Media

Alma Matters is a Poynter newsletter designed to provide ideas, news and insight to those in the journalism education community. Subscribe here to get Alma Matters delivered to you. Happy Sunday! You’re a few weeks into this semester … I hope this resource roundup helps! Two fun classroom misinfo tools Clemson’s Media Forensics Hub is offering […]

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Front pages courtesy The Newseum.                          

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This story has been updated. The 2020 election just inherited a new issue. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Friday at the age of 87, told her granddaughter, “My most fervent wish is that I will not be replaced until a new president is installed.” But that wish may not be fulfilled. In fact, President […]

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The forcible sterilizations of female detainees at an immigration detention center in Georgia represent a new level of cruelty. But ice healthcare systems are known to replicate those of American prisons, where reproduction injustice is an enduring problem. On this week’s Kicker, Tina Vasquez, a senior reporter at Prism who has covered the Georgia case, […]

In an effort to cover misinformation responsibly, The New York Times has debuted a new feature that will debunk and contextualize misleading information after it has gone viral or created “offline harms.” Daily Distortions will appear as a swipeable feature for mobile apps focused on one subject per day and a running blog with a...

There’s been a raft of reporting this week on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s possible problem with Hispanic voters. “Trump is doing better with Hispanics than he did four years ago,” CNN’s Harry Enten reported. There are a number of reasons for this — as Derek Thompson noted in The Atlantic, those reasons include Florida’s...

Is it “Black” or “black”? (Or African-American? Or kill the hyphen?) Hispanic, Latino, Latino, Latin@, or Latinx? Is calling a piece of legislation a “bathroom bill” an acceptable shorthand? LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQIA — or none of the above? These are the kinds of decisions that can show up in any journalist’s writing (or, in many...

Last week was a tale of two stories for CNN. The best of the network, and the worst, all at once.  On September 2, senior national correspondent Kyung Lah reported the rapidly increasing rate of evictions in Houston, mostly attributed to the economic crisis shaped by the pandemic. Lah embedded with an officer in charge […]

A year ago today, the Washington Post reported details about a whistleblower complaint filed from someone in the US intelligence community, vague word of which had been swirling below the news cycle for days: Trump had made a “troubling” promise to a foreign leader. The Post’s story accelerated a media-wide rush to find out more; soon, we learned that the leader in question was Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and that Trump had asked him to investigate Hunter Biden, son of Joe. After four months, those revelations culminated in Trump’s impeachment in the House of Representatives and acquittal in the Senate.

In hindsight, that was a quieter time. During the past week alone, we’ve learned details of three whistleblower complaints alleging misconduct across the Trump administration. First, we found out that Brian Murphy, a senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, filed a complaint claiming that he was told to suppress and/or doctor intelligence reports—on Russian interference, domestic white supremacy, and other urgent matters—that risked contradicting Trump’s political priorities. (Murphy, it should be noted, was recently removed from his post atop a DHS office that compiled intelligence reports on journalists; former officials told the Post that Murphy was a “poor manager,” but confirmed that the substance of his complaint is valid.) Then Dawn Wooten, a nurse at a privately-run ICE detention facility in Georgia, revealed that she filed a complaint alleging that the facility recklessly mismanaged COVID-19 cases and subjected Spanish-speaking female detainees to hysterectomies—frequently, and possibly without their informed consent. (Her account has been corroborated, including by The Intercept.)

ICYMI: Journalism’s Gates keepers

Yesterday, the Post reported a claim by Adam D. DeMarco, a major in the DC National Guard, who gave whistleblower testimony about the decision to violently clear peaceful protesters outside the White House, in June, when Trump staged a photo-op with a Bible. Hours before Trump took a step toward Lafayette Square, DeMarco said, federal officials had been stockpiling ammunition and seeking weapons—including a “heat ray” designed to make targets feel as if their skin is on fire—that have repeatedly been deemed inappropriate for use in war zones.

Also yesterday, we learned of two other claims—not from whistleblowers per se, but disturbing just the same. In an interview with The Guardian’s Lucy Osborne, Amy Dorris, a former model, alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in 1997 at the US Open. Several sources confirmed that Dorris told them about the alleged assault at the time or subsequently. Dorris is at least the twenty-fourth woman to have accused Trump of sexual misconduct; E. Jean Carroll, an advice columnist, has accused him of rape. Later in the day, Olivia Troye—a former aide to Vice President Mike Pence, and who served on the White House’s coronavirus task force—said that Trump’s response to the virus was guided primarily by reelection concerns; she alleged that the president said the pandemic could be a “good thing” if it stopped him from having to shake hands with “disgusting people”—an apparent reference to his supporters.

