Great Caesar’s Ghost!

Posted on May 29, 2026 by Joe Weber

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

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.

“All of Germany hears the Fuhrer”

Posted on March 16, 2025 by Joe Weber

Trump’s war on the press has antecedents

German poster promoting the People’s Receiver. It reads “All of Germany hears the Führer with the People’s Receiver.” Source: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Germany in the early 1930s was a global leader in mass communications. It had more newspapers than other European nations and an influential film industry, one of the world’s largest. But, as we all know, Adolf Hitler soon trampled on all that.

“Within months of Hitler becoming chancellor, his regime destroyed the country’s free press,” historians at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum report. “It shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers. The propaganda ministry issued daily orders dictating what could be published. Oversight of radio, film, newsreels, theater, and music likewise fell under its rule… After 1933, the Nazi regime broadcast propaganda over the radio to homes, factories, and even city streets.”

Hitler’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, made his intentions clear in a speech at the Reich Broadcasting Co. on March 25, 1933. “We make no secret of it: broadcasting belongs to us, no one else,” he said. “And we will place broadcasting in the service of our ideas, and no other idea will be given a chance to speak.”

Are we seeing a similar effort now in Donald J. Trump’s Washington? Recall that the president made attacking the press a pillar of both his presidential campaigns and a hallmark of his first term in office. To Trump, the media are “truly the enemy of the people.” And, certainly, he now is doing his best to stifle American journalism, both domestically and abroad.

Internationally, Trump has just all but shuttered the Voice of America, using an executive order to put on leave some 1,300 journalists there. All full-time staffers at the VOA and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martí, were affected, as NPR reported. The move followed a late Friday night edict from President Trump that the VOA’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, must eliminate all activities that are not required by law (it’s a minor inconvenience for Trump that Congress chartered the agency).

VOA delivers news coverage to countries where a free press is threatened or nonexistent, according to The Washington Post. “At its start, VOA told stories about democracy to people in Nazi Germany,” the paper reported. “VOA and affiliates such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia are designed as a form of soft diplomacy, a way to tout the United States’ free-press values in countries where antidemocratic forces prevail.”

The service’s impact, has been huge. In effect, it has carried America’s pro-democratic and free-press values to some 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week.

“VOA promotes freedom and democracy around the world by telling America’s story and by providing objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny,” the now-suspended VOA director Michael Abramowitz, wrote in a post on social media. “For more than 80 years, Voice of America has been a priceless asset for the United States, playing an essential role in the fight against communism, fascism, and oppression, and in the fight for freedom and democracy around the world.”

But as it has covered antidemocratic regimes that Trump admires, such as those in Russia and Hungary, the service appears to have offended the president. “It is another chilling sign of Trump’s desire to upend the U.S.’s relationship with the world, press freedom advocates say — and to eliminate the flow of information he doesn’t like,” The Washington Post reported.

Of course, Trump can’t directly control what America’s independent media say about him — but he’s doing his best.

He has barred the Associated Press and Reuters from some White House events, for instance. His White House substituted two Trump-friendly outlets, Newsmax and Blaze Media, in the small group of correspondents who have access to the Oval Office for some press conferences. The press office ousted HuffPost from the group after one of its reporters posed a critical question to Trump on Air Force One.

He’s also using his bully pulpit to bludgeon critical outlets, habitually singling out some for verbal whippings. In his recent Justice Department speech, he said: “I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.” Of course, he meant MSNBC, using his trademark — and juvenile — slur style for it.

But, as Just Security has recounted, Trump has also moved far beyond words. His Federal Communications Commission reinstated previously dismissed complaints against CBS, NBC, and ABC relating to Trump’s claims of unfair pre-election coverage. FCC chief Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the commission, also launched an investigation into National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), following up on Trump’s repeated calls to yank broadcasting licenses of outlets he disdains.

