Trump and the press

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

We’re getting a master class in would-be autocracy

Nearly a decade ago, during his first presidential term, Donald J. Trump infamously tweeted that major media outlets were “the enemy of the American people.” That drew an intriguing response from a fellow Republican, Sen. John McCain.

“I hate the press,” the Arizona war hero sarcastically told NBC News’ Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “I hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital.”

And McCain – whom Trump had derided as “a loser” — made the risks of losing an unfettered press all too clear.

“If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” McCain said. “And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”

So, now – after he has coopted Congress, the Senate and much of the Judiciary, and weaponized parts of the military against Americans – Trump and his minions are going after the press anew. The administration subpoenaed five New York Times reporters after they reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked advanced security features, including antimissile capabilities. The journalists cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, a common technique when sensitive matters are involved.

Chillingly, federal agents showed up at the homes of some of the reporters to serve the documents on them. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said in a statement.

The administration will likely try to force the reporters to name their sources, who presumably would be prosecuted for divulging information this leak-wary White House seeks to suppress. The DOJ insisted that the reporters are not the targets, but rather those leaking classified information are.

What seems more likely is that l’affaire Air Force One is simply embarrassing to Trump, one of a string of incidents that have been leaving the president red-faced. After all, how could his much-adored “flying palace” be ill-equipped? The reports coincide with his repeated failures to resolve the ill-conceived Iran War, the Reflecting Pool “Algaegate,” and his bizarre misstatements during a NATO meeting (for the record, there’s no “Islamic Republic of Japan.”)

The New York Times is expected in the first instance to fight the subpoenas in court. Taking such a stance paid off earlier this year when the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The feds withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.

As the Times reported, the Justice Department had sought information from three reporters at The Journal about an article detailing how top officials warned Trump of the risks of a military campaign against Iran. It also sought information from a reporter at The Post about reporting related to U.S. military action in Venezuela.

Whether Justice is on firmer legal ground in the Air Force One case could prove to be a crucial matter for journalists. The stakes are every bit as high as McCain suggested they could be so many years ago, as several journalism organizations have contended:

“The National Press Club calls on the Justice Department to immediately withdraw these subpoenas and reaffirm a principle that has long distinguished the United States: a free and independent press serves the people, not the government,” National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. said in a statement.

White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang said the organization stands with the Times reporters, saying they were “targeted for doing their jobs to uphold the public’s right to know how its government operates.”

“The WHCA condemns any act of intimidation against journalists, including attempts to pressure them into revealing sources,” Jiang added.

And Stephen J. Adler, chair of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said, “When the public’s right to know is crushed, as the Trump Administration is trying to do with its subpoenas against The New York Times, all of us suffer irreparable harm, as does the freedom upon which this nation is built.”

Of course, if the journalists do get hauled up to testify before a grand jury, they likely would refuse to disclose their sources. That could set up a painful and costly time for those reporters, as several cases over the last quarter-century have shown.

In 2001, a Houston-based author writing a book about a local murder spent 168 days in jail because she would not identify sources or give her notes to law enforcement. Four years later, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was sentenced to jail because she refused to reveal who told her that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent and Miller served 85 days, testifying ultimately because her source gave his permission. Then, in 2008, a subpoenaed USA Today reporter in an anthrax-by-mail case was held in contempt of court and ordered to pay $500 per day for the first seven days in which she refused to comply, $1,000 per day for the next seven days, and $5,000 a day for the next seven days after that – all from her own pocket, not her employer’s. That contempt charge was later thrown out.

The orders for the Times journalists to testify could put the DOJ official who issued them into interesting political crosshairs. Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who issued the subpoenas, was recently nominated by Trump to serve as director of national intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard. Clayton, who had chaired the federal Securities & Exchange Commission in Trump’s first term, appears to be one of Trump’s most devoted toadies.

For instance, Clayton did not object when the Trump Administration fired Maurene Comey as a prosecutor in the Southern District office in 2025 in a vindictive political move. Comey’s main problem: she is a daughter of James B. Comey, the former FBI director who is one of Trump’s most prominent adversaries. She also handled cases against Trump’s longtime friend, child molester Jeffrey Epstein.

Clayton is to testify on July 15 before the Senate Intelligence Committee and journalism advocates are calling on committee members to press him on the administration’s latest assault on journalists.

“Donald Trump’s war on the press is looking for another victim, this time the storied federal prosecutors office in Manhattan,” Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement. “The subpoenas it issued to journalists at The New York Times break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted. When Jay Clayton appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, members of both parties must not let him escape accountability.”

Thankfully for journalists and the public, Trump and his minions have been set back on some of their anti-press efforts.

In January, FBI agents descended on the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant.

But, in the following month, a federal judge ruled that he – not Justice – would review her materials.

“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Magistrate Judge William B. Porter wrote in his opinion.

Not surprisingly in this appeals-happy administration, the judge’s order is under appeal.

Of course, Trump and his lapdogs have also scored some victories in high-profile assaults on the press. They’ve sued TV networks that have produced critical coverage of Trump’s actions, including ABC, they’ve made them the target of regulatory pressure from the once-independent Federal Communications Commission; and they’ve cut press access or significantly curtailed it at both the White House and Pentagon.

Under CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, “60 Minutes” bowed to Trumpian pressure in killing a story involving deportation. The network also heavily edited an interview with Trump on the program, including omitting comments about whether the 2020 election was rigged. Weiss was hired by David Ellison and his father, Larry, the Trump-backing billionaires who own CBS parent Paramount. Trump praised her as “a great new leader.”

Trump’s administration has even used labor law to pressure The New York Times via an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit that was decried by the newspaper as “politically motivated.”

As Trump continues to try to cow the press, the work of the Times, the Journal, the Post and other outlets has grown more important than ever. And, given the largely supine Congress, courts have emerged as the last bastions in helping them fight on behalf of the public.

Ultimately, however, the largely Trump-friendly Supreme Court will likely have to weigh in on some of the press cases. And, so far, the prospects look poor for the press.

For instance, the Supreme Court recently declined to intervene to halt an $800-a-day fine imposed on former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge involving her coverage in 2017 of a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged. The issue: Herridge has refused to disclose a confidential source.

If Sen. McCain were around today, he would likely be appalled at how the system lately is ill-serving the press and, by extension, the public. Of course, he was onto Trump long before many others. He once excoriated the president for “naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats.”

Lately, the last charge seems the most resonant.

Not journalism, but maybe better

Posted on June 25, 2026 by Joe Weber

Ann Patchett’s latest offering is packed with insight

Joseph Weber

As every journalist knows, facts can both reveal and mask reality. Reporters telling stories of disasters, of human failures and frailty — and even of triumphs — can go only so far in explaining the personal motivations and deep emotions that may afflict or engage us.

Tethered by facts, journalists rarely can delve into human psyches. Even the weightiest quotes or most touching anecdotes can just scratch the surface.

For real depth, however, we can be thankful for fiction. Novelists – including some who launched their careers as reporters (think Hemingway, Didion and Orwell) – have the power to pick up where straightforward reportage leaves off. They can round out a tale, put flesh on the bones of a story, give a character depth beyond the stark outlines of news accounts.

All this springs to mind thanks to some fresh work by a national treasure, Ann Patchett. Her new novel, Whistler, tells the story of a fiftysomething private school English teacher, Daphne Fuller, who by happenstance runs into a stepfather she hasn’t seen in 44 years. We then read of broken marriages, closeted sexuality, affairs, too much drinking and more – essentially a parade of human comedy and tragedy.

Along the way, Patchett shares a wealth of truth. Facts? Well, there are some, it turns out – but she deftly uses them to get to deeper things.

Patchett, in the way of most authors, drew on personal experiences for parts of the book. For instance, Daphne’s stepfather, Eddie Triplett, stoically endures cancer and Daphne ministers lovingly to him. This echoed the sad death of a real-life friend of Patchett’s, Jim Fox, to whom she dedicated the book.

She wrote, journalistically but passionately, about her time with Fox in nonfiction form in The New Yorker just last year.

“In the last week I would ever spend with one of the best friends I’ve ever had, I was given the gift of being supremely useful,” Patchett wrote. “I brought him vanilla ice cream and black coffee. I emptied the urinal, found the remote and the hearing aids, changed the sheets, tended to the sacral ulcer, greeted other helpful visiting friends. When, three days later, Jim was discharged into my care without a single thing relating to his health having been resolved or discovered, I got him dressed and wrapped in a blanket, then pushed him the three blocks home in his wheelchair, because I couldn’t imagine how I would get him into and out of a taxi. We spent our final day together making lists, organizing bottles of pills, and cleaning out the linen closet. I located, purchased, and installed a riser on the toilet seat. I soaked his feet and cut his toenails. He gave me the small china dog that his father had won for him at a fair in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, when he was a child. ‘I’ve had that dog with me everywhere I’ve lived,’ he said.”