Given their dizzying pace, it’s hard to keep all these revelations in mind—let alone prominently in the news cycle—at once. This time, there will be no impeachment inquiry to hang the reporting around. Yesterday, when I flicked over from CNN, where Wolf Blitzer was discussing Troye’s remarks, to MSNBC, it took me a while to realize that they weren’t discussing the same story, but rather the Post’s coverage of DeMarco and heat rays. Stephen Colbert put it well: “The news can be depressing these days,” he tweeted, “so take a mental wellness break from reading about how the president sexually assaulted someone to read about how he tried to use a heat ray against his own citizens.” Not that either of those stories is conspicuous on many major news homepages this morning. We may already have moved on.

There’s also the stuff that Trump says and does publicly, wrenching the attention of the news cycle. Yesterday, at the National Archives museum, he condemned the 1619 Project—a major New York Times Magazine initiative that aims to root the American story in the history of slavery. An important part of the 1619 Project is educational material, which Trump called “ideological poison.” He also referred to the teaching of critical race theory as “a form of child abuse, in the truest sense of those words.” The speech was surreal (I, for one, did not have “Howard Zinn” marked on my Trump-insult bingo card) and part of his effort to reframe the election campaign around conservative theories of the past, since things aren’t going so well in the present.

Amid the swirl of reports about Trump’s insults and abuses, we must try and keep a sustained spotlight on testimony that credibly alleges the abuse of human rights, especially when such abuses are ongoing. The ICE story, in particular, must not fall victim to the fleetingness of our outrage. The institutional racism and violence there, worsened by Trump, will outlast him. Come election day, and the days after, we must remember what America has done.

Below, more on everything:

• Another new story: American Oversight, a watchdog group, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain nearly 10,000 pages of documents from the US Postal Service, then handed the records to the Post; they contain damning details about dysfunction at the agency during the months of March and April, several months before the USPS became a national election story. At one point, the postal service was planning to deliver 650 million face masks nationwide, but the plan never came to fruition. Separately, yesterday, a federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked Louis DeJoy, the Republican donor turned postmaster general, from instituting operational charges at the USPS; the judge accused the Trump administration of “a politically motivated attack” on the agency that will likely slow the delivery of mail ballots.
• Another old story: Yesterday, the Center for Public Integrity debuted The Heist, a new investigative podcast exploring how Trump’s 2017 tax cuts (remember them?) benefited the rich and exploded the national debt, even though Trump said they’d help the middle classes the most. “Something similar happened again with the 2020 pandemic bailout,” the team behind The Heist writes. “Promises made, promises broken.”
• A response: After Trump attacked the 1619 Project, its lead author, Nikole Hannah-Jones, responded on Twitter. “I take great satisfaction from knowing that now even Trump’s supporters know the date 1619 and mark it as the beginning American slavery,” she wrote. “1619 is part of the national lexicon. That cannot be undone, no matter how hard they try.”
• A threat: Yesterday, Christopher Wray, the FBI director, told lawmakers on the House Homeland Security Committee that Russia has been “very active” in sowing a disinformation campaign aimed at smearing Joe Biden. The campaign mimics Russia’s tactics in 2016, when it also tried to target election infrastructure, though the latter threat has not yet recurred, Wray said. (ICYMI, I wrote on Tuesday about Russian disinformation, and how the press ought to conceptualize it.)
• A swan song: Drew Magary is ending his regular politics column at Gen because “writing about politics sucks.” Doing so every week, he writes, “is like your old man catching you with a pack of Marlboros and forcing you to smoke the entire thing in one sitting to make you sick. I can’t do this shit anymore. I don’t know how any human can.” Most TV politics commentators, Magary adds, are “a parade of scum.”