NPR, in particular, is facing an assault by Trump minion (or, perhaps, puppetmaster) Elon Musk “Defund NPR,” Musk wrote on X. “It should survive on its own.” Carr’s FCC probe is attacking the legality of the radio network’s underwriting. And in petty slights, the Department of Defense ordered NPR, The Washington Post, CNN and The Hill to give up their offices at the Pentagon. Trump-friendly Breitbart News will fill NPR’s space, while Newsmax replaces CNN and The Free Press replaces The Hill.

Earlier, Trump brought a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS for its “60 Minutes” pre-election show, alleging “partisan and unlawful acts of voter interference.” He took umbrage at an October 2024 interview with then Vice-President Kamala Harris. Even as it has pursued a settlement, CBS-parent Paramount is seeking dismissal of the suit. Meanwhile, Trump sicced his FCC on the network with an investigation. The stakes are high for Paramount, as it depends on Washington for a proposed merger with Skydance Media.

Before taking control of various levers of power in Washington, Trump sued a slew of publishers, broadcasters, and platforms including Meta, ABC, CBS, and Gannett’s Des Moines Register. As Just Security reported, Meta settled with Trump for $25 million, Disney parent ABC settled for $15 million. Both had business and legal reasons – not journalistic ones — for settling. Meta chief Marc Zuckerberg has been cozying up to the president, perhaps hoping that he will quash a multistate lawsuit against Meta that the Federal Trade Commission, for now, is leading. And Disney could have faced a hostile jury in Florida.

Trump has also cowed Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post who triggered an exodus among subscribers and several editorial page departures by forcing the paper’s editorial page to be less critical of Trump. Let’s remember that in 2018, Trump threatened to punish Bezos’s Amazon, possibly by changing its tax treatment.

To be sure, the Trump onslaught has ignited some pushback — although it’s an open question about how effective statements of protest can be against someone who wields the power of Washington.

Some 40 media organizations on Feb. 21 issued a joint statement condemning his efforts in barring AP from the White House press pool. “When leaders try to silence reporters through intimidation, legal threats and denial of access, they are not protecting the country; they are protecting themselves from scrutiny,” the statement said. “This is how authoritarian regimes operate — by crushing dissent, punishing those who expose inconvenient facts and replacing truth with propaganda.”

Recall that Trump imperiously barred AP from the press pool because he was offended that it refused to refer to the “Gulf of Mexico” as the “Gulf of America,” as he unilaterally coined it. AP is continuing to pursuit a lawsuit in the matter. And, fortunately, the judge handling the case has suggested that Trump might lose that fight, saying: “It might be a good idea for the White House to think about whether what they’re doing is really appropriate given the case law.”

There’s even more to be concerned about than the exclusion of reporters. The Trump Administration is training its guns on what has been reliable government information. Its efforts could mask the economic effects of Trump’s antigovernment and economy-dampening measures, such as tariffs.

Trump’s Commerce Department Secretary, Howard Lutnick, wants statisticians to remove government spending from reports of gross domestic product. Federal government spending accounts for about 6.5% of GDP and it contributed 0.25 percentage point to the economy’s 2.3% annualized growth rate in the fourth quarter, according to Reuters.

The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, a nationwide group of business journalists, warned that this “raises the possibility that GDP and other economic data will be distorted, particularly if the Bureau of Economic Analysis eliminates the government accounts from its releases.” In other words, Lutnick wants to monkey with the data to put a happier face on a likely economic slowdown in the coming year, a contraction that may top 2 percent in the opening quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

“We don’t think it is a coincidence that the administration has curbed access to the White House for Bloomberg, Reuters and the Associated Press while simultaneously suggesting it may want to obscure the effect of its cost-cutting measures on the overall economy,” SABEW said. “There is the potential for long-term damage to the public’s right to know what’s going on with the economy – and the ability to make sound decisions based on accurate, complete data.”

Cooking the books has some history with Trump. Recall that the Trump Organization was convicted in 2022 on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. His chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, was jailed for five months in connection with lying for his boss. And separately Trump personally was convicted last year on 34 felony counts based on falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments to a porn star.

