, a lawyer with Farrar & Ball who represents several Sandy Hook parents suing Jones and who filed the latest motion, told HuffPost that “the public filings speak for themselves” and declined to comment further.

The months of September and October 2015 saw a handful of orders a day — but just one year later, the Infowars store was making an average of about $110,000 a day. And some of Jones’ most profitable days were the ones when he pushed his Sandy Hook lies.

For instance, on Nov. 18, 2016, Jones aired a segment titled “Alex Jones’ Final Statement on Sandy Hook” in which he said he has “watched a lot of soap operas, and I’ve seen actors before. And I know when I’m watching a movie and when I’m watching something real.”

The Infowars store made just over $100,000 that day.

About five months later, on April 22, 2017, Jones published a new video on Infowars titled “Sandy Hook Vampires Exposed.” The store made $90,000.

In a June 2017 segment for NBC’s “Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly,” Sandy Hook parent Neil Heslin painfully described holding his 6-year-old son’s body.

Press Run, Commentary: Joe Rogan sounds like the new Rush Limbaugh, Eric Boehlert, Jan. 7, 2022. Far-right lurch. Late last year, popular podcast host Joe Rogan invited onto his show Dr. Robert Malone, a world-class Covid denier and medical quack, who told Rogan’s millions of listeners that public health experts advocating for vaccines today are akin to Nazi’s in the 1930s. Getting vaccinated against a deadly virus was a sign of “mass formation psychosis,” and Malone suggested Biden was leading a hypnotized cult. It was a misinformation-fest that Rogan said at the time he hoped would go viral.

It did. Then the whole thing got banned by YouTube, where the Joe Rogan Experience gets uploaded, for violating the platform’s rules about trafficking in pandemic lies. It was the latest, reckless example of a once-libertarian podcast host with an eclectic past (actor, comedian, “cage-fighting commentator”), hitching his wagon to conservative lies and distortion, as he whips up distrust of the government and science.

As Rogan, left, takes a hard turn to the right, you get the feeling he wants to be the new Rush Limbaugh — the source of GOP misinformation and conspiracies. More than any other daytime talker, it’s Rogan who could fill Limbaugh’s shoes after the GOP host passed away last year.

Like Limbaugh, Rogan preaches to a mostly male audience of roughly 10 million that wallows in victimhood while the host lashes out at imaginary forces trying to keep the White Man down in America. (“Straight white men are not allowed to talk.”) Like Limbaugh, Rogan faces no consequences for peddling ceaseless lies. Spotify, which has exclusive rights to Rogan’s show, refuses to acknowledge the torrent of misinformation that flow from his show, while at the same time pretending Spotify podcast hosts must adhere to company guidelines.

And like Limbaugh who landed a $100 million contract for the endless litany of smears he trafficked in for decades, Rogan last year penned a nine-figure deal.

The podcast host made political headlines in the winter of 2020 when he said he would support Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) in the Democratic primary. Lots of progressives rushed to embrace the host, suggesting he reached an audience outside of the traditional Democratic base, even though Rogan appears to despise the Left.

Since then, Rogan has lurched to the far right, announcing last year he preferred Trump over Biden in the general election.

With the pandemic, the host has become aggressively and arrogantly dishonest. “I believe he’s become more emboldened to push baseless conspiracy theories and right-wing lies over the past year,” Media Matters researcher Alex Paterson recently told The Verge. “Just from listening to him every day, he’s by no means remitting conspiracy theories and false rhetoric on his show. If anything, he’s leaning into it more. He’s a darling of the conservative right in the United States. Joe Rogan has shown really clearly that he will use his podcast to spread conspiracy theories, right-wing lies, [and] racist rhetoric in order to sort of promote himself.”

Rogan gladly plays hosts to chronic GOP liars such as Ben Shapiro and Alex Jones, while remaining a huge supporter of Tucker Carlson.