Other notable stories:

• In a cover story for Bloomberg Businessweek, Sarah Frier and Kurt Wagner make the case that “Facebook needs Trump even more than Trump needs Facebook.” (The cover shows a cartoon of Zuckerberg wearing a MAGA hat, along with the words, “What, me partisan?”  Alfred E. Neuman would approve.) Frier and Wagner write that above all, Zuckerberg cares about “Facebook’s ubiquity and its potential for growth. The result, critics say, has been an alliance of convenience between the world’s largest social network and the White House, in which Facebook looks the other way while Trump spreads misinformation about voting.”
• For CJR, Bill Grueskin writes that the moderators of the presidential debates between Trump and Biden must call out lies in real time. The hosts “need to have Glenn Kessler– or Daniel Dale-quality fact checkers in their control room, providing instantaneous quality control on the candidates’ claims,” Grueskin argues. “So armed, moderators can help voters see which candidate is more capable of handling and delivering the truth.”
• This week, dozens of staffers at BuzzFeed received an email from an outside source accusing one of their colleagues of harassment. (The allegations have not been corroborated, and the staffer facing them has not been publicly named.) Managers at BuzzFeed pledged to investigate—but also deleted the original email from all inboxes, a move that alarmed BuzzFeed staffers. The Daily Beast’s Maxwell Tani has more.
• In 2016, managers at WAMU, an NPR station in Washington, DC, tried to fire Martin Di Caro, a transportation reporter who was repeatedly accused of sexual harassment. Then HR bosses at American University, which holds WAMU’s license, stopped the firing. (The university disputes this.) Di Caro left WAMU in December 2017 and went on to work for Bloomberg Radio. Rachel Kurzius has more for DCist.
• Poynter’s Kristen Hare profiles Mountain State Spotlight, a new investigative newsroom in West Virginia. Its founders—Greg Moore, Eric Eyre, and Ken Ward, Jr.—initially intended to launch the site under the banner of the Charleston Gazette-Mail, where they all previously worked, but ended up striking out on their own. Mountain State Spotlight is receiving support from Report for America, the American Journalism Project, and ProPublica.
• For CJR, Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, lists ten questions lawmakers should ask Michael Pack—the head of the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees state-backed outlets including Voice of America. When Pack entered his position, in June, many feared what his leadership would mean for editorial independence. Next week, Pack will appear before a House committee. (“Who are you working for?” Simon wants to know. And: “Why on earth would you suggest journalists are spies?”)
• With New York City schools set to begin a phased reopening next week, Alexander Russo, of The Grade, argues that coverage should prioritize “school-based experiences and carefully contextualized data” and not “scary anecdotes and political infighting.” So far, he writes, much coverage has been “unnecessarily alarmist.” (ICYMI, we discussed back-to-school coverage on a recent episode of our podcast, The Kicker.)
• Vanity Fair’s Keziah Weir profiles Skyhorse, the independent publishing house responsible for recent books by Woody Allen, Roger Stone, and Michael Cohen, among others. Crown, a division of Penguin Random House, announced that it will publish A Promised Land, the first volume of Barack Obama’s presidential memoir, on November 17, two weeks after the election.
• And CJR’s Betsy Morais asked Roger Angell, a New Yorker writer and editor known for his baseball pieces, to suggest a reading list to fans in honor of his hundredth birthday (which is tomorrow). “He sits motionless in the hot sunshine, with a shapeless canvas hat cocked over his eyes,” Angell writes, in his profile of a baseball scout. “At last, responding to something on the field not perceptible to the rest of us, he takes out a little notebook and writes a few words in it, and then replaces it in his windbreaker pocket.” We’re tipping our caps.

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?

The American public may not see winners announced quickly in this year’s election, due to delays from mail-in balloting driven by the coronavirus pandemic. If races are close, it could take a week or more to count votes and declare winners. Reporters will need to explain how voting works in advance, and set expectations clearly […]

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Poynter recently hosted an online workshop called “The Weirdest Election ‘Night’ Ever: What journalists and election-watchers need to know about the 2020 elections and a working democracy.” This reading list was an accompaniment to the workshop. Register to see free replays of four workshop panels on election returns; debunking misinformation; television coverage on election night, […]

The post The challenges of the 2020 election — What we’re reading appeared first on Poynter.