After Hitler came to power, he used the might of the state to crush dissent. Is it overwrought to contend that Trump is doing the same now, albeit by more subtle means than seizing the media outright? Trump’s approach seems more akin to that of Hungarian despot Viktor Orbán, who has used media buyouts by government-friendly oligarchs to control the messages Hungarians hear.

“He’s a very great leader, very strong man,” Trump has said of Orbán, who has held power as Hungary’s prime minister since 2010, with a prior four-year stint from 1998-2002. “Some people don’t like him ’cause he’s too strong.”

Of course, Trump sees himself in the same mold. Trump, whom critics see as delusional on many fronts, has also cast himself as akin to another strong leader, Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill.

But, before going into politics, Churchill worked as a journalist. As a part-time war correspondent, he traveled to Cuba, Afghanistan, Egypt and South Africa. And, while he insisted on wartime censorship for military reasons, he also defended the press.

“A free Press is the unsleeping guardian of every other right that free man prize; it is the most dangerous foe of tyranny,” Churchill reportedly said in 1949. “Where men have the habit of liberty the Press will continue to be the vigilant guardian of the rights of the ordinary citizen.”

By contrast, Trump has nothing but loathing for the liberty of the Press.

If editorialists had their way …

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Joe Weber

… things would have been far different

Jeff Bezos is half right. Newspaper endorsements don’t sway elections. If they did, Donald J. Trump would not have won in 2016.

Eight years ago, the gap between editorialists and the public made the Grand Canyon look like a roadside ditch. Only two of the nation’s top 100 newspapers – the Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Florida Times-Union – supported Trump for president. Fifty-seven editorialized for Hillary Clinton, while 31 (perhaps surprisingly) didn’t endorse anyone, four supported others and three just opposed Trump, according to The American Presidency Project.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, tells us in explaining why he has taken the paper out of the endorsement business. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None.”

Clearly, Trump wasn’t the choice of the smart set in 2016. Enough Americans thumbed their noses at editorial writers that Trump could plant his ample bottom behind the Resolute Desk the following January. Yes, it’s true that more voters lined up behind Clinton (48.2 percent) instead of Trump (46.2 percent), but the GOP candidate, nonetheless, swept the Electoral College vote by 56 percent.

So, does this mean that more newspaper opinion writers should go the way of Bezos’s Post? Will the lack of an editorial page thumbs-up make any difference to readers?

Editorial writers at a number of major papers say no on the first point. With Election Day a week away, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Houston Chronicle, the Seattle Times, The Boston Globe and the Las Vegas Sun have weighed in for Harris. Stumping for Trump so far are the New York Post, The Washington Times and the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

But the endorsers are among a shrinking number of papers advising voters on how to cast their ballots. As recently as 2008, 92 of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain for president, according to the Associated Press. But by 2020, only 54 made a choice between Trump and Joe Biden, AP reported, citing the presidency project (47 went for Biden, seven for Trump and 44 took no stance).

Some publishers and editors may side with the Amazon billionaire, who bought the Post in 2013, and who argues that the only thing presidential endorsements do is “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.” Readers, he implies, don’t distinguish between editorial pages, which are devoted to opinion, and news pages, ideally devoted to unbiased reporting.

That, he suggests, is at the root of widespread public mistrust of the media. Such mistrust, of course, has been growing for decades. Indeed, Trump capitalizes on it with his incessant attacks on “fake news” and, worse, his latest threats to punish media that offend him.

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” Bezos maintains. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion.”

But does it follow that withholding endorsements will help change that view of bias? Even Bezos equivocates: “By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction,” he writes.

His argument raises a host of questions. Would newspaper readers be more likely to believe what they read on the front pages because of the absence of calls to action by editorial boards? Do they now disbelieve those front pages just because of opinionated material on the inside of the papers?