So, it’s no wonder, perhaps, that some of the wisdom in Whistler comes from Eddie Triplett.

Consider this jewel that he utters:

“There is so much randomness to youth. The person assigned to share your room becomes your friend, the girl you pass on your way out the door becomes your wife, and from these random encounters our entire lives are built, four beautiful children came into the world and they, in turn, found the people they were meant to spend their lives with.”

And, as you ruminate on that paragraph, ponder the accidents that may have shaped your life. Of course, we all have such things.

A friend from my childhood, for instance, met his wife of nearly 50 years when she happened to be in a car that picked him up while he was hitch-hiking. For my part, I met my wife thanks to a mutual friend who just happened to take a Henry James class in college with me and thought we’d be a good match.

That proved right and for us that was three children and eight grandchildren ago.

While randomness plays a role in the book, Patchett is hardly just about happy happenstances, though. Daphne and her sister, Leda, a therapist, root around in their psyches and those of others in the book in ways journalists would be hard-pressed to do.

“I knew what Leda would say,” Daphne reflects at one point. “She would say it was because childhood never leaves us. We seal the room up and cover it in sheetrock. We dry and sand and paint, but the pocket of history remains, and sooner or later someone always winds up tapping on the wall, commenting on the way it sounds strangely hollow in there, and then the whole thing comes tumbling down.”

Such wonderful and wise turns of phrase there. Such a great and simple metaphor, gently delivered.

The wounds and scars of childhood are one of Patchett’s major themes in Whistler. At another point, Daphne’s husband, Jonathan, sorts through his deceased mother’s belongings. He is helped by his sister.

“I wonder what Leda would think about that – put two siblings in their childhood home and let them go through every single object in the house, see what comes up,” Jonathan says. “Memory, loss, love, anger, all the usual suspects.”

Indeed, don’t we all know siblings who seem to have lived entirely different childhoods – even under the same roofs? One can only wonder what varying recollections a bit of domestic archeology in the family home would produce for many of us. Certainly, the experience of reliving those years could be a joyous, funny and awful experience, all at once.

And in Whistler some of that experience, of course, inevitably is ugly. In a basically upbeat book, Patchett delicately digs into that, too. She offers a savvy insight into the purpose and style of psychotherapy in the process.

Referring to less pleasant experiences in her young life while talking with Leda, Daphne says: “I packed it away … I put the whole thing in a box and shoved it behind the hot water heater in the basement. Then I forgot about it. Isn’t that what people do? They pack things up and then years later they hire you to unpack it for them.”

And then Patchett also offers some eloquent musing about children and parents, and how they might see one another with blinkers on. “Our parents did not depend on us for their sense of identity. They had their lives and we had ours,” Leda tells Daphne at one point. “Bless them.”

Of course, didn’t we all see our parents through very narrow prisms?

Those folks were our protectors, providers, guides, perhaps. Or maybe they were the banes of our existences. But they were also characters and personalities in their own right, wholly separate of us. If we were lucky, maybe, we’d see a bit of those interesting people when they visited with friends and relatives.

Not surprisingly, Patchett gives Eddie Triplett a bevy of great lines. His important backstory is revealed only slowly, so I will share no spoiler here. But the griefs he suffered through gave him potent insights.

“Your mother and I both have a small shard of glass in our hearts where the other is concerned: her disappointment, my shame, her regret and my regret,” Triplett says. “This helps to pry it loose. All these years later, you can still pry something loose. There’s no sense carrying shame and regret into the next life.”

A similar gem: “… I have found that when you start to wonder about who you’ve hurt in this life, you can easily lose your mind.”

And still another, from a conversation with young Daphne: “Everybody’s got to be vigilant against the bad people. I get that. But there are so many more people who are going to want to help you … it’s mostly good people out there, with a few bad people around the edges.”

Finally, Triplett shares a touch of what may be Buddhism. He says: “… no one wants to change even though change is the never-ending engine of existence. We are attached to our life, so we want to stay alive even though we know we’re going to die …. So by practicing nonattachment and recognizing impermanence, we might have a happier life, and we might have an easier death.”

These selections – little homilies, one might say — pop up unobtrusively along the way as Patchett sketches out a difficult but ultimately redeeming family history. It’s filled with warm and intriguing characters we’d all love to know.

In these cynical and dark times, perhaps we should all be blessed to know such figures.

“Is there a place in serious literature for kind, happy characters and kind, happy stories?” a New York Times reviewer wrote of the book. “This intimate and entertaining novel makes the strong case that there is; as demonstrated across her work, such sturdiness of spirit is part of Patchett’s generous worldview.”

Now, when we need it so badly, let’s be thankful for that worldview. It’s not journalism. Maybe it’s something better.

Great Caesar’s Ghost!

Posted on May 29, 2026 by Joe Weber

There’s life in news yet, at least in D.C.

Joseph Weber

For people in the news business – and maybe for the country at large – the news about a brewing newspaper war in Washington, D.C., seems quite welcome.

But this won’t be your father’s journalism duel. Instead, it seems likely to be something of a battle between a very right-wing magnate and a perhaps less hands-on magnate with an ax to grind. And it will be largely digital.

Of course, this refers to The Washington Star, which recently debuted, and NOTUS (a.k.a. News of the United States). As it aims to go inkwell to inkwell, NOTUS plans to rebrand itself as The Star, a far-more newspapery sounding moniker.

Aside from confusing us all with the names, just how this will play out in the Trump era is unclear, though. And whether either publication will be a worthy successor to The Washington Post, much-shrunken as it is, is just as opaque.

But, already, the magnates involved – Politico founder Robert Allbritton and Dovid Efune, the British-born publisher of The New York Sun – are scrapping. Efune filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against NOTUS for its planned use of the Star name. This comes after NOTUS twice engaged in talks with The Washington Star Company to buy the trademark but couldn’t reach a deal. Instead, Allbritton’s team just opted to drop the “Washington.”

Presumably, they will battle one another for scoops, as well.

The Star (should that name prevail) already has a jump on things. It debuted, as NOTUS, in January 2024 and claims that its news site now reaches almost all of the Senate and Congress, as well as the White House. As the Columbia Journalism Review reported, Allbritton says NOTUS’s morning newsletter lands in more than 90 percent of House offices, and 80 percent of the Senate. “I know everybody in the White House reads it,” he told CJR. “I know all the heads of the agencies read it, or their chief of staff or whoever.”

Like Politico, it has focused on politics and inside-the-Beltway news, but it aims to move into local news and sports – voids that staff-cutters at The Washington Post have left. As The New York Times noted, The Post in February abruptly laid off more than 300 of its 800 journalists, pared back its metro section and shuttered its local sports coverage. After those moves, the Times reported, the leaders of NOTUS decided to accelerate their expansion plans.

NOTUS (the perhaps-Star) has hired Post veterans including Jeff Stein, as chief economics correspondent; Dana Milbank, as a columnist; Paul Kane and Kadia Goba, as congressional reporters; and Sam Fortier, as a sports reporter. Other new hires have come from other Washington outlets, such as The Hill, Politico and Axios. It plans to double its newsroom staff to as many as 95 people.

But Efune and the folks at The Washington Star have started publishing on Substack, and are planning to offer a custom website within the next two months and a weekend print newspaper by the end of the year. For now, Efune plans to hire up to 50 fulltime journalists and contributors, but will operate under the oversight and resources of The Sun’s newsroom until it names its own editor in chief.

Like Allbritton, Efune has publishing chops. He is a former top editor of the Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner, and has been reinvigorating The Sun, a once-shuttered outlet that now publishes online and has a weekly print edition. The Sun now counts two million subscribers, “tens of thousands of which are paid,” the Times reported.

“We’re reviving one of the great and epic rivalries of American journalism,” Efune told the Times. “For decades, The Star was The Washington Post’s fiercest competitor and an important editorial and ideological counterweight in the press in our nation’s capital.”

For his part, Allbritton is a billionaire – helped by his sale of Politico for $1 billion to Germany’s Axel Springer. His late father, Joe Albritton, owned The Washington Star, a conservative-leaning alternative to the Post, from 1975 to 1978, according to the Times. The paper folded in 1981. The younger Albritton founded the nonprofit Albritton Journalism Institute in 2023, intending to train young journalists. The institute publishes NOTUS.