Good morning, everyone. Tom Jones is on vacation, but the team at Poynter is keeping tabs on the latest media news and analysis. Here’s what you need to know today. Ad Age reports that political spending is about to bail out the industry’s overall 2020 performance. Total ad sales were down 7.2% in the first […]

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Lee en español. ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (Sept. 18, 2020) — Led by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute, FactChat is the first collaborative project to unite 10 U.S. fact-checking organizations with two major Spanish-language news broadcasters to fight mis/disinformation during a presidential campaign. This bilingual alliance will expose the record 32 million […]

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Tomorrow is Roger Angell’s hundredth birthday. I met Roger at The New Yorker, where he has contributed since 1944. I was assigned to be his assistant; we’ve since become dear friends. Reading his pieces, many of them about baseball, a few things are obvious: Roger is a terrific noticer. He has an extraordinary talent for […]

Covering COVID-19 is a daily Poynter briefing of story ideas about the coronavirus and other timely topics for journalists, written by senior faculty Al Tompkins. Sign up here to have it delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. The Washington Post has an important piece about how college students, especially low-income students, can’t make a […]

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This article was originally published on April 6, 2020, and has been frequently updated since. It was last updated on September 17.  It’s getting hard to keep track of the bad news about the news right now. But we have to. Here’s our attempt to collect the layoffs, furloughs, and closures caused by the coronavirus’ […]

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MediaWise Rating: Not Legit On Sept. 3 a video surfaced on Twitter that appears to show Joe Biden calling for the arrest of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who was shot by police on March 13. The video comes from a Q&A session during a public speaking event in Delaware. But did Biden really say […]

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In mid-October 2012, President Obama’s reelection campaign was in trouble. He had just turned in a listless debate performance against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and his three-point lead in the polls had evaporated. So anticipation was high for the second debate, a town hall. Another stellar performance by Romney might torpedo Obama’s prospects. Candy […]

There are certain kinds of news stories that are really just iterations of an Ur-text, the defining statement about human existence that underlines a million variant tales. For instance, how many environmental stories do you read that are versions of Human activity is warming the earth’s atmosphere and damaging countless natural processes? Or how many...

Mountain State Spotlight, a new nonprofit newsroom dedicated to accountability journalism, launched in West Virginia on Thursday. On opening day, the news site featured a slate of stories on inadequate internet access, holes in a program to feed the state’s children during school closures, and the first responders across the state still waiting on pandemic...

“It’s time for action.” Two months ago, following nationwide protests and increased calls for anti-racist policies, a number of media companies released diversity and inclusion pledges. Now, journalists say their employers have done little to live up to those promises. Tim Peterson writes in Digiday that, by many accounts, plans to hire Black employees have...

The Cold War was fought not with weapons, but with information and ideas. In the struggle, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, American government-funded news outlets, were on the front lines.  They were powerful not because they were propaganda, but because they weren’t. Today, under the leadership of conversative documentarian Michael Pack—appointed, of […]

Over the past decade, we’ve seen the rise of a new kind of corporate power, one built on an almost unprecedented level of digital surveillance, fueled by the demands of the global advertising industry—a phenomenon that Harvard professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.” Google, Facebook, and Amazon have built businesses that are worth trillions, […]

The comedian Samantha Bee recently told the Los Angeles Times about her reaction to the arrest of Steve Bannon, President Trump’s former strategist, by postal inspectors aboard a megayacht owned by an exiled Chinese billionaire. “For me, it was a chef’s kiss moment,” she said. “Every once and in a while we deserve good news.”  […]

There’s state-supported media, and then there’s state-supported media. And without getting too Potter Stewart on you, you tend to know the difference when you see it. Virtually every country in the world spends public money on some form of broadcast media — directly or indirectly, through taxes or fees, with editorial control or editorial independence...

NPR’s daily podcast Consider This began as Coronavirus Daily, but changed its name and broadened its scope in June as protests against police brutality and racial discrimination competed with the virus for headlines. Now, the shortform afternoon podcast, pitched as a bookend to the morning’s Up First, is morphing again. Last week, NPR announced Consider...

The foundations of local journalism are crumbling, as this newsletter seeks to explain each week; over the past few years, as the US has faced voter suppression, foreign meddling, and executive overreach—and as political polarization charges the atmosphere around the world—the foundations of a democratic government can also seem precarious.  In April 2019, the Pew […]

If you have an Instagram account, you may have seen this post when you were going through your friends’ Stories: View this post on Instagram Update: A GoFundMe has also been set up for Jacob and his family. Please support (link in bio, too): https://www.gofundme.com/f/justiceforjacobblake On Sunday, August 23, a Black man was shot in...