There’s big money in right-wing hate and conspiracies, and Rogan’s leaning into all of it —“Nancy Pelosi is the head witch” of the Democratic Party — at the same time Limbaugh’s death created a hole in the far-right media landscape.
When Rogan endorsed the baseless notion that the Clinton family was somehow connected to the 2016 murder of Seth Rich, a Democratic National Committee staff member, he sounded just like the deceased AM talker. Same with Rogan’s regular anti-trans rhetoric.

The similarities don’t end there. Just as Limbaugh in 2020 claimed Covid was “no worse than the common cold,” Rogan today lies without pause about a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of nearly one million Americans, going as far as claiming “actual microchips” are “being injected into your arm to see if you have COVID-19.” The show has become a cesspool of unhinged anti-vaccine rhetoric.

He endorsed the nonsensical lie that the government was monitoring private citizens’ text messages for anti-vaccine content. He urged young people not to get vaccinated because “exercising” would protect them. He said use of Ivermectin would effectively treat COVID-19, claimed Biden didn’t actually get his vaccine shot live on TV because they’re too dangerous, warned vaccine passports would move the country towards a “dictatorship,” and insisted immigrants crossing the Mexican border were driving a Covid surge.

It’s all indistinguishable from the bile that Limbaugh made his career spreading and amplifying. We’ll never know how many of Limbaugh's loyal, elderly listeners died from the virus, in part because he assured them the infection was essentially harmless. And we’ll never know how many of Rogan’s (younger) listeners got sick or died from Covid because of the host’s nonstop propaganda campaign against a miraculously effective, and free, vaccine.

Rogan seems eager to carry on Limbaugh's toxic legacy.

 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) questions U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on the State Department's 2021 budget in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on July 30, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images)

Daily Kos, Tucker Carlson shows Ted Cruz who's boss on how Republicans should talk about Jan. 6, Laura Clawson, Jan. 7, 2022. Sen. Ted Cruz spoke a few words of inconvenient truth on Wednesday, and for that sin, on Thursday night he went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show for a round of ritual humiliation. It was perhaps the most pathetic groveling Cruz has ever done publicly, and that’s saying something for a man who eagerly embraced Donald Trump after Trump insulted his wife’s looks.

On Wednesday, Cruz called the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol a “violent terrorist attack.” It was, and that’s not the first time Cruz has used such language: In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, he called it “a despicable act of terrorism.” He called it “a terrorist attack” in a Jan. 8 tweet, and in an interview that day. Even months later, in May 2021, he again called it a “terrorist attack.” And he was right every single one of those times.

But when he used that language in January 2022, he quickly learned that he was way, way out of step with the official Republican cover-up, and Carlson, right, was not going to let it slide.

After Carlson blasted Cruz on his Wednesday night show, Cruz asked to appear on Thursday’s show, where he must have known he would be berated again. And he was. And in classic Cruz fashion, he shamelessly groveled for forgiveness.

“The way I phrased things yesterday—it was sloppy, and it was, frankly, dumb,” Cruz said of the absolutely true words he had used repeatedly before. But absolution wasn’t coming.

”I don’t buy that,” Carlson said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don’t buy that.” Cruz, after all, is an accomplished lawyer who presumably chooses his public words carefully. And so it went: Cruz tried to weasel his way out of the thing he said and Carlson laid into him for it, because the correct Republican message is now that Jan. 6 was no big deal and no one should act like it was.

 

Washington Post, Trump cancels news conference at Mar-a-Lago, blames media and House committee, Felicia Sonmez and Josh Dawsey, Jan. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The former president had planned to hold an event on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the attack by a mob of his supporters.

Former president Donald Trump has canceled the news conference he planned to hold on Jan. 6 to mark the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.

In a statement released Tuesday by his Save America PAC, Trump blamed the media and the bipartisan congressional committee that is investigating the attack. Trump’s lawyers are fighting the panel’s efforts to obtain his records.

“In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media, I am canceling the January 6th Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, and instead will discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th, in Arizona—It will be a big crowd!” Trump said.