Efune has thrust his stake in the ideological ground already. In announcing The Washington Star on May 28, he featured a photo of Ronald Reagan reading the paper and quoted the former president as bemoaning its disappearance. Reagan wrote a personal note of regret, Efune wrote, describing The Washington Star as “one of the most admired newspapers in America.”

The (new) Washington Star’s political bent is also apparent in its headlines and news selections. Among them: “Virginia Released Illegal Immigrant With Long Criminal Record Days Before He Allegedly Sexually Assaulted DC Woman,” “Clarence Thomas Dissents on Supreme Court Refusal to Weigh Illegal-Immigrant Commercial Licenses,” and “The White House Has Seen Worse ‘Desecration’ and Weirder ‘Gimmicks’ Than Trump’s UFC Octagon.”

A Fox News clone online, perhaps? A D.C. version of the New York Post? In Efune’s words, his priority is to “stay true to the editorial legacy of The [Washington] Star.” That means supporting “limited government” and opposing “bureaucratic corruption and federal overreach.”

Allbritton’s inclination at his The Star, it seems, is more middle-of-the-road or perhaps a mite leftish, at least judging by the recent headlines on NOTUS. Among them: “A Judge Has Temporarily Blocked Trump’s ‘Anti-Weaponization’ Fund,” “Judge Orders Removal of Trump’s Name From the Kennedy Center,” and Louisiana Passes a New Congressional Map Leaving Only One Majority-Black District.”

But Allbritton may have long maintained close ties to the pre-Trump Republican establishment, as well. As a writer for The Wesleyan Argus wrote in 2009, the former president of Allbritton-founded Politico, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., served in the Reagan White House for eight years, ascending to the title of Assistant to the President in 1987. Then, from 1989 to 1995, he was responsible for designing, planning and funding the construction of the Reagan Presidential Library.

In Washington’s usually polarized elite ranks, Ryan then served as Publisher and CEO of The Washington Post from 2014-23. He now chairs the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute and is leading the launch of a new Center on Civility and Democracy.

For now, Allbritton’s motivations seem less ideological than Efune’s. As a writer for Puck scathingly described him, “Inside Politico, Robert was seen as an oblivious-but-harmless Mr. Magoo type, the kind of guy who enjoyed owning a news company and the prestige it conferred but wasn’t interested in the management or production of a daily news report—or even wielding the political influence of the institution.”

The Star says it intends to “cover government, politics, policy, local news and D.C. sports with the power of The Washington Post in the 1970s, the punch of Politico in the 2010s and the audience focus required to build a sustainable news organization in 2026.”

And, if hiring liberal columnist Dana Milbank is any indication, it could lean left. Milbank, in a post on X, said he jumped to the Allbritton paper because it presents “an irresistible chance to both to create the hometown publication the D.C. region needs and to build a scrappy and fearless national news organization.”

Just how big a deal this will prove in D.C. – or outside – isn’t all that obvious, though. Despite the travails of The Washington Post, the town is awash with lots of outlets including Politico, Axios, Punchbowl News, and out-of-towners Semafor and Puck News, which regularly dip their toes in. Of course, The New York Times covers the political world in D.C. to a fare-thee-well, too, as does The Wall Street Journal.

“Does the town need another media company? Obviously not. But Robert does, and bless his heart for it,” the Puck writer asked in a piece headlined “Little Allbritton” and bearing a subhed dismissing him as “the son of a yesteryear D.C. media baron.”

The answer may, indeed, prove to be “obviously not.” But, for now, new life in a journalistic landscape that, nationwide at least, has been something of a desert seems as welcome as a spring rain.

Read all about it

Posted on May 5, 2026 by Joe Weber

A storied newspaper gets a lifeline

Joseph Weber

The Sunday, May 3, edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was supposed to be the 239-year-old paper’s last. But, since a Baltimore-based nonprofit came to the rescue, the PG has kept offering its regular mix of local, national and international news. It plans to do so, although mostly on its website, with print editions only on Sundays and Thursdays.

For Pittsburghers and anyone interested in seeing a well-informed public, that’s great news, of course.

Newspapers have been dying for decades, a trend accelerated by the onslaught of the Net and the advance of cellphones. Since 2005, the number of papers published in the United States has dropped from 7,325 to 4,490 now, according to the Medill State of Local News report. As AP reported, in the year leading up to October 2025 alone, some 136 papers shut down, with daily newspaper circulation now down to just over 15 million from an average of between 50 and 60 million people at the turn of the century.

And, not coincidentally, our politics have grown more demagogic and ill-informed. Donald J. Trump, a longtime hater of the press, seems to have persuaded millions of his followers that the news media is “the enemy of the American people,” as he famously started saying in 2017, mostly referring to broadcasters. He has escalated his attacks since, with his broadsides becoming “the tap water of his political rhetoric,” as The New York Times noted.

With such prominent assaults and declines in readership, is it any wonder that Americans’ confidence in the mass media has plummeted? That faith edged down to a new low last fall, with just 28 percent of those polled expressing a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly, according to Gallup. This is down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago.

So, it is encouraging that the Venetoulis Institute swept in to keep the Post-Gazette alive. The nonprofit also owns The Baltimore Banner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news site that – in contrast to other media outlets — has been expanding. Under the institute – named for former Baltimore County Executive and media champion Ted Venetoulis – the Banner has doubled its newsroom to about 80 journalists since 2022.

The Banner gives The Baltimore Sun a run for its money, offering readers a centrist alternative to the rightist environment now fostered at The Sun. The storied Sun, owned for a time by the media vultures at Alden Global Capital, in 2024 became a mouthpiece for the right-wing head of Sinclair Broadcast Group, David D. Smith, and Clarence Thomas chum Armstrong Williams.

As reported by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, The Sun now has no foreign bureaus and a far smaller newsroom. Local union officials pegged the number of journalists working there in 2024 at about 60, down from more than 300 when Folkenflik reported for the paper two decades earlier. Shortly before that, its newsroom topped 400 reporters.

And, according to Poynter, sentiment in the newsroom has dropped as the paper’s political tilt has shifted. “New ownership at the Sun has driven staff and some readers away. Since its former managing editor retired in June, at least 18 journalists have quit. Morale is low in the 56-person newsroom,” the journalism foundation reported early last year.

“Sinclair is known for forcing stories with a right-leaning agenda onto its more than 180 television stations across the country,” Poynter journalist Angela Fu reported. “Sinclair-acquired stations increase their coverage of national politics at the expense of local politics, a 2019 study found, and coverage overall undergoes a significant rightward shift.’”

The Banner won a Pulitzer in 2025 for a series of pieces that likely would not have appeared in The Sun. As the Pulitzer folks described it, the package was a “compassionate investigative series that captured the breathtaking dimensions of Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate impact on older Black men, creating a sophisticated statistical model that The Banner shared with other newsrooms.”

Before the current owners took over, The Sun in a 2022 editorial apologized for having, “sharpened, preserved and furthered the structural racism that still subjugates Black Marylanders in our communities today.” The paper added that “Reporting that arises directly from sources in the region’s Black communities has long been lacking in The Sun, largely because the connection is lacking. We’re not out there enough, and we’re not trusted enough. We are working on that, and looking into an impression some hold that The Sun is harder on Black officials than white.”

Now, however, The Sun seems to be adopting the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach taken by Sinclair’s Baltimore TV station, WBFF, a Fox affiliate, the City Journal reported. That style appears to exploit Black community problems, rather than explore them.

“The Sun has moved closer to that sensibility, with a ‘Spotlight on Maryland’ TV–newspaper partnership that highlights stories such as police ignoring drug crimes even after mass overdoses,” the City Journal said. “The paper’s reporters have covered juveniles arrested and released with no oversight, ready to commit violent crimes again. Instead of glossing over those stories, the paper asks bluntly, ‘How did that happen?’”

A retired Sun reporter, Michael Hill, told NPR that the formula reflects a business judgment about who the paper serves. “They have picked an audience they want, which is a suburban audience, and they want to tell them how terrible the city is, and that they’re right to live in the suburbs,” Hill said. “And that, I think, is their sort of commercial approach that is reflected in their news business.”

A former staffer at the TV station put the approach this way: “You amplify the negativity.”

Regardless of a media outlet’s political slant, the question arises about whether its staffing gives it the firepower it needs to do its work well. Fifty-six journalists just can’t be in as many places as 400.