It’s rare for President Trump to appear on networks that aren’t Fox, and even rarer for him to engage with Americans who aren’t already aboard the Trump train, but last night he did both, traveling to Philadelphia to participate in an ABC News town hall with undecided voters. Their questions, at times, were much blunter than those Trump typically allows himself to face. Paul Tubiana, a health researcher who supported Trump in 2016 and is diabetic, asked the president why he has “thrown vulnerable people like me under the bus.” Carl Day, a pastor who voted for the Green candidate Jill Stein last time, brought up Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan and asked, “Are you aware of how tone deaf that comes off to the African-American community?” The visual of the audience, members of which sat masked and far apart in an otherwise empty auditorium, was itself a jarring, sobering reminder that nothing is normal right now.

Still, the event raised familiar complaints. The anchor, George Stephanopoulos, pushed back on some of what Trump said—a nonsense answer about his supposed healthcare plan, most aggressively—and won some plaudits for doing so. (He certainly did a better job than his colleague David Muir mustered when ABC got a shot at the president in May.) Several journalists and media critics, however, felt that Stephanopoulos wasn’t nearly assertive enough. “We spend all our time rightly getting exercised by mad stuff Trump says or does,” Mehdi Hasan, of The Intercept, argued, “yet at the same time we set the bar so low that when he gets a mild question or two suddenly we’re celebrating that he somehow was held to account. He wasn’t.” At the very least, the town hall felt like the latest iteration of a perennial problem: Trump tells lies at such velocity that his interlocutors can’t challenge them all. Some of the postgame reviews, too, felt familiarly lacking. ABC’s Jon Karl judged that the town hall was “pretty good” for Trump because he got to show his “empathetic side.” (After a voter told Trump about her mother’s death from cancer, Trump referred repeatedly to her mother’s death from covid-19. One can imagine what the pundits would have said if Joe Biden had done that.)

ICYMI: Journalism’s Gates keepers

The criticisms of the town hall were further grist for those who believe that major news outlets have learned nothing from the mistakes they made in 2016. Earlier yesterday, James Fallows, of The Atlantic, made precisely that argument in an essay that was widely quoted on media Twitter. Fallows compares the media’s present performance to that of Robert Mueller, in the sense that we observe naive “proprieties” that Trump and his allies know how to exploit, and to Groundhog Day, albeit so far “without Bill Murray’s eventual, hard-earned understanding that he could learn new skills as time went on.” (Murray isn’t the worst suggestion to play Mueller in the inevitable biopic, depending on which direction you want to take it, but I digress.) Fallows names three specific mistakes that news organizations keep making—falsely equating the conduct of Trump and his opponents, obsessing over the horse race, and chasing ratings—and argues that we’re running out of time to fix them. “Soon the clock will show 6:00 a.m. once more; the alarm will start blaring ‘I Got You Babe’ another time,” he writes. “This day, we can do better.”

The problems that Fallows identifies are of deep concern and have been discussed and written about repeatedly, at CJR and elsewhere. They undoubtedly played a malign role in 2016. But, as Fallows acknowledges, their roots go much deeper than the errors of one election cycle, and some of his more specific 2016 parallels—comparing the “egregiousness” of the New York Times’ coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails to the way it’s covered Bob Woodward’s new book, for instance—aren’t especially convincing. From my perch, at least, this year’s election news cycle, while depressingly familiar in many respects, doesn’t exactly feel like 2016 redux.

In large part, that’s due to the presence of massive new challenges to our election-coverage model that simply weren’t at issue last time. In recent weeks, one potential danger spot, in particular, has preoccupied election experts and media columnists: what newsrooms in general, and TV shows in particular, will do if there isn’t a result on election night. (The pandemic will lead to a surge in mail-in votes; counting them will take a long time, and many states—including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which will likely be crucial—don’t allow election officials to make an early start.) Last month, Ben Smith, media columnist at the Times, asked news executives and TV hosts about their contingency plans; many of them responded with “blithe confidence,” leading Smith to conclude that at the highest levels of our industry, “it simply hasn’t sunk in how different this year is going to be.” No one Smith spoke to “had any real idea how cable talkers or Twitter take-mongers would fill hours, days and, possibly, weeks of counting or how to apply a sober, careful lens” to Trump’s likely, bogus allegations of massive fraud.