Jan. 6

New York Times, Commentary: One Year After the Jan. 6 Attack, Parler’s C.E.O Grapples with Big Tech and Trump, Kara Swisher, right, Jan. 6, 2022. George Farmer doubles down on his efforts to revive a right-leaning social medial company that was taken offline a year ago. After an angry mob attacked the Capitol last year and users on the right-leaning social network Parler organized, shared footage and called to “burn D.C. to the ground,” Kara Swisher grilled the platform’s co-founder and C.E.O., John Matze. The interview was cited in Apple’s decision to take Parler off its App store and Amazon’s decision to suspend web hosting service for Parler. Google also booted the platform off its Play Store. Parler effectively went offline because of these three moves, and Matze lost his job.

A year after Jan. 6, and with Parler back online, Swisher interviews the platform’s new chief executive, George Farmer. He’s bent on reviving Parler, saying: “You’ve never seen a company quite so unceremoniously booted off into digital exile. It’s the kind of medieval equivalent of the church sort of excommunicating someone.” He sees the deplatforming of Parler and the former president as signs that Big Tech has gotten too big and too powerful, calling the companies “the unprecedented leviathans of the corporate world.” And yet, Farmer notes, “here we are basically saying, ‘These guys are good guys.’”

In this conversation, Swisher pushes Farmer on how his platform failed on Jan. 6 and what it may still be missing today. They also discuss Donald Trump’s return to social media and the end of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal Twitter account. And while they both agree that Apple, Amazon and Google could have done more to punish other social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, after Jan. 6, Swisher pushes back on Farmer’s assertion that the lack of action was some kind of “colluding behavior” among tech giants. Her take? They simply didn’t want “the stink of sedition” that Parler and Matze helped enable a year ago.

Washington Post, Perspective: The ridiculous hypocrisy of Sean Hannity hiding behind ‘freedom of the press,’ Margaret Sullivan, right, Jan. 6, 2022 (print ed.). The Fox News host spent years disavowing and attacking the U.S. media. Now his lawyer is trying to hide behind the First Amendment.

The House Jan. 6 committee asked this week that Fox News host Sean Hannity appear and answer investigators’ questions about his text messages to President Trump’s aides before, during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The response from Hannity’s lawyer was every bit as predictable as it was laughable.

“We remain very concerned about the constitutional implications especially as it relates to the First Amendment,” wrote Jay Sekulow, the Trump-team lawyer who represents Hannity. He was even more explicit in a statement to Axios, referring to “concerns regarding freedom of the press.”

Those statements look like a winning entry into the Hypocrisy Hall of Fame.

Everything about Hannity’s text messages, part of a trove of documents the House panel received from former chief of staff Mark Meadows after a subpoena, scream one thing: that the prime-time host is not a journalist.

Jan. 5

Washington Post, Trump cancels news conference at Mar-a-Lago, blames media and House committee, Felicia Sonmez and Josh Dawsey, Jan. 5, 2022.  The former president had planned to hold an event on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the attack by a mob of his supporters.

Former president Donald Trump has canceled the news conference he planned to hold on Jan. 6 to mark the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.

In a statement released Tuesday by his Save America PAC, Trump blamed the media and the bipartisan congressional committee that is investigating the attack. Trump’s lawyers are fighting the panel’s efforts to obtain his records.

“In light of the total bias and dishonesty of the January 6th Unselect Committee of Democrats, two failed Republicans, and the Fake News Media, I am canceling the January 6th Press Conference at Mar-a-Lago on Thursday, and instead will discuss many of those important topics at my rally on Saturday, January 15th, in Arizona—It will be a big crowd!” Trump said.

Washington Post, Perspective: The ridiculous hypocrisy of Sean Hannity hiding behind ‘freedom of the press,’ Margaret Sullivan, right, Jan. 5, 2022.  The Fox News host spent years disavowing and attacking the U.S. media. Now his lawyer is trying to hide behind the First Amendment.

