Citizen Cartwright

Lack of trust in the news

My thanks to the reader who alerted me to a study of the way misrepresentation and underrepresentation of disadvantaged communities undermines their trust in news. The study was conducted by the Reuters Institute Trust in News Project.

The study’s report uses data from 41 focus groups in Brazil, India, Britain and the United States. 

The report looks at "how differences along lines of race, caste, religion, class, and place may point towards distinct needs and expectations around news and how this intersects with people’s sense of trust in important ways,” the institute says. 

In Brazil, the study focused on black and mixed-race audiences; in India, on audiences from marginalized castes or tribes and Muslim audiences; in Britain on working-class audiences, and in the United States on African American and rural audiences.

Although there were differences in the way study participants saw the world and criticized news media for their coverage of people like them, there were many commonalities in frustrations about news across these groups, the institute says. Most saw news media as not only out of touch but at times as an especially harmful force that did damage to their communities, either through neglecting them entirely or exploiting them, reinforcing harmful stereotypes, or sensationalizing in divisive and polarizing ways.

News media as an institution, especially in Britain, the United States and India, often were seen as an extension of systems aligned to serve those in power — systems many felt excluded from, the institute says.

It is "worth underscoring how similar issues have been raised by study after study after study for a very long time,” the institute says. In 1968, the report notes, the Kerner Commission critiqued similar distortions and inaccuracies in U.S news media.

An article on the report by Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab says the report’s authors are clear that "though trust is thorny and multifaceted, there are opportunities for newsrooms to improve their standing in underserved communities. Those opportunities include relentlessly rooting out bias and inaccuracies, telling a 'more complete story' through news coverage that’s more positive and relevant, diversifying newsroom staffs, and being more engaged and present where people live and work.”

 

The take-home message of Reuters' report, to me, is the fundamental, systemic, long-time nature of this problem in countries with very different histories and economics.

 

I ran out of time working on this item yesterday because I was searching online for an update on solutions journalism — a U.S. media effort in recent years to focus not just on identifying problems, but on solutions to them. For example, The New York Times ran for several years a Fixes section, on "solutions to social problems and why they work.” 

 

An example of a Fixes article is titled “India’s barefoot lawyers,” from 2017. The Times’ summary of the article says: “In India's rural villages, few people seek the protection of law because lawyers are distant and expensive. Now paralegals are coming to help.”

 

The Times closed down its Fixes section in 2021. A list of the Fixes articles is here.

 

If you come across information on ways media are trying to address the problems Reuters points out, please let me know.

GOP efforts to keep abortion rights off state ballots

Last year, voters approved ballot measures that established or upheld abortion rights in all six states where they appeared, says The New York Times.

 

Now, with abortion rights groups pushing for similar citizen-led ballot initiatives in at least six other states, GOP-controlled legislatures and anti-abortion groups are trying to make it harder to pass the measures — or to get them on the ballot at all, the Times says.

 

While some legislators have targeted citizen-led initiatives on redistricting, voting rights for felons and legalized marijuana, abortion opponents and supporters agree that the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade has supercharged the push for citizen ballot measures and GOP efforts to deter them, the Times says.

 

The biggest and most immediate fight is in Ohio, where Republicans in the state legislature are advancing a ballot amendment that would raise the percentage of votes required to pass future abortion rights measures to a 60 percent supermajority, says the Times. The measure has passed the state Senate and is expected to pass the House this week.

 

The GOP measure — which would require support from 50 percent of voters to pass — would go before voters in a special election this August. 

The Fox, Dominion settlement

As a packed courtroom was waiting for opening statements to begin on Tuesday, "gasps filled the air" when Judge Eric Davis told the jury shortly before 4 p.m. that the two parties had resolved the matter, says The New York Times. 

 

Fox News and its parent company Fox Corp. had agreed to settle the case for $787.5 million.

 

The settlement, one of the biggest ever in a defamation case, came with this admission from Fox News:

 

"We acknowledge the Court's rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false. This settlement reflects FOX's continued commitment to the highest journalistic standards. We are hopeful that our decision to resolve this dispute with Dominion amicably, instead of the acrimony of a divisive trial, allows the country to move forward from these issues.”

 

Dominion Voting Systems had alleged that Fox stars, executives, journalists and guests defamed the election tech company for segments in which conspiracies held it had switched votes for then-President Trump to Democratic challenger Biden.