Despite the lifeline that Venetoulis has thrown the Post-Gazette, staffing has been hit hard. About 40 percent of the roughly 120-member news staff were recently told that their jobs are gone, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. “I don’t know how the Post-Gazette is going to cover a city the size of Pittsburgh, effectively, with half the staff,” a now-former PG reporter Andrew “Goldy” Goldstein told CJR.

The same can be said of cities all over the country.

The Los Angeles Times, which boasted more than 1,200 journalists just before the turn of the century, is down to perhaps 235 now. The Boston Globe gets by with less than half the 550 journalists it employed in 2002, while The Philadelphia Inquirer’s 200-member news staff is down from 700. The Denver Post makes do with a news staff that was cut in the last decade from above 300 to an estimated 75 or so, according to Westword.

Recall that in Denver, the Post’s longtime rival, the Rocky Mountain News, folded in 2009. (Full disclosure: I worked as a reporter at the Rocky in the first half of the 1980s, an exhilaratingly fierce newspaper war period.)

The problem with such reductions in forces, of course, is that readers don’t know what exactly they are missing – but they can see that the menu is smaller. It’s obvious that once-fat newspapers are thinner (and that their websites carry comparatively few articles).

But subscribers don’t know that, for instance, local town council meetings may not be followed closely unless there’s a major scandal. They may have a sense that feature pages are skimpier now, but there’s no real count on column inches that anyone can cite.

And, since newspapers are offering less, no one should be surprised that readership is down, along with credibility. Give people thin soup and they’ll look for something else – especially when their phones are packed with plenty to read and watch, even if much of it is trash.

To be sure, the technology changes have created enormous opportunities for news coverage, too. State governments, for instance, are well covered by online affiliates of the nonprofit States Newsroom. The Nebraska Examiner, one such affiliate, reshaped the state’s governor’s race in 2022 by reporting on sordid doings by the Trump-backed leading Republican., for instance.

And online operations such as Nebraska’s Flatwater Free Press and The Colorado Sun fill in some of the gaps created by the declines of The Omaha World-Herald and The Denver Post – even though the newcomers’ small staffs simply can’t be in as many places as sprawling reporting staffs once were.

It’s also clear that top-notch journalism is still getting done. Just check out the Pulitzer Prizes recently awarded.

The Washington Post, beleaguered by cuts imposed by owner Jeff Bezos, topped the list with its Public Service Pulitzer for reporting on the Trump Administration’s “chaotic overhaul of federal agencies and chronicling in rich detail the human impacts of the cuts and the consequences for the country.” The New York Times took the award for investigative reporting with “deeply reported stories that exposed how President Trump has shattered constraints on conflicts of interest and exploited the moneymaking opportunities that come with power, enriching his family and allies.” And Reuters won the national reporting prize for “documenting how the president used the U.S. government and the influence of his supporters to expand executive power and exact vengeance on his foes.”

None of the awards will endear Trump to those news outlets – and supporters of the president would likely look on them as proof of the media’s bias against their boy. But the fact-based journalism in those pieces also demonstrates how independent reporting can — indeed must — hold people in power to account.

Over its history, the Post-Gazette has won three Pulitzers, snaring its last one in 2019 for breaking news reporting on the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue. The Pulitzer judges saluted the paper’s “immersive, compassionate coverage of the massacre … that captured the anguish and resilience of a community thrust into grief.”

With Venetoulis behind it now – and the possibility that the PG’s shrunken staff could grow again – perhaps the paper will soon capture another such prize. Count it already as a victory that the paper won’t disappear.

Shrinking its way to greatness?

Posted on February 4, 2026 by Joe Weber

The Washington Post will surely not find success that way

Joseph Weber

Someday, a smart academic will cooly analyze the rival game plans that enabled The New York Times to thrive while, just down the road, The Washington Post slipped into what has been looking like a slow-motion death spiral.

But it’s likely that two things on that list will include an owner committed to great journalism and a passion for innovation, even at great cost.

Consider first the nonstop innovation that has kept the Times vibrant. The New York paper’s website is a cornucopia of offerings from the news of the day and in-depth magazine offerings to games, consumer advice in Wirecutter, exceptional sports coverage in The Athletic, audio offerings that range from The Daily to Opinions, along with entertainment, cooking and health news.

The soup-to-nuts menu of the paper could keep a reader, listener or video-watcher engaged for hours. Just picking out the best things to tap into takes a while each day.

By contrast, the best that can be said of the Post is that it tries.

In unoriginal ways, the Post mimics some of the same offerings, but with far less content. While on a given day the Times might have whole subsections devoted to the Trump Administration, the Epstein files, the Russia-Ukraine war, the Super Bowl and more, along with the top stories of the day in its many categories, the Post offers short lists of pieces that take no time to scan through.

It could hardly be otherwise given the yawning gap in staff at the papers. While the Times employs more than 2,800 people in its journalism operations, the Post shrank its newsroom in multiple downsizings in recent years to 800 and now is losing more than 300 of them, along with more on the business side.

With its extraordinary breadth, the Times has been on a roll in adding digital subscribers and is now up to 12.78 million total subscribers as it aims for 15 million by the end of next year. By contrast, the Post is believed to be down to about 2 million subscribers.

Sadly, the soup is thin in the D.C. paper and the latest trimming could hardly bulk it up. As the Times reported about its competitor, the Post’s sports and books sections will close, its metro section and international staff will shrink. In a sharp contrast with the growing Daily podcast at the Times – which just added a Sunday version – the daily “Post Reports” podcast will disappear.

Just how will all that make for a better, more relevant and profitable product? The Post, as of Feb. 4, hadn’t even reported on its layoffs. Instead, it posted an Associated Press story that quoted editor Matt Murray saying in a note to the staff: “We can’t be everything to everyone.”

Just what the Post will be to anyone, going forward, is tough to see. Ashley Parker, a Post veteran now at The Atlantic, offered hints, though, and they are hardly optimistic.

“Today’s layoffs provide a whiff of the latest alleged strategy: an almost-exclusive focus on politics and national-security coverage, though even that explanation defies credulity, as the growing list of those laid off includes some of the nation’s finest political and international reporters and editors,” she wrote. “To the extent that a plan exists, it seems to be to transform the Post into a facsimile of Politico.”

Parker noted that Politico was born out of the Post nearly 20 years ago. Two Post reporters launched it as a “fast-paced, scoop-driven, win-the-morning publication,” she wrote.

Parker also quoted a longtime Post reporter bemoaning the new cuts. “We’re changing and trimming and cutting our way toward a much more mundane product, and one that doesn’t seem to attract more readers,” the journalist told her.

And what’s especially disheartening is that Post owner Jeff Bezos could easily underwrite the sorts of innovation that the Sulzberger family has done at the Times. Indeed, after he bought the paper in 2013, he backed ambitious efforts and the paper was gaining in leaps and bounds.

Ralph E. Hanson, a professor at the University of Nebraska Kearney, described some of the surge. Instead of focusing narrowly on D.C., he noted, Bezos and his editors pushed the paper into becoming a national or even international paper, much as the Times is.

By 2016, under Bezos’ ownership, Hanson wrote, the paper had a growing audience, increasingly ambitious reporting, and was gaining recognition as a national read. Politico’s Ken Doctor said that the Post was joining the ranks of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today as having nationwide appeal.

While other papers were laying journalists off, in fact, the Post was hiring, Hanson noted. He cited Politico’s estimates that the Post’s newsroom grew by more than 60 positions, or 8 percent. This gave the Post a news staff in excess of 750, compared with 1,307 at the NY Times, 450 at USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal with about 1,500.

And 2016 delivered a 75 percent increase in new subscribers over the year and doubled digital subscription numbers. Under the guidance of Marty Baron, who joined in January 2013, that growth was driven by exceptional journalism, the sort that won 11 Pulitzer Prizes before he retired in 2021.

Of course, the paper was punching above its weight in terms of staffing. It had always done so, compared with the Times. “Not being The New York Times, being forced to do more with less, was freeing,” contended Post veteran Parker. “It created—required—a culture of collegiality and collaboration, a willingness to experiment and take risks, a certain puckishness.”

A former colleague, now at The Athletic, told Parker: “There’s sort of an Avis mentality at the Post: ‘We try harder.’” The quip recalled the Hertz-Avis ad campaign of decades past.