There are reasons, beyond complacency, to hope that an election-night/-week/-month calamity can be avoided. We might know something definitive (the Florida result, for example) pretty quickly; in the meantime, we’ve seen much aggressive coverage of Trump’s efforts to disrupt the integrity of mail-in voting, and numerous outlets have published clear explainer content about how the election will work this year. Per Smith, CNN and CBS, at least, plan to ditch their typical use of physical voting precincts as a proxy for votes counted, and the Times is considering how to improve its infamous election-night “needle.” And, at present, most voters seem to be registering the uncertainty: more than 60 percent of respondents to a Fox News poll published Sunday said they’re “comfortable” with having to wait for the result. Still, this is just one poll (and when I was a kid, I was “comfortable” waiting for Santa till Christmas Eve arrived). And on the media front, past election cycles—2000, the 2018 midterms, this year’s Iowa caucuses—have proved that when things go wrong, pundits like to fill the air with inane babble and half-baked narratives.

In 2020, the challenge is not just to correct old errors but to anticipate new ones, and try and avert them ahead of time. That’s a tall order; as Smith wrote last month, “the media specializes in fighting the last war,” not the current one. When we come to look back on it, the media story of the 2020 election may well be that we didn’t learn the lessons of 2016—but I fear that fresh, as-yet-unrealized mistakes will loom larger than Hillary’s emails, round two. If we’re to avoid spending the 2024 cycle ruing the mistakes of 2020, we need to look forward as well as back. Escaping Groundhog Day isn’t the end of this movie.

Below, more on the election:

• Threat modeling: To the latter point, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, has argued that major news organizations should appoint “threat modeling teams” that “would try to identify the most serious threats to a free and fair election and to American democracy over the next four months, so that their newsrooms can take appropriate action.” To inform his suggestion, Rosen spoke with threat modelers from other fields: Joshua Geltzer, a former counterterrorism official, and Alex Stamos, formerly Facebook’s chief security official.
• The “no diner” rule: For the Associated Press, David Bauder assesses how journalists have changed their coverage plans due to the pandemic. ABC’s Martha Raddatz told him that she was still able to do a cross-country road trip, but decided to arrange interviews ahead of time, and has steered clear of diners. As well as being a health risk these days, diner journalism is a much-criticized campaign cliché. Peter Wallsten, a politics editor at the Washington Post, told Bauder that the pandemic has presented an “opportunity to reassess how we do things. It’s not clear whether how the media has been covering campaigns in the past has been the right way.”
• Old habits: Before appearing on ABC yesterday, Trump called in to a more familiar setting, Fox & Friends, and rambled for forty-seven minutes. When he was done, host Brian Kilmeade asked Trump whether he would be coming on the show every week; when Trump replied that he would, another host, Steve Doocy, told him that Fox “is not committed to that.” (At that, Kilmeade made a face.) Fox later confirmed that there’s currently no agreement for Trump to make a weekly appearance on Fox & Friends. That Trump wants to, the Post’s Erik Wemple writes, reflects that he is “desperate.”
• Endorsement watch: Yesterday, Scientific American backed Joe Biden for president—the first time in the magazine’s 175-year history that it has taken such a step. “We do not do this lightly,” editors wrote, but “the evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science.” Last week, the LA Times became the first major outlet of the fall election cycle to formally endorse Biden, who will do a town hall on CNN tomorrow.
• Who Matt Gaetz thinks picks the president: Vanity Fair’s Abigail Tracy previews a forthcoming book by Matt Gaetz, a pro-Trump congressman, in which he outlines what he perceives as the importance of the media in swaying elections. “You are governed by the theater geeks from high school, who went on to make it big booking guests on the talk shows,” Gaetz writes. “Ignore them and they’ll ignore you, and you’ll go nowhere fast. The hairdressers and makeup ladies and cameramen pick our presidents. As well they should. They are closer to the viewers and therefore the voters.”
• Who actually picks the president: All year, CJR has been running a project called “Year of Fear,” a series of dispatches focused on communities around the country that lack a strong local news presence. In her latest update from South Texas, Sandra Sanchez reports that “covid-19 has struck this region hard, and the energy that normally pulses through the political landscape––which should be especially stoked by the upcoming presidential election––has substantially diminished.”

Some news from the home front: CJR and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism are convening a two-day (virtual) conference to explore where the media industry might go next, following this moment of crisis. The conference began yesterday; panelists including Maria Bustillos, of Popula (and CJR); Smith, of the New York Times; and Sewell Chan, of the LA Times, discussed industry failures, including around diversity and inclusion. Bustillos urged newsrooms to embrace transparency and accountability; Chan pledged that his paper will soon publish an accounting of its own diversity problems. Today, Emily Bell, of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, will host a panel on rebuilding journalism, and Jelani Cobb, of The New Yorker and Columbia Journalism School, will moderate a discussion focused on holding the news accountable. Today’s program kicks off at 2pm Eastern; for more details, follow this link. 