 

"Dominion started this case because Fox's defamatory statements had severely damaged its reputation,” says Tom Wienner, a retired Michigan corporate litigator who's been following the case closely at the request of NPR. "By largely trying its case in the court of public opinion, Dominion has gone a long way toward restoring its good name. In the process, of course, Fox's own reputation has been seriously undermined.”

 

It's uncommon for defamation suits to get to trial, in part because the bar for proving “actual malice” — the legal standard that requires plaintiffs to show that defendants knew what they were saying was a lie, or had a reckless disregard for the truth — is so high, says the Times. It's rarer yet for one to feature the volume of evidence that Dominion had amassed against Fox.

 

In the run-up to trial, Dominion publicly released internal communications among Fox executives, hosts and producers that revealed how the country’s most-watched cable news network set in motion a strategy to win back viewers who'd tuned out after Trump’s loss. 

 

Those communications showed how employees at Fox expressed serious doubts about and, at times, were scornful of Trump and his allies as they spread lies about voter fraud.

 

Some Fox hosts privately described their colleagues as “reckless” for endorsing Trump’s false claims, acknowledging that there was “no evidence” to back them up. Yet for weeks, Fox continued to give a platform to election deniers despite the doubts about their credibility. Dominion challenged statements that were made on multiple programs on multiple nights. Typically, defamation cases involve just a single disputed statement, the Times says.

 

The settlement deal is a significant amount of money, even for a company the size of Fox, says The Associated Press. It represents about a quarter of the $2.96 billion the company reported earning last year before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — a figure often used to approximate a company’s cash flow.

 

The settlement is about half of what Dominion was asking for in the trial. But Elie Honig, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, says, “I didn’t think there was any way they would get $1.6 billion — even when they proved their case, even if they proved it overwhelmingly to a jury. Let’s remember, by its own estimation, Dominion valued the entire company at somewhere between $30 and $80 million. This settlement is 10 times the value of Dominion as an entire company. That’s how strong a statement this is with this number.”

 

Fox faces a separate $2.7 billion lawsuit from Smartmatic USA, a voting-machine company that’s making claims similar to Dominion's. 

 

I’m not seeing any mention of the settlement on Fox News' main web page this morning. Here is what I found when I searched the site.

Media's take as Trump is first current or former president to be indicted

The indictment is under seal, and the Lawfare blog says "we encourage all commentators to refrain alike from triumphant claims that the rule of law has been vindicated or from clucking about witch hunts. There will be plenty of time for that later.”

Sounds sensible to me.

So here is “background material on the fact pattern that has reportedly given rise to the indictment,” from Lawfare.

And here is a “what to know about Alvin Bragg” — the Harlem-raised, Harvard Law-educated Manhattan district attorney who convened the grand jury that indicted Trump — by The Associated Press.

Here is a “what happens next,” with Trump expected to turn himself in next week, also from AP. “There is no playbook for booking an ex-president with U.S. Secret Service protection,” AP says.

If you’re interested, here is a roundup of reaction to the indictment from Trump — "This is Political Persecution and Election Interference at the highest level in history,” he says — and others, from Reuters.

And here is reaction from Trump’s 2024 GOP rivals, from Fox News.

Finally, here is what I find interesting possible schadenfreude from our British friends at BBC News:

"In some ways, a former head of state being charged with a crime and possibly even going to prison is not news. It's happened all over the world down the ages: hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and military leaders turfed out of palaces and straight into prisons.

"But America regards itself as exceptional; and Washington, the city on a hill that provides a moral and democratic beacon for the world.

"Historians refer to the 20th Century as The American Century — will they do the same for this one?"

Biden says he won't veto GOP-led legislation blocking D.C. crime law

"I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule — but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections — such as lowering penalties for carjackings,” the president tweeted on Thursday.

 

Biden’s reversal of his previous position came after Republicans seized on the law as a way to put Democrats on the spot about crime, says long-time New York Times congressional reporter Carl Hulse. It's an issue the GOP has been working to turn into a major liability for Biden and his party, portraying them as lax on enforcement.

 

Biden’s shift eases pressure on Senate Democrats, sparing them a vote defying a veto threat and potentially a decision on whether to override him.

 

Crime long has been a complicated political issue for Biden, who helped write a 1994 tough-on-crime bill. Then he had to backtrack on it during his 2020 presidential race, when deadly police assaults on people of color, mass incarceration and violations of civil rights by law enforcement were top issues for Democrats, particularly the party’s progressive base, says the Times.