But lately, Bezos has apparently not seen much reason to try hard at all. “Over recent years, they’ve repeatedly cut the newsroom—killing its Sunday magazine, reducing the staff by several hundred, nearly halving the Metro desk—without acknowledging the poor business decisions that led to this moment or providing a clear vision for the future,” Parker wrote.

Marty Baron, source: The Harvard Gazette

Baron, in a post on Facebook, acknowledged “acute business problems that had to be addressed.” As anyone in the industry knows, and Baron noted, we are in “a period of head-spinning change in media consumption.” It is one that requires “radical innovation,” which, of course, demands money.

More than that, it requires courage and values – of the sort that the Sulzbergers have long had. In recent years, Donald J. Trump has filed at least three major lawsuits against the Times, including a pending $15 billion defamation suit filed last September. Two were dismissed.

Bezos, instead, has sought to cozy up to Trump, perhaps mindful of the power Washington has over his financially far more important Amazon business and other interests.

“The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity,” Baron wrote. “Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands.”

As readers lost faith in the paper, journalists were losing trust in Bezos, as well. “Similarly, many leading journalists at The Post lost confidence in Bezos, and jumped to other news organizations,” Baron wrote. “They also, in effect, were driven away.”

The former editor, known for his grace, said he remained grateful for Bezos’s support during his tenure.

“During that time, he came under brutal pressure from Trump,” Baron wrote. “And yet he spoke forcefully and eloquently of a free press and The Post’s mission, demonstrating his commitment in concrete terms. He often declared that The Post’s success would be among the proudest achievements of his life. I wish I detected the same spirit today. There is no sign of it.”

There also seems no sign of an editorial vision at the diminishing newspaper. Perhaps one will emerge, but it’s likely impossible for the Post to shrink its way to prosperity.

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” Baron wrote. “The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted, and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.”

The odds are that the academic who someday analyzes the Post’s rise and fall will, in effect, be conducting an autopsy. And that is sad for us all.

Flooding the zone

Posted on July 18, 2024 by Joe Weber

Maybe some presidential election rhetoric should not be turned down

A longstanding maxim in the news business says “information abhors a void.” When we don’t know things, or know things only partly, we rush to fill in the gaps. Often, we are wrong and, sadly, misinformation may carry enormous weight.

The latest example is the reaction to the shooting of Donald Trump. We still don’t know why a disturbed young man took up arms against the former president. But that hasn’t stopped people from blaming the fiery rhetoric of one side or the other – pleas for putting oil on the waters, notwithstanding. Indeed, the absence of information has driven those who see opportunity here into overdrive (and it’s been rich grist for the inevitable conspiracists).

Before the shooting, would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks googled the phrase “major depressive disorder” and searched for information about Trump, Joe Biden, and Attorney General Merrick Garland, as we heard from The Washington Post and The New York Times. We also saw in The Times that he looked up events where Trump and Biden were speaking.

Does that mean he would have attacked whichever man was nearby? That it was just convenient that Trump was appearing not far from his home? That his motivation was less political (or partisan) and more psychological, i.e., a lost post-adolescent looking for a grandiose way to commit what is often called “suicide by police?”

We’ve seen several reports that Crooks had shown little interest in politics, though he was a registered Republican with one parent a Democrat and one a Libertarian. Those reports, and the absence of political matters on his phone or other communications, suggest that his motivation was something other than wanting to do away with a candidate who may or may not have infuriated him.

Still, the black hole that Crooks has created is being filled by Republicans, such as J.D. Vance, who eagerly blame Democrats and the media for demonizing Trump – an odd flip, since Democrats and the media are routinely demonized by such Republicans. It’s also being filled, to a degree, by Democrats, such as President Biden, who blame the hot rhetoric of the campaign for a toxic atmosphere, implying that such language drove Crooks to his mad actions.

One of the more seemingly sophisticated commentaries was offered by author Gerald Posner, who rushed into print in The Wall Street Journal just two days after the July 13 shooting to blame “incendiary political language.” From whom? Well, liberals and the media, of course. “The assassination attempt against Mr. Trump follows years of relentless attacks from left-wing media and many in the Democratic Party, who likened the former president to Hitler and claimed his re-election would end democracy,” Posner argued.

Posner, a lawyer and an investigative journalist who wrote well-regarded books about the assassinations of JFK and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., compares the “volatile atmosphere” in Dallas in 1963 and in Memphis in 1968 with today’s environment, warning that “reckless speech” can inspire an assassin. He makes the link, even as he undercuts his argument by acknowledging that we may never know the motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray, as we may never know what drove Crooks.

This is a classic case of correlation versus causation: I got up and the sun came up this morning, so therefore I must have caused the sun to rise. Similarly, people said nasty things about Kennedy and King, therefore those comments must have caused their killings. Today, people are saying nasty things about Trump, so it follows that someone would try to kill him. A lawyer such as Posner, frankly, should know better.

The questions his reasoning begs are legion. Here are a few: did critical things that people said about Trump drive Crooks? Or might it have been Trump’s own many vile comments, some of which incited the riot in the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021? Or might both those things have been irrelevant to a troubled loner who perhaps was looking for a way to write himself into history and do away with himself at the same time? Might it have been that Trump was just the famous politician on hand?

We may learn more as the FBI continues its investigation into Crooks. Perhaps his parents, acquaintances and workmates will shed more light as time goes on.

But we also may never know, as Posner sensibly admits. And, given that void, should the opportunists rule the day? Should Democrats and Republicans stop criticizing one another?

Certainly, Republicans are not holding back. “America cannot afford four more years of a Weekend at Bernie’s presidency,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said, referring to the ‘80s comedy in which two salesmen accidentally kill their boss and then pretend he is still alive. “Let’s be honest here. Biden is just a figurehead.”

And some argue that Democrats should not fall into a trap by backing off on warning Americans about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

“Donald Trump really does present a threat to the norms of liberal democracy and the welfare of millions of US residents,” Vox commentator Eric Levitz writes. “Joe Biden truly supports the legality of medical procedures that some Christian conservatives believe to be murder. Rhetoric that describes in good faith our polity’s disputes will imply that our elections have life-or-death stakes — because they do.

“That Trump poses a threat to democracy should go without saying,” Levitz adds. “As president, he attempted to block the peaceful transfer of power by manipulating vote counts and instigating a riot on Capitol Hill. He has also outlined plans for undermining the independence of federal law enforcement while vowing to enact ‘retribution’ on his movement’s enemies.”

Those unaware of the profound effect a Trump presidency could have can turn to plenty of places for info. As The New York Times reported, and I’ve previously recounted, he would step up the trade war that already is riling global relations, imposing stiff tariffs that will drive up prices on broad ranges of goods for Americans. He would set up WWII-style detention camps to hold rounded-up migrants for mass deportations, try to end birthright citizenship, use the Justice Department to persecute his enemies, strip employment protections from tens of thousands of civil servants, purge intelligence agencies and other bodies of people whose work he dislikes, and he would cut taxes for wealthy friends, driving up the national debt anew.

Even more discomfiting things might come if Trump associates at The Heritage Foundation have their way. Their Project 2025 would reduce the size of federal agencies, ban abortion drugs, and overhaul popular programs like the Affordable Care Act, as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writer reported. He argued that it could cause immense harm to “women of childbearing age, undocumented immigrants, public education, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, unions, and the LGBTQ community.” Critics say Trump would enjoy “unprecedented and potentially dangerous powers unlike any occupant of the White House in American history.”

Certainly, there’s no dearth of information about what a Trump presidency would bring. The problem is that his supporters either back his agenda or don’t bother to inform themselves about it, as they remain under his demagogic sway.

Sadly, no amount of information may swing enough devotees away from Trump’s magnetic lure. And it remains to be seen whether Biden could be persuaded to yield the ground to a younger Democrat who could better go toe-to-toe with the former president.

Still, filling voids with misinformation seems to help only Trump. And, in this regard, jailed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon once offered some perverse wisdom: “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon told writer Michael Lewis in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The GOP and folks such as Posner are doing that to a fare-thee-well.

Higher Ed aims lower these days

Posted on June 26, 2024 by Joe Weber

Have the pols lost sight of the value of education in Nebraska?

Back in 2009, when I joined the journalism faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, all arrows were pointing upward for the university. Enrollments were growing, buildings were rising, and graduates were going on to healthy careers in newswriting and other things. The state legislature and good citizens of the state realized that education was important, and they funded it, accordingly.

Even the Huskers won far more than they lost. The state’s football team racked up a 10-4 season that year, leading the Big 12 Northern Division and ranking 14^th best in the national AP poll.

My, how things have changed.