Other notable stories:

• As fires continue to rage on the West Coast, the East Coast is on hurricane watch again: overnight, Hurricane Sally, a slow storm marked by torrential rain, gathered strength and made landfall in Alabama as a category 2 hurricane, threatening drastic flooding. Both weather events have been exacerbated by climate change; yesterday, ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine ran a timely story, by Abrahm Lustgarten, detailing how fires and hurricanes will help force “a new American migration.” Also yesterday, Facebook launched a page offering trustworthy climate information to its users. Earther’s Brian Kahn called the effort “a joke,” and accused Facebook of “peddling tips that mirror Big Oil talking points.”
• The Justice Department has ordered AJ+, a US-based division of the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to register as a foreign agent on the basis that Al Jazeera is “an agent of the government of Qatar.” The ruling, Dan Friedman reports for Mother Jones, “follows a years-long push by lobbyists hired by the autocratic government of the United Arab Emirates, which has long resented the critical coverage it receives from Al Jazeera.” The US law firm Akin Gump has led that push, and Republican lawmakers have echoed it.
• In June, Trump tried to block the publication of a forthcoming memoir by John Bolton, his former national security adviser. A federal judge ruled against Trump, but also said that Bolton “likely jeopardized national security by disclosing classified information in violation of his nondisclosure agreement.” Since then, Katie Benner reports for the Times, the Justice Department has opened a criminal inquiry into Bolton. He denies wrongdoing.
• Facebook will spend $5 million to boost local newsrooms “led by and for people of color” as well as the business skills of community news leaders, including via a “Sustainability Accelerator” supporting publishers of color. Sara Fischer, of Axios, notes that the company is making the investment “amid tensions between Facebook and civil rights leaders over the prevalence of hate speech and misinformation on its platform.”
• Since the beginning of the year, El Nuevo Herald, the Miami Herald’s sister paper, has regularly distributed racist and anti-Semitic content—including a column comparing Black Lives Matter protesters to the Nazis—without editors reviewing it first. The content appeared in LIBRE, an insert in the paper that was paid for by a third party. Yesterday, management at the Herald apologized and ended the paper’s relationship with LIBRE.
• For Rest of World, Linda Kinstler reports that researchers in former Soviet countries are making old secret-police records freely available online, enabling citizens to see if and how they were surveilled. “These databases contain fragments of history that, when unearthed, have utterly transformed family and political narratives and shifted the terrain upon which conversations about memory, complicity, and justice are held,” Kinstler says.
• In the UK, the BBC increased the pay of more than seven hundred women staffers as it seeks to end a long-running scandal about gender pay disparities, The Guardian’s Jim Waterson reports. At least eighty-four of the pay raises were the result of formal processes including legal action; the remainder followed an informal review. (The BBC says that not all of the latter raises were tied to the gender pay dispute; some male staffers got a raise, too.)
• And Michael Caputo, the Trump-appointed spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, apologized to staff after he accused government scientists of “sedition” and warned of left-wing “hit squads.” Caputo—who has reportedly tried to meddle with scientific reports—is considering a leave of absence, on health grounds.

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?

Yesterday, I wrote that Apple was expected to announce a new set of services bundles — letting customers mix and match subscriptions among Apple’s various products, including Apple News+. And…yeah, that happened. But I don’t think there’s any reason to change my expectation that these bundles won’t do much to increase the number of Apple...

Slow food, slow travel, slow cinema, slow fashion, slow gardening: There are so many slow movements that you might think homo sapiens as a species was in an irreversible entropic downshift into the pace of slugs and snails. But of course, slow movements exist mostly to be a counterpoint to the ever-increasing speed technology seems...

In the same way that it’s no longer possible for sports news to “stick to sports,” political and lifestyle journalism are increasingly intersecting — and that meeting point is discussed in a new paper, “Aspirational lifestyle journalism: The impact of social class on producers’ and audiences’ views in the context of socio-economic inequality,” published last...