Well, consider some recent headlines from the news section of The Washington Post. On the paper’s website, we find “On Elon Musk’s X, Republicans go viral as Democrats disappear,” “Poop artist strikes again with neo-Nazi tiki torch statue for Trump,” “Trump to speak in Florida amid fallout from comedian’s Puerto Rico insult,” and “Autocracy and ‘enemy from within’ are thrust to center of campaign’s final days,” to name a few.

Certainly, Trump supporters would scarcely warm to such pieces. Would such readers believe the outlet to be impartial? Or would they – when fed a steady diet of such headlines over time – just turn away from the paper, deeming it unfair to their golden boy?

Would they, instead, turn to Fox News? There, they could find “news” pieces headed “Momentum shifts against Kamala Harris just days before election and here’s why,” “Harris caught on hot mic admitting her campaign is struggling with male voters,” and “Trump merchandise outsells pro-Harris by striking margin, as Election Day draws near.”

Bezos is demonstrably correct that editorialists – and columnists, for that matter – don’t make much of a difference in elections, at least once perceptions are set. More than that, though – and far more troublingly — it seems news coverage doesn’t make all that much of a difference.

Citizens nowadays either find media that suits their biases or they just disregard whatever discomfits them, regardless of whether the information is opinionated. Some of my Trump-backing relatives simply dismiss news coverage, either unaware of journalistic ethics of impartiality or blinded by cable TV so much that they argue that all media outlets have agendas. Thus, none are trustworthy.

But where Bezos may be wrong is in implying that viewpoint-oriented material isn’t important, that it can’t change minds. Support for the Vietnam War waned on newspaper editorial pages (and on network TV, for that matter) long before widespread public support did, for instance, but eventually the public came round.

The editorialists just got there early.

More recently, editorialists in places such as The New York Times urged withdrawal from Afghanistan as far back at least as 2019. This was while Trump was in office and long before the Biden Administration drove its poorly executed abandonment of the 20-year war in 2021. Even then, at the time of the withdrawal, a substantial minority of Americans – 29 percent – did not think the war was a failure. And a surprisingly low 62 percent thought the war wasn’t worth fighting.

Truth be told, some of us who have worked in both straight news and in viewpoint-oriented journalism don’t look on editorials (or op-eds and other commentaries) as all that useful in changing minds on elections. Partisan loyalties and personalities often dictate there. But the edits are vehicles where insights are distilled, where the flood of facts that hit us daily can be sifted, put in context, and, yes, where smart analysis can lead to judgments.

Indeed, Bezos is not barring opinion writers from the Post pages. There, one nowadays still finds “Only care about your pocketbook? Trump is still the wrong choice,” “The U.S. can learn from other countries’ encounters with fascism,” “The Black vote will signal a change, but what kind?: A turn toward nativism among Black voters would send America in the wrong direction,” and more such hardly Trumpian views.

Moreover, he is not barring editorialists from criticizing candidates. On the same day that he explained his rationale in his owner’s note, Oct. 28, the Post’s editorial board lambasted Trump anew and praised Harris in “The right place to make the best case against Trump.” This was in an editorial, an “official” stance of the paper:

“Vice President Kamala Harris will deliver her closing argument in a speech Tuesday at the Ellipse in D.C.,” the editorialists wrote. “This location, where President Donald Trump incited a mob to ransack the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is fitting and proper. Mr. Trump’s unprecedented efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, combined with promises to pardon supporters convicted of crimes committed that day, represent Ms. Harris’s strongest argument for why voters shouldn’t return him to the White House. Mr. Trump has shown no contrition for what happened during the worst assault on the Capitol since the British set it ablaze in 1814. Instead, he’s attempted to rewrite history.”

Is that not a condemnation of Trump, if not an endorsement of Harris?

In fairness to Bezos, a longstanding industry view about editorials (and news coverage) suggests that outlets should not get too far ahead of their readers on controversial matters or they simply will lose them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t lead the crowd or try to.

If Denis Morton or Jenn Sherman push too hard or too fast, Peloton riders will just avoid them, as exercise fans know. But riders do expect to be nudged a bit out of their comfort zones.