Overall enrollment at the flagship Lincoln campus has slipped from 24,100 back then to 23,600 now. Journalism is on the run, with graduates finding fewer opportunities in newspapers and other news operations. And the legislature and governor, engaged in ideological warfare with educators, seem to have forgotten that education both matters and costs.

As for the Huskers, the team seems emblematic of the university’s decline. After several pricey coach and athletic director departures, Big Red eked out a 5-7 season last year, a middling result in the Big 10 West (albeit better than the 4-8 record of the prior year). The university appears to be scrambling to avoid being kicked out of the Big 10, a lingering fear because UNL is the only conference member that doesn’t belong to the 71-member Assoc. of American Universities (the university was tossed by the AAU in 2011 over research funding issues and is trying to rejoin it).

Ameer Abdullah rushes in 2012; Source: Aaron Babcock

But now the ideologues who’ve seized most of the levers of power in the state are busy chipping away at the university’s hopes and ambitions. As a former student of mine, Zach Wendling, reported for the Nebraska Examiner, the regents just approved a $1.1 billion state-aided budget for fiscal year 2025 that will require campus leaders to scrape away another $11.8 million from their budgets in the next year, after they cut about $30 million in the past two fiscal years

While that one-year 1% cut seems like a pittance, it will bite. The earlier cuts did so, with some of the most visible trims being reduced library hours and fewer graduate teaching assistants and student workers. Plans were made last fall for deep cuts in the diversity, equity and inclusion office, undergrad ed and student success programming and non-specific operational efficiency improvements.

I’m reminded of a dark joke an economist colleague at BusinessWeek once told me. “If you cut the feed of a fine thoroughbred racehorse just a little bit each month or so to save money, what do you wind up with?” The answer: “a dead horse.”

In the case of UNL, it more likely will be a hobbled one, but one that limps along, nonetheless. The new round of cuts will involve an elaborate consultation approach with faculty and administrators, so it’s not clear now where they will come from. “As we begin this work, we will utilize shared governance processes to move forward in an engaged and thoughtful way,” Chancellor Rodney D. Bennett said in a message from his office.

But cutting majors and departments with little enrollment has been vaunted as one possible approach, along with eliminating staff jobs. That has been a popular tack at several schools, including the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The University of New Hampshire, as it trims 75 staff jobs, is shutting it art museum. And closer to home, at the University of Nebraska’s Kearney campus, bachelor’s degrees in areas such as geography, recreation management and theater are slated for elimination.

At UNL, just how much university-wide consultation versus administrative fiat will be involved will be difficult to say. When the chancellor last fall proposed a 46% cut from the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Office of Academic Success and Intercultural Services – some $800,000 – he triggered passionate objections from a good number of faculty and others. But he was pleasing the regents who had hired him last year.

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

The university’s DEI efforts – like similar programs around the country – have been hot-button matters for many on the right. Indeed, the chair of the regents opposed the budget in the June 20 5-2 vote, arguing that no diversity, equity or inclusion initiatives or programs should be funded.

“We need to recruit and have folks — diversity — here, but we shouldn’t be using tax dollars to fund and promote certain races or genders above others,” said regent chair Rob Schafer. “It ought to be a fair and level and equal playing field for all.”

Asked whether he’s seen the promotion of one race or gender at NU campuses – i.e., evidence of a problem — Schafer offered a, well, incomprehensible reply. “Just the fact that we have funding and we’re promoting different things, I think there’s some things that we could just do better,” journalist Wendling reported.

While enrollments continue to be under pressure, in part because the numbers of teens in the state have been stuck at between 129,000 and 142,000 for the last dozen years, the regents seem to be operating at cross-purposes by making the school more costly. They voted to hike tuition between 3.2% and 3.4% across the system’s several campuses, on top of a 3.5% across-the-board hike they okayed last year.

Despite that, Chancellor Bennett pointed to enrollment growth this past spring. Going forward, though, it’s not clear how making something more costly will draw more customers. Perhaps the regents and administrators haven’t consulted the folks in the economics department.

The tuition hikes drew the other no vote on the budget from Kathy Wilmot, who won her elected post as regent in 2022 in part by attacking “liberal leaning” courses at the university and venting about “indoctrination” at UNL. Now, as she bemoans the planned tuition hikes, she doesn’t seem to be urging more funding from the legislature to make those hikes unnecessary.

“To me, the families have already chipped in because they’re paying the taxes and things that we turn to the Legislature and everybody for,” Wilmot said, according to Wendling. “Then, when we ask those students from those families to chip in again, I feel that’s somewhat of a double hit.”

Back in the late 1960s, when the university was forming its four-campus system and the legislature generously funded the effort, a rising Republican star with a lot of influence in the state named Clayton Yeutter argued passionately for education. The schooling he got at Nebraska – including an undergrad degree, a Ph.D and a law school degree – led him from a small family farm to high levels in Washington, D.C. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including serving as Secretary of Agriculture, U.S. Trade Representative and head of the Republican National Committee. Trained in economics, the late Yeutter understood that quality costs.

Somehow, in these polarized times, the overwhelmingly Republican leaders in Nebraska have lost sight of that. Yeutter, whose statue graces the campus, would likely be disgusted by their approaches now.

Bias vs. disinformation

Posted on April 9, 2024 by Joe Weber

Can media outlets, such as The New York Times and NPR, maintain their credibility in the Trump era?e

Ah, the power of disinformation. It distorts the truth and, sometimes sullies the media that report it. Consider a couple matters that raise issues of bias:

The New York Times, in the recently published “The Method Behind Trump’s Mistruths,” offers a rich catalog of the former president’s misstatements and distortions – all accompanied by real facts that undercut his claims.

To take a couple examples:

“While Joe Biden is pushing the largest tax hike in American history – you know, he wants to quadruple your taxes.”

In fact, as the piece notes: “President Biden has not proposed quadrupling taxes. In fact, he has consistently vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000.”

“I mean, what he’s doing with energy with an all-electric mandate, where you won’t be able to buy any other form of car in a very short period of time.”

In fact, as noted, “Mr. Biden has not implemented an electric car mandate. The administration has announced rules that would limit tailpipe emissions from cars and light trucks, effectively requiring automakers to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids. It doesn’t ban gas cars.”

Such correctives – and those applied to more than a dozen more misstatements by the former president – are appropriate and helpful. The disgraceful roster of mistruths by Trump should be beneath anyone running for the presidency, much less a former president.

But the Times piece is not called “opinion” or, better, “analysis.” And yet the author offers a lot of both in framing his view of Trump in the opening paragraphs:

“Since the beginning of his political career, Donald J. Trump has misled, mischaracterized, dissembled, exaggerated and, at times, flatly lied. His flawed statements about the border, the economy, the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 election have formed the bedrock of his 2024 campaign.

“Though his penchant for bending the truth, sometimes to the breaking point, has been well documented, a close study of how he does so reveals a kind of technique to his dishonesty: a set of recurring rhetorical moves with which Mr. Trump fuels his popularity among his supporters.”

None of that is untrue, though much is a matter of interpretation – “bedrock of his 2024 campaign” and “kind of technique to his dishonesty,” for instance. Moreover, there’s no attempt to balance any of this with comments from, say, Trump’s spokesman. The author doesn’t present “the other side” from a Trump defender, perhaps from someone who would rationalize away the former president’s claims as just hyperbolic.

Is it fair journalism, nonetheless? Is it a good-faith effort to combat disinformation of the sort that has marked Trump’s career for years, both as a real-estate mogul whose failures are legend and as a politician given to fabrication?

Indeed, would efforts to get another side be an example of “bothsidesism,” an approach that critics rightly say gives credence to falsehoods?

For my part, I see the Times piece as very much on target and factually devastating. But I suggest that labeling it as something other than straight news would be helpful. When such pieces go unlabeled, the media are dismissed by Trumpists as incurably biased.

Sadly, that gives credence to Trump’s attacks on the “fake news” media. Such attacks have driven many on the right, I suspect, to not pay attention to troubling stories about Trump’s business interests and his political plans.

Some turn, I suspect, to Fox News, Newsmax or similar outfits that don’t hold their golden boy to account for his untruths.

To be sure, the Times and others should carry opinionated material. But it’s not straight reporting and shouldn’t be portrayed as such.

Bias – or perceived bias — though, goes further than just labeling. Media outlets can betray their viewpoints both in the stories they choose to cover and those they avoid.