The House Jan. 6 committee asked this week that Fox News host Sean Hannity appear and answer investigators’ questions about his text messages to President Trump’s aides before, during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The response from Hannity’s lawyer was every bit as predictable as it was laughable.

“We remain very concerned about the constitutional implications especially as it relates to the First Amendment,” wrote Jay Sekulow, the Trump-team lawyer who represents Hannity. He was even more explicit in a statement to Axios, referring to “concerns regarding freedom of the press.”

Those statements look like a winning entry into the Hypocrisy Hall of Fame.

Everything about Hannity’s text messages, part of a trove of documents the House panel received from former chief of staff Mark Meadows after a subpoena, scream one thing: that the prime-time host is not a journalist.

Washington Post, What it’s like at one of the world’s biggest tech trade shows as omicron surges, Chris Velazco, Jan. 5, 2022. This year's chaotic CES conference in Las Vegas raises valuable questions about the future of giant in-person business events. Massive TVs. Powerful computers. Augmented reality, smart glasses and self-driving cars. Every year, the world’s biggest tech companies, start-ups and automakers give us a glimpse at how much more convenient and luxurious the near-future could be at CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics show.

But as CES 2022 opens its doors in Las Vegas on Wednesday amid a surge of coronavirus infections around the world (total cases in the United States alone have now surpassed 57 million), the show will serve as a litmus test for whether in-person events can be executed while keeping attendees safe during a pandemic.

CES is the first major trade show of 2022, and its organizer — the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) — has insisted on holding the event in person despite the fast spread of the omicron variant. The World Economic Forum last month postponed its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, moving it from January to mid-2022, citing the omicron variant. And JPMorgan Chase said its annual health-care conference in San Francisco scheduled for later this month would be virtual instead of in person.

This year’s unorthodox CES raises valuable questions about the future of giant in-person business events.

“To connect buyers with distributors and vendors, to connect press with new technologies, to connect large companies with their clients in one place — you don’t get that online,” said Avi Greengart, who is lead analyst at Techsponential and has covered the show for more than 15 years. “But of course, during a pandemic when a lot of people are understandably unwilling to travel, all of that gets muted.”

Last month, major companies such as Google, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors, Panasonic and Amazon, and many others, as well as media organizations, pulled out of attending the event in person, citing coronavirus concerns and international travel restrictions. Jean Foster, the CTA’s senior vice president of marketing, said the organization expects between 50,000 and 75,000 attendees to flock to Las Vegas this week. That’s less than half the number of people who attended the last in-person CES, in January 2020, which had an estimated economic impact of more than $250 million, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Washington Post, NPR is losing some of its Black and Latino hosts. Colleagues see a larger crisis, Paul Farhi and Elahe Izadi ,Jan. 5, 2022. Audie Cornish’s departure from “All Things Considered” this week triggered an outpouring of pent-up grievances from within the public-radio giant.

In recent years, NPR has taken pride in its efforts to diversify its ranks of on-air hosts, with the hiring of many Black and Latino journalists to lead its signature news programs, including voices such as Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, Noel King, Michele Norris and Audie Cornish.

But now the public-radio giant is contending with an exodus of the very same talent.

On Tuesday, it was Cornish, the co-host since 2012 of NPR’s daily newsmagazine, “All Things Considered,” who announced she would be leaving at the end of the week, destination unspecified. “I have never considered the host chair a tenured position,” she said, though many of her predecessors have enjoyed decades-long runs in the job. “It’s time for me to try my hand at new journalism projects and embark on new adventures.”

Other prominent on-air personalities of color to depart NPR’s airwaves recently include “Weekend All Things Considered” host Garcia-Navarro, who left in September to host a New York Times podcast; “Morning Edition” host King, who left in November for Vox Media; and former “1A” host Joshua Johnson, who joined MSNBC.