Back in the day, my editors at BusinessWeek bristled at the idea of letting focus groups of readers determine our editorial content. The argument was that such readers might not know what they want until they see it, and it was up to writers and editors to provide that. Journalists brought judgment that readers needed.

Similarly, when editors at The Wall Street Journal a few decades ago were asked whom they were editing the paper for, they answered “for ourselves.” Of course, that view seems to have changed under editor Emma Tucker, who has remade the paper. Our user-friendly choice-filled days seem to make such responsiveness necessary.

As it happens, both the BusinessWeek I worked for and the Journal long declined to make election endorsements. At BW, the non-stance stance had to do with whether such an endorsement would reflect the views of then-owner McGraw-Hill and the McGraw family or the editors of the magazine – which would likely differ. In the case of the WSJ, the paper hasn’t endorsed a candidate since 1928 (embarrassingly, it backed Hoover). The Journal did say in a recent editorial, though, that it wished that the GOP had chosen someone other than Trump as its nominee for 2024.

“His rhetoric is often coarse and divisive,” the journal wrote. “His praise for the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping is offensive, and betrays his view that he can by force of personality cut favorable deals with them. He indulges mediocrities who flatter him, and his attempt to overturn the 2020 election was disgraceful. These columns preferred any other Republican nominee.”

Hardly warm praise for Trump, whom the writers called “flawed.” But this fell short of an endorsement of Harris.

For its part, The Washington Post until 1976 had mostly avoided endorsements. Even in the critical 1972 election of Richard Nixon, the editorial board stayed neutral.

“In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role?,” the Post board wrote then, as noted recently by current publisher William Lewis. “Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

But, given the starkly different options today and the high stakes of this election, is there not reason to think that some smart judgment in an editorial would be useful? The editors at The Atlantic this year decided, for only the fifth time in the magazine’s history, to make an endorsement. Calling Trump “one of the most personally malignant and politically dangerous candidates in American history,” it backed his opponents in 2016 and 2020.

“This year, Trump is even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme,” the editors wrote. “Trump has made clear that he would use a second term to consolidate unprecedented power in his own hands, punishing adversaries and pursuing a far-right agenda that most Americans don’t want. ‘We believe that this election is a turning-point in our history,’ the magazine prophesied correctly when it endorsed Abraham Lincoln in 1860. This year’s election is another.”

Bezos, along with peers at papers including the Los Angeles Times, the Minnesota Star Tribune, USA Today, The Tampa Bay Times and the Gannett, McClatchy and Alden chains, have taken a different course. Gannett argued that “readers don’t want us to tell them what to think,” as a Poynter Institute analyst reported. The others offered variations on the same theme.

An editor whose paper, The Oregonian, took a different route suggested to Poynter that trying to stay above the fray sometimes doesn’t play well with readers. “Our decision to endorse in this race reverses our policy in 2012 and 2016,” Therese Bottomly said in explaining her paper’s Harris support. “We heard the community’s disappointment over our past non-endorsements loud and clear. Particularly at this precipitous moment, we recognize both the privilege and obligation we have to advocate for the candidate who can best lead our country forward.”

Plenty of folks have been disappointed with Bezos’s decision to sit on the fence this year, with many suggesting he was feeling cowed by ever-increasing threats by Trump to punish his critics. Bezos drew heat from within and without.

Eighteen columnists signed a dissenting column against his choice, calling it “a terrible mistake.” Watergate reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward called the move “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.” And former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X: “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty.”

As The Guardian reported, the cartoon team at the paper even published a dark image protesting the non-endorsement decision. This was a play on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after Bezos bought the paper. Author Stephen King and former congresswoman and Trump critic Liz Cheney announced they were cancelling their Post subscriptions, just as more than 200,000 digital subscribers reportedly have.

In the end, this contretemps may amount to just another painful blow to a declining industry. But it could also be a distressing harbinger of the rising threat America faces if the public makes the wrong choice next Tuesday.

The Big Picture

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