Troubling examples come in a scathing piece about National Public Radio in the conservative outlet, The Free Press. In it, longtime NPR staffer Uri Berliner bemoans the lack of “viewpoint diversity” in the outlet’s news operation. Because of its groupthink, Berliner suggests, stories are not being done that should be.

Criticizing NPR’s coverage (or lack of coverage) of the COVID-19 lab leak theory, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and allegations that Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, he contends that “politics were blotting out the curiosity and independence that ought to have been driving our work.”

To detail one example, NPR paid little mind to the Hunter Biden laptop story in the fall of 2020, even though, Berliner argues, “(i)ts contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father. The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump.”

The NPR veteran also lambasts the lack of conservative voices on staff, saying that “people at every level of NPR have comfortably coalesced around the progressive worldview.” He backs that up with a look at the Washington offices: “Concerned by the lack of viewpoint diversity, I looked at voter registration for our newsroom. In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans. None.”

That observation begs the question: can a Democrat fairly cover a Republican, and vice versa? I would argue yes, but it’s also helpful if one can find more stripes than one in a news organization. If nothing else, the lack of variety means one risks everyone moving in lockstep, in questions not being asked. Even the Times has bona fide conservatives writing for its opinion pages.

A lack of intellectual diversity, Berliner contends, shapes NPR’s work and is costing listenership. “An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.”

“Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large,” Berliner writes. “Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal. By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal.”

“We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals,” Berliner argues.

Media outlets will lose their audiences if they don’t reflect them and speak to them in their journalistic work. That doesn’t mean pandering and certainly doesn’t mean reporting untruthfully or incompletely.

Finding the truth is a messy matter and giving charlatans platforms to spout unchallenged misstatements – as the right-leaning media often do – is not good journalism, of course. It’s the media’s job to hold officials and would-be officials to account, to call out their shortcomings and misstatements — but to do so in appropriate ways.

Later this year, I suspect we will see Trump and Biden square off in debates, at least if major news organizations get their way. And we can expect many misstatements to be aired, probably more from the former president than the current one. Will fact-checking help? Will partisans simply dismiss that? And can it be done in real-time, as the contenders rail against one another?

Politicians who shun facts have made a mockery of the most cherished journalistic tenets. Sadly, they could drag sound journalistic organizations down to their level, hurting all of us. The smartest outlets shouldn’t fall for that.

Just what do we want in a President?

Posted on March 4, 2024 by Joe Weber

A look at what drives Trumpism and its potential for the fall election

It’s funny how important things often come in threes. At the base of today’s triptych is Donald J. Trump, the likely victor in tomorrow’s sweep of primaries. All the matters that popped up today deal with the mystery of the man’s appeal and his potential second term. They are worth probing.

First, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens offered some interesting insights on what drives Trumpism – a source of wonder for anyone with half a brain, a sense of history and respect for responsible and responsive government. How can this boorish, immoral, often-unhinged would-be autocrat seem so inspiring to so many people?

Stephens, in a conversation with a colleague, offers the following:

“He’s a raised middle finger at all the people whom his supporters see as a self-satisfied, self-dealing cultural elite. The more that elite despises him, the more they love him. That’s why any good analysis of the Trump phenomenon has to begin with an analysis of the Us phenomenon, if you will: Where did those of us who were supposed to represent the sensible center of the country go so wrong that people were willing to turn to a charlatan like Trump in the first place? I have endless theories, but here’s another one: We tried to change the way people are instead of meeting them where they are. Neocons (like me) tried to bend distant cultures in places like Afghanistan to accept certain Western values. Didn’t work. Progressives tried to push Americans to accept new values on issues like identity, equity, pronouns and so on. That isn’t working, either. Trump represents a complete rejection of all that. For every American he scandalizes, another one feels seen, heard, reflected and understood by him.”

There’s a lot there. To unpack it, consider the “basket of deplorables” phrase that Hillary Clinton deployed to disastrous effect in September 2016. Speaking of half the Trump supporters, she said: “They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” The deplorables phrase was quickly snapped up proudly by such supporters, who took to wearing T-shirts emblazoned with it. Clinton even mentioned it in a book as contributing to her loss.

As Stephens suggests, the more the elites loathe Trump (and his supporters), the more his backers love him. The more they are pilloried by those of us who have benefitted from such forces as globalism, economic change and the need for education, the more Trumpists dig in behind the lead critic of such forces. The more they are accused of racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., the more they will bask in such traits, wearing such qualities all the more brazenly.

The second development has to do with the national Supreme Court and its ruling that Trump can remain on the ballot in Colorado, despite the state Supreme Court’s ruling striking him from it because of his role in the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. The decision was not surprising, of course, given that the Colorado ruling was a 4-3 one to begin with and, as a cynic might suggest, the conservative majority on the national court includes three Trump appointees.

But it was surprising that the national court’s decision was unanimous as the justices agreed that individual states don’t have the right to bar candidates from federal offices, noting “especially the Presidency,” although they may do so for state offices. The majority held that federal legislation would be needed to determine who would be disqualified under section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from holding office. Interestingly, the justices dodged the question of whether Trump had engaged in insurrection.

Unless something extraordinary happens – perhaps turning on any one of several Trump legal woes that all seem, oddly, to entrench Trumpists even more deeply — this decision suggests that we will see a Trump-Biden rematch in November. That prospect looks troublesome for Team Biden, in large part because voters seem to see Biden as much more enfeebled by his age (81) than they do Trump (77). Of course, both men are prone to mixing up facts and faces (Trump recently confusing Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and suggesting Barack Obama was still in office, and President Biden confusing the presidents of Mexico and Egypt). Experts say such verbal stumbles aren’t necessarily signs of a loss of mental acuity, though Joe Q. Voter may disagree, at least in Biden’s cas

Allen Weisselberg, source: Rolling Stone

The third development involves Trump’s dishonesty and the hold he, nonetheless, commands on some associates. Some go to the mat for him, lying or refusing to cooperate with investigators, even when that means jail terms. The latest is former Trump chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, with his guilty plea for lying under oath in the Trump civil fraud trial that will cost the former president $455 million. Weisselberg faces five more months in jail after the 100 days he served in an earlier case, but he can console himself with a $2 million severance payment Trump provided on the condition that he not cooperate with law enforcement unless forced to.

In that case, Trump seems to have purchased an underling’s loyalty. An exceptional number of Trump associates and supporters have been convicted of or faced various charges, with many going to jail without such payouts, though. Former aide Peter Navarro, who devised a plan to overturn the 2020 election, recently got four months in jail for ignoring a subpoena to testify in Congress about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Of course, some Trump loyalists turned against him. Former longtime attorney Michael Cohen is perhaps the best known because his testimony was instrumental in Trump’s most costly civil fraud trial. But others have owned up to missteps they made on Trump’s behalf.

Trump’s support among the undereducated is well-documented. He even bragged about this in 2016, saying “I love the poorly educated.” But just why he appeals to people who should know better is a mystery as profound as that of his appeal to a broader base of Republicans. Along with the support his associates provide, his backing among college-educated white GOP members doubled to 60 percent over the last year, according to polling by Fox News.

What do they see in the man? How can they back him in spite of – or perhaps because of – his broad array of legal problems? How do they fall for his victimization narrative?

I’m reminded of a day in 1992, when I spent time with Trump visiting one of his then-bankrupt casinos in Atlantic City for a story for BusinessWeek. He was in financial ruin, his empire controlled by others for the benefit of his many creditors, and his reputation in New York City real estate was in the toilet. And yet, as he strode through the since-sold (and renamed) Trump Taj Mahal, gamblers reached out to touch him for luck, one begging him to autograph her slots-playing hand. No matter the reality that he was a wreck financially, he looked to them like a god, much as he does now to those at his rallies.

Part of this may be narcissistic self-delusion on his part. He casts himself publicly – and perhaps in his mind — as paradoxically godlike (“I alone can fix it”) and as a victim, perhaps much as his followers see themselves as victims of social and economic change. But it also may all be good acting of the sort that he honed on his years on “The Apprentice,” the show that elevated his tough-guy image for a national audience. For all his many verbal flubs, he is an extraordinary performer, one who even managed to disguise ill-health during and after his time in the White House.

If one believes he is the alpha, perhaps he is the alpha, at least to his devotees. The analysis I find most intriguing – albeit the most unusual and entertaining – is research related to animal behavior.