Apple News — which comes pre-installed on every iPhone in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia — is a pretty useful source of readership and traffic for a lot of news organizations. But Apple News+ — its $10/month subscription plan that includes content from a few newspapers and hundreds of magazines — has been a...

Kelsey McKinney is one of the founders of a new sports site, launched this week by a number of ex-Deadspin writers and editors, called Defector Media. You may know her from stories like The Only All-Girls Tackle Football League in America and What A Foul Ball Can Do, as well as her newsletter Written Out....

The internet is a polarized place and often a difficult place to have meaningful discussions. With no globally recognized definition for what constitutes hate speech, it can be difficult for social media users, content moderators, and news outlets to decide what is hateful and what is profane because each culture and country has its own...

No single, authoritative source exists to track evictions in the United States. It can be confusing, even during the best of times, to know how many evictions are happening at any given moment. It is not the best of times. The pandemic and a patchwork of emergency orders have made the numbers and laws around...

In 2016, there were more non-voters than voters who cast ballots for either Democrats or Republicans. Who will sit out again this November? A new report exploring the media habits of these non-voters has some answers. The analysis, released by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of their 100 Million Project,...

I would assume that “extort” isn’t the word that the author of a new report on Section 230 would prefer. Maybe “no carrot, all stick”? Actually, he instead uses the much nicer phrase “leverage to persuade platforms to accept a range of new responsibilities.” But either way, the pitch is pretty similar: Hey, tech companies...

Since El País, the newspaper of record in Spain and one of the largest in the Spanish speaking world, launched its subscription program on May 1, 64,200 readers have purchased a digital-only subscription, making it the Spanish publication with the most paid subscribers so far. El País announced on Monday that it has nearly 110,000...

A new test of the influence of national news coverage It’s clear that in the U.S., the news industry is steadily becoming more national. Local news continues to be hollowed out, and national news organizations are taking an ever-greater share of news revenue and audience attention. But the most prominent national news organizations’ spot at...

The Pentagon has ordered the 159-year-old independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes to come up with a shutdown plan by September 15 and stop publishing by September 30. The news — and a bipartisan group of senators’ plea to save the paper — was reported on Wednesday. This morning, USA Today reported on the memo...

“Even when companies are handed misinformation on a silver platter, they fail to act.” The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate and global agency Restless Development trained young volunteers to identify, record, and report vaccine misinformation on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter.” The platforms’ responses were not impressive: “Of the 912 posts flagged and reported...

Let’s say someone came up to you — when you were reading the news, or playing a game — and handed you a form. “Hi! I’d like permission to track you. Not just here and now, but also going forward — across all sorts of places you go and things you do. Sound good?” It...

In his first speech to staff, the BBC’s new director general — former BBC Studios head and “marketing guru” Tim Davie — came out against a subscription model and warned there must be “a radical shift” in focus if the public broadcaster is to survive. Davie also told staff that his top priority was to...

For many journalists in the United States and around the world, the next 60 days will be filled with polling stories, debate previews and recaps, voting guides, pandemic updates, and lots of push notifications, all leading up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Madeleine Schwartz, the founder and editor of The Ballot, knows there will...

While the use of local TV for news is declining, cable news is growing: Audience and revenue for Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN are all up this year. So which stories, and people, are getting the most airtime? Thanks to the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer, anyone can query “the amount of time people appear...

On July 30, a Mexican pastor named Oscar Gutierrez broadcast what would become one of the most-watched videos on Facebook about chlorine dioxide solution, an industrial bleach he promotes as a cure and preventive treatment for Covid-19. “Chlorine dioxide is dangerous — but for whom? For the pharmaceutical companies and corrupt governments,” said Gutierrez in...

Once you start looking for it, you see service journalism everywhere. Tips on how to make face masks fit better, reading lists to learn about institutional racism, advice to help a friend deal with anxiety. Forces on both sides of the news producer/consumer equation are driving this uptick: these stories, broadly defined as those that...

In a year marked by protests sparked by racial injustice and high-profile newsroom uprisings over coverage and representation, a new Pew Research Center analysis found that Black Americans are much more likely to say it’s important to see themselves reflected in coverage — and newsroom staff photos — than other Americans. This Pew Research Center...

Of all the ways the Trump administration has attacked the free press — the “enemies of the people,” remember — the past few months at the Voice of America have featured some of the most vexing. Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker and buddy of now-indicted Steve Bannon, was nominated to lead the U.S. Agency for...