 

Now, with public worries about crime increasing, Biden is pivoting again with his decision to allow the District code to be overturned.

Biden’s decision is a blow to D.C. home rule, and the issue is likely not the last time Republicans will challenge local laws in the heavily Democratic capital city, the Times says.

 

The district lacks the rights that states have to make and amend laws, explains The Associated Press. While Congress has allowed the city’s residents some powers of home rule, it's retained veto powers over district government actions. District residents also don't have voting members of Congress.

 

If the legislation is signed into law, it would be the first time in three decades that Congress has overturned a District law.

 

Republicans are joining Biden in citing the decision by Mayor Muriel Bowser to veto the law as a persuasive factor. She later was overridden by the D.C. Council.

“First rule of politics,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. “Don’t get to the left of D.C.’s mayor.”

 

Here is the local reaction to Biden’s switch, from The Washington Post.

 

And here, from DCist/WAMU.

Supreme Court seems likely to reject Biden student loan forgiveness

The court’s conservative majority seemed "deeply skeptical" Tuesday of the legality of the Biden administration’s plan to wipe out more than $400 billion in student debt over 30 years, says The New York Times.

 

Chief Justice John Roberts indicated that the administration had acted without sufficiently explicit congressional authorization.

 

The court’s three liberal members said Congress already had acted, by passing a law in 2003 that authorized the secretary of education to address emergencies.

 

"By the end of about three and a half hours of arguments in two separate cases, the court’s conservative majority seemed likely to dash the hopes of the 26 million borrowers who have already applied for loan relief, including millions who have received approval,” says the Times. "If the administration is to prevail, it would probably be on the ground that none of the plaintiffs in the two cases had established standing to sue, but that outcome did not seem likely, either.”

 

To have legal standing to show harm and challenge a program, plaintiffs have to show they have suffered a specific, rather than generalized, injury that can be remedied by relief from a federal court, explains The Washington Post.

 

An Associated Press article makes the same point on standing as the Times: "Biden’s only hope for being allowed to move forward appeared to be the slim possibility, based on the arguments, that the court would find that Republican-led states and individuals challenging the plan lacked the legal right to sue.”

Student loan borrowers arriving in D.C. for Supreme Court hearing

More than two dozen advocacy groups are busing in borrowers to rally outside the Supreme Court this morning. The event has aligned labor unions, civil rights organizations and youth activists with groups as diverse as the Hip Hop Caucus and National Council of Jewish Women, says The New York Times.

 

You can listen to the 10 a.m. hearing on the court’s website.

 

The court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, is hearing arguments in two challenges to President Biden’s plan to eliminate or reduce the student loans of millions of Americans. The plan has been blocked so far by Republican-appointed judges on lower courts.

 

Twenty-six million people have applied and 16 million have been approved to have up to $20,000 in federal student loans forgiven, according to the Biden administration. The program is projected to cost $400 billion over 30 years.

 

GOP-led states and lawmakers in Congress, as well as conservative legal interests, oppose the plan as a clear violation of Biden’s executive authority, says The Associated Press. Democratic-led states and liberal interest groups are backing the Democratic administration in urging the court to let the plan take effect.

Without it, loan defaults will dramatically increase when the pause on loan payments ends no later than this summer, the administration says. Payments were stopped in 2020 as part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. 

 

One of the challenges to the plan the court is hearing involves six Republican-led states that sued, and the other involves a lawsuit filed by two students. 

 

A lower court dismissed the lawsuit involving Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina. The court said the states couldn't challenge the program because they weren’t harmed by it. But a panel of three federal appeals court judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit — all of them appointed by Republican presidents — put the program on hold during an appeal. 

 

The students’ case involves Myra Brown, who is ineligible for debt relief because her loans are commercially held, and Alexander Taylor, who's eligible for just $10,000 and not the full $20,000 because he didn’t receive a Pell grant. They say the Biden administration didn’t go through the proper process in developing the plan, among other things. 

 

Texas-based U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, an appointee of President Trump, sided with the students and ruled to block the program. Pittman ruled that the Biden administration didn't have clear authorization from Congress to implement the program. A federal appeals court left Pittman’s ruling in place, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case along with the states’ challenge.

Special counsel appointed in Biden classified documents probe

Attorney General Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to investigate the presence of classified documents at the Washington office President Biden used after leaving the Obama administration and at Biden’s house in Delaware.

 

Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney appointed by former President Trump, will lead the investigation.