As Wikipedia notes, psychology researcher Dan P. McAdams pointed to the dominance behavior of alpha male chimpanzees such as Yeroen, the subject of a study of chimp social behavior by primatologist Frans de Waal. McAdams describes the similarities: “On Twitter, Trump’s incendiary tweets are like Yeroen’s charging displays. In chimp colonies, the alpha male occasionally goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear … Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, and expressing various forms of submission. In Trump’s case, his tweets are designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base … These verbal outbursts reinforce the president’s dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force.”

Primatologist Dame Jane Goodall compared Trump’s behavior with that of other male primates. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks,” Goodall said. “The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”

The comparison has been echoed by political observers sympathetic to Trump, Wikipedia recorded. Nigel Farage, a Trump backer, said that in the 2016 United States presidential debates where Trump loomed up on Clinton, he “looked like a big silverback gorilla“, and added that “he is that big alpha male. The leader of the pack!”

Sadly, in all his reasonableness and moderation, as well as his frailness, Biden looks like someone the alpha chimp can stomp at will. Just how the two will compare in face-to-face debates (assuming that Trump doesn’t hide from them, as he has in the primaries), will be a telling spectacle, I suspect. Will America go for sober, thoughtful and measured, albeit it physically challenged, or will it go for a more ape-like manner? What will that choice say about our country?

Mass Media Takes a Big Hit

Posted on February 3, 2024 by Joe Weber

The Messenger lost millions and now a lot of journalists have lost work

With the sudden death of The Messenger, an ambitious news site plagued by trouble from without and within, mass media has suffered another devastating blow. The outlet’s demise comes atop staff cuts at Time magazine, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Business Insider, layoffs that have cast hundreds of top-notch journalists onto unemployment lines.

There is plenty of reason to mourn this loss – not so much for the site, but rather for the people involved. As my former BusinessWeek colleague Tom Lowry wrote on LinkedIn, the shutdown made for “a tough day – brutal, really,” adding how “sad for all [his] The Messenger colleagues who find themselves suddenly without a job …” That group included some 300 people, half of whom were journalists, including many from A-list publications.

Along with Lowry, BW veterans working there included Ciro Scotti, Dawn Kopecki and Justin Bachman. These superb talents joined a similarly impressive group in the much-touted venture, which went live only last May. In that short time, the group on the site’s business news team did outstanding work, as Kopecki described in a sad LI post. Indeed, she was prepping the best efforts for journalism contests as the site’s owners shut it down.

But this latest collapse – along with the drip-by-drip bloodletting at other big pubs – raises the question of what kind of journalism we will have going forward. The Messenger was slammed by many critics for its lack of innovation, its attempts to duplicate the glories of a media environment long since gone. Even as storied outlets such as The New York Times still find a large audience, the journalistic innovators that are succeeding nowadays seem to be far more locally focused and to not rely on advertising of the sort The Messenger never quite got.

In short, most of today’s promising news operations reflect the decline of the mass approach and the rise of targeted efforts.

Take, for instance, a couple pioneering outlets from Nebraska, the Flatwater Free Press and the Nebraska Examiner. The Flatwater Free Press, supported by donors and subscribers, has broken some of the most important stories in its well-defined turf, including award-winning coverage of Nebraska’s prison and parole board. The Nebraska Examiner, a nonprofit that is part of the States Newsroom national network, broke news that cost a leading gubernatorial candidate his race.

In a neighboring state, The Colorado Sun, another subscriber-supported site, has won a slew of awards for its important journalistic work. The controversial introduction of wolves in the state, for instance, has made for a series of major pieces. Similarly, its tick-tock account of a devastating fire shed light on the vulnerability of residential areas to climate change.

Such local news operations – often manned by small staffs and backed by foundations, donors or subscribers – are doing what any business must; they are serving their markets. They offer local, tightly focused content that makes a difference in people’s lives, a bold contrast with the outsize – one might say inflated — ambitions of the founders of The Messenger.

Jimmy Finkelstein, source: the New York Post

Principal owner Jimmy Finkelstein, former owner of The Hill, had raised $50 million to launch The Messenger. He staffed bureaus in major cities with some of the best journalists from outlets such as POLITICO, the Los Angeles Times, NBC News and Reuters, wooing them with generous pay. As the Daily Beast reported, on The Messenger’s launch last spring, managers predicted that the company would bring in $100 million annually and average over 100 million hits a month by the end of this year. (In December, it drew 24 million visitors, the New York Times reported).

But the effort seemed doomed from the start. Months before its launch, critics derided its business plan as “delusional” and mocked its high-profile execs for trying to serve a media environment that no longer existed. Finkelstein, in his mid-70s, had said he hoped the site would appeal to audiences who had warmed to “60 Minutes” and “Vanity Fair.” As a critic quoted by the New York Post put it, “Whenever a new website references an old magazine and TV show, you know they are not looking towards tomorrow.”

Then, once it debuted, the site was troubled by internal friction, as well as criticism from outside. As The New York Times reported, staffers chafed at demands to rewrite competitor stories, as their editors pressed them to churn out work to build hits. Communication within the outfit was so poor that multiple teams of reporters worked on the same topics, unaware of each other’s efforts.

For me, much of this is reminiscent of the last days of BusinessWeek. Fifteen years ago, we were all scrambling to deal with the Net. And part of the answer was doing anything to generate traffic. We had a magazine staff and a separate online staff, but we all fed an online operation whose main metric, it seemed, was eyeballs. As Chicago bureau chief, I was routinely pressed to file anything and everything about Boeing, for instance, no matter how slight. Why? The big-name company drew traffic.

BusinessWeek ultimately was sold – for essentially nothing – to Bloomberg and rechristened as Bloomberg Businessweek. Just recently, Bloomberg announced that the weekly print edition will be taken monthly. Long before that, though — back in the 2007-09 period — there was a desperation about our efforts that seemed to be replicated so many years later at The Messenger.

Gregg Birnbaum, source: www.greggbirnbaum.com

Only days after The Messenger’s launch last May 15, politics editor Gregg Birnbaum quit, disgusted with the culture of the place. “Who doesn’t like traffic to their news site?” he said in an email shared by The New York Times. “But the rapacious and blind desperate chasing of traffic — by the nonstop gerbil wheel rewriting story after story that has first appeared in other media outlets in the hope that something, anything, will go viral — has been a shock to the system and a disappointment to many of the outstanding quality journalists at The Messenger who are trying to focus on meaningful original and distinctive reporting.”

With its biggest debut effort, an interview with former President (and Finkelstein friend) Donald J. Trump, the outlet bent over backwards to avoid seeming partisan, as it promised impartiality and objectivity. Instead, what it did was just to duck controversy, avoid hard issues. For giving Trump an uncritical platform, the admittedly partisan Mother Jones lambasted the Messenger as “just another media outlet that enables extreme politics and the inflaming of divisions.” MJ Washington bureau chief David Corn argued that when its “down-the-middle approach is applied to a political extremist, the result is not objective journalism but the amplification and legitimization of extremism—and that can threaten honest political discourse and even democracy itself.”

On the left, publications such as Mother Jones and, perhaps, The Atlantic, seem to have carved out niches. On the right, outfits such as National Review have found an audience, as The New York Sun and The Free Press are attempting to do. Outlets such as POLITICO endure by zeroing on specific interest areas, much as trade journals like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed serve particular markets. And, across the nation, the small nonprofits seem to fill a vital need in down-the-middle general interest news, albeit local (nothing like the grandiose targets The Messenger leaders aimed for).

It is surprising that the lessons of serving particular audiences were lost on Finkelstein. After all, he had been involved with such tightly focused publications as The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, Billboard and The Hill, which his father, Jerry, co-founded in the 1990s with New York Times journalist Martin Tolchin. The younger Finkelstein raised some of the money for The Messenger by selling The Hill. But he had long lusted after bigger stages, in 2015 bidding unsuccessfully for New York’s Daily News.

In the end, The Messenger was the product of the flawed vision of a man who appeared to have little touch with an audience and less with the best interests of his staffers. As he burned through tens of millions, it appears Finkelstein didn’t bother to set aside anything for severance or health insurance for his staffers. Not surprisingly, some, have filed suit, seeking damages, as reported by Variety.

Finkelstein even slighted his staff in announcing the end of the publication. The staffers read about the shutdown first from reports in The New York Times, the Daily Beast and elsewhere before they got an email from the Florida-based failed mogul. For the journalists involved, this is a sad loss. Few, however, will shed a tear for the pied piper who led them down the rat hole.

The Big Picture

Category Archives: Journalism

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Just what do we want in a President?

A look at what drives Trumpism and its potential for the fall election

Mass Media Takes a Big Hit

The Messenger lost millions and now a lot of journalists have lost work