Jan. 4

 

Palmer Report, Opinion: It’s Sean Hannity’s time in the barrel, Bill Palmer, right, Jan. 4, 2022. Fox News host Sean Hannity often manages to find himself connected to various Donald Trump scandals, sometimes tangentially, sometimes in the thick of it. But Hannity seems to be just slippery enough to avoid getting dragged down in the process. However, he may have finally bitten off more than he can chew.

Adam Schiff now says that the January 6th Committee has requested Sean Hannity’s cooperation with regard to the text messages he was sending Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the January 6th Capitol attack. Talk about a no-win situation for Hannity.

Keep in mind that the committee surely already has some or all of Hannity’s text messages to Meadows, or it wouldn’t be targeting him like this. If Hannity’s texts reveal that he was in on the January 6th plot, then he’s screwed for obvious reasons. And even if Hannity is innocent in all of this and his texts were merely pleading with Meadows to have Trump call off the Capitol attackers, Hannity will lose badly in the eyes of his own audience by testifying to as much.

If you’re wondering which way Hannity is leaning, longtime Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow is representing him in the matter, suggesting Hannity is trying to figure out how not to cooperate.

Jan. 2

Washington Post, Twitter permanently suspends Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account over covid-19 misinformation, Brittany Shammas, Jan. 2, 2022. Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), saying Sunday that she repeatedly violated the company’s covid-19 misinformation policy.

The congresswoman had been temporarily suspended two times over the summer. In July, she lost access to the account for 12 hours after falsely claiming that the coronavirus was “not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65.” A month later, she faced a week-long suspension after she falsely tweeted that the coronavirus vaccines were “failing.”

Twitter on Sunday cited a “strike” system for violations of its covid policy, which bars users from sharing content that is “demonstrably false or misleading and may lead to significant risk of harm.” Five or more strikes lead to a permanent suspension.

“We’ve been clear that, per our strike system for this policy, we will permanently suspend accounts for repeated violations of the policy,” Katie Rosborough, a company spokeswoman, said in an email.

In a statement on messaging app Telegram, Taylor Greene lambasted Twitter, saying, “Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth. That’s fine, I’ll show America we don’t need them.”

She maintains access to her congressional Twitter account, @RepMTG.

Jan. 1

Washington Post, China harvests masses of data on Western targets from social media, documents show, Cate Cadell, Jan. 1, 2022 (print ed.). Hundreds of projects launched since 2020 show that Chinese police, state media and the military are gathering data from sites to track perceived threats.

China is turning a major part of its internal Internet data surveillance network outward, mining Western social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets, according to a Washington Post review of hundreds of Chinese bidding documents, contracts and company filings.

China maintains a countrywide network of government data surveillance services — called public opinion analysis software — that were developed over the past decade and are used domestically to warn officials of politically sensitive information online.

The software primarily targets China’s domestic Internet users and media, but a Washington Post review of bidding documents and contracts for over 300 Chinese government projects since the beginning of 2020 include orders for software designed to collect data on foreign targets from sources such as Twitter, Facebook and other Western social media.

The documents, publicly accessible through domestic government bidding platforms, also show that agencies including state media, propaganda departments, police, military and cyber regulators are purchasing new or more sophisticated systems to gather data.

These include a $320,000 Chinese state media software program that mines Twitter and Facebook to create a database of foreign journalists and academics; a $216,000 Beijing police intelligence program that analyses Western chatter on Hong Kong and Taiwan; and a Xinjiang cybercenter cataloguing Uyghur language content abroad.

“Now we can better understand the underground network of anti-China personnel,” said a Beijing-based analyst who works for a unit reporting to China’s Central Propaganda Department. The person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their work, said they were once tasked with producing a data report on how negative content relating to Beijing’s senior leadership is spread on Twitter, including profiles of individual academics, politicians and journalists.

• New York Times, A Digital Manhunt: How Chinese Police Track Critics on Social Media, Muyi Xiao and Paul Mozur, Jan. 1, 2022 (print ed.). Authorities in China use advanced software to silence criticism on overseas social media. Their targets include students and non-Chinese nationals.