 

Here is a profile of Hur, from NBC News.

 

In November, Garland appointed Jack Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor, to oversee concurrent investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents and his actions surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. 

 

"Though the situations are factually and legally different, the discovery of classified documents at two separate locations tied to Biden — as well as the appointment of a new special counsel — would almost certainly complicate any prosecution that the department might bring against Trump," says The Associated Press.

 

Here is an explainer of the role of a special counsel, from AP.

Democrats confirmed more federal judges in Biden’s first 2 years than GOP did in Trump’s

I want to mention a trend I missed.  

 

We all heard about the historic number of judges confirmed during the Trump administration.

 

But "Democrats fell just short of an ambitious goal of confirming 100 new federal judges as time ran out on the 117th Congress, but they are optimistic they can continue to reshape the courts over the final two years of President Biden’s term,” long-time New York Times reporter on Congress Carl Hulse wrote in a Dec. 29 article.

 

The 97 judges Democrats seated, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, passed the Trump total of 85 judges. And Trump’s total "was compiled with what to that point was one of the most intense efforts ever to fill court slots under the stewardship of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader who vowed to 'leave no vacancy behind,'" Hulse says.

 

The Senate’s top two Democrats say their ability to outpace Trump’s first two years was especially noteworthy considering they did it with a 50-50 Senate, an evenly divided Judiciary Committee and little cooperation from most Republicans.

 

“We had three or four Republicans who were really open-minded and helped us on the votes,” says Sen. Dick Durbin, Ill., who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, led the judicial push. Durbin mentioned Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who says he believes that presidents are entitled to confirmation of qualified judges of their choosing, and was the most frequent Republican backer of Biden nominees on the committee.

 

The nominees were historically diverse, including 92 women, 60 of whom were women of color out of a total of 85 people of color, along with eight LGBTQ nominees. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., noted that of 28 appeals court judges confirmed, 11 were African American women, more than under all previous presidents combined.

 

“I’m particularly proud of the professional diversity,” Schumer says. “For the first time, we have a bunch of public defenders, immigration lawyers, consumer people, so it’s not just the corporate perspective or the prosecutorial perspective that’s on the bench.”

 

Federal judges are appointed for life.

Will DOJ pursue House panel’s charges against Trump, allies?

It’s unclear how closely the special counsel’s office in charge of the Justice Department’s own investigation will follow the path mapped out by the House Jan. 6 committee — or whether Trump and others will face any criminal charges at all, says The New York Times.

 

The panel on Monday urged the Justice Department to consider prosecuting Trump for four different crimes involving his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election and his behavior during the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

 

There's been some overlap between criminal statutes cited by the department and the charges the committee recommended, according to search warrants and subpoenas that have surfaced during the federal inquiry, the Times says.

 

The laws the committee cited:

 

— Obstruction of an official proceeding 

Both the committee and prosecutors have placed this at the center of their work, says the Times. DOJ mentioned that charge in a warrant used in June to seize the cellphone of Jeffrey Clark, a former department official whom the committee referred for criminal charges on Monday.

 

And prosecutors already have used the obstruction charge in nearly 300 criminal cases to describe how the mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 disrupted the certification of the election that was taking place there during a joint session of Congress.

 

— Conspiracy to defraud the United States

This charge has been used in several Justice Department cases against both far-right extremists and ordinary rioters who appeared to have planned in advance to storm the Capitol.

This conspiracy charge may better describe the evidence against Trump, says the Times. According to the committee, he defrauded the public by making constant false claims that the election had been rigged against him.

 

— Conspiracy to make a false statement

The committee says this charge is warranted because Trump took part in a scheme to send to Congress and the National Archives fake slates of electors declaring that he was the victor in several key states that were actually won by Joe Biden.

 

— Inciting or aiding an insurrection

This is the most serious charge the panel has recommended against Trump and likely would be the hardest to prove, says the Times. 

 

While the Justice Department has won a conviction on a related charge, seditious conspiracy, against Stewart Rhodes, leader of the Oath Keepers militia, and is set to try five members of another far-right group, the Proud Boys, for sedition, it hasn't charged anyone with insurrection in more than 900 criminal cases, the Times says.

 

On the other hand, a federal judge in Washington laid the ground for a potential insurrection case against Trump in a ruling in February that permitted a series of Jan. 6-related civil cases filed against the former president to move forward, says the Times.

 

Here is the text of the Jan. 6 panel’s summary of its report, from NBC News.