Citizen Cartwright

Beginning 2025 with gladness

Blogger Maria Popova has put together “a little reservoir of gladness” to start the year.

 

Among her “gladnesses”:

 

“Bless chance for how, across the billions upon billions of tiny and terrific events stretching all the way back to the first particle collisions in the first stars, events each one of which could have gone differently, it sang the bright clear note of you over the din of otherwise.”

 

And “Bless knowledge, all the species of it — how the small black seed knows to break into the Fibonacci spiral of a sunflower, how we know that when the house burns down and the tyrant takes office and the toe pokes through the last good sock, we still have each other.”

ABC News succumbed to Trump’s pressure; will others?

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

There’s a theme emerging in some of the news recently. It began just before the election, when owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both killed plans by their editorial boards to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be president.

 

Since Donald Trump was elected, more stories have followed the same theme:

— Several tech CEOs have made $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee.

— Tech leaders also have made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago

— And the tech bro who got there first with the most, Elon Musk, may already be seeing return on his investment: According to Reuters, the Trump transition team plans to kill a regulation requiring the reporting of accidents involving self-driving vehicles — most of which involve cars by Musk’s Tesla.

— This follows Trump’s announced plan to nominate Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire with close ties to Musk and SpaceX, to head NASA.

 

Of course, where there are carrots, there are sticks: The Senate had a press protection bill pending that had passed the House with bipartisan support; it would have barred the federal government from compelling reporters to reveal confidential information, such as sources. Trump announced his opposition, and Senate Republicans blocked floor action.

 

Most notable of all was the decision by ABC News, revealed last weekend, to settle a libel suit filed by Trump. The decision is striking, given the difficulty facing public figures under U.S. law to win such suits in the absence of particularly egregious behavior.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written frequently about authoritarianism, calls it “obeying in advance.”

Margaret Sullivan commented:

“ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement.

“As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual,” she said. “News organizations generally don’t settle ‘because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.’”

“Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect,” Sullivan said. “As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as ‘part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.’”

“Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing.”

Brian Stelter of CNN noted: “The president-elect has a long history of litigation, with numerous unsuccessful cases against news outlets in the past. Some media law experts believed ABC had a good chance of beating him at trial, given the inherent challenge of proving Stephanopoulos acted with ‘actual malice.’ But trials also add uncertainty and a risk of severe reputational damage – factors that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is now avoiding.”

 

Journalist Parker Molloy, writing in Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2025, argued that acquiescence won’t spare journalism organizations: 

“The bitter irony is that this voluntary surrender won’t protect these outlets from Trump’s attacks. He’ll continue using them as punching bags to rally his base, even as they bend over backwards to appear ‘fair’ to his administration. But their owners calculate that performative criticism is preferable to actual accountability journalism that might threaten their bottom lines.

“For those who remember post-9/11 journalism, this feels eerily familiar,” Molloy said. “But at least then, the press could claim they were caught off guard by an unprecedented national crisis. This time, they’re choosing compliance with eyes wide open, trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table.

 

“The question isn’t whether mainstream media will hold Trump accountable in his second term — they’ve already decided not to try. The question is whether enough independent voices can survive to fill the vacuum they’re leaving behind.”

 

Molloy’s prediction for 2025 is coming true early. The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump and his allies were threatening more lawsuits.

 

In fact, on Monday, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, seeking “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up by 3 percentage points in Iowa.

 

According to Semafor, “news organizations are bracing” for more attacks:

“In an email shared with Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel told staff that the news organization anticipates the new administration will attempt to force reporters to out their sources, will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation, and could charge journalists with crimes using the Espionage Act,” Max Tani wrote.

One analysis suggests that voters elected Trump due in part to their revulsion at the “elites” — a category that, for many, includes legacy media. Trump and his billionaire allies — populists, apparently — are seizing that opportunity, wielding their wealth to intimidate and isolate news organizations. ABC News acquiesced, essentially waiving the protection of the First Amendment.

The near-universal dismay within the industry at ABC News’ decision may be mere bravado. Or it may indicate not every media enterprise will be so compliant. The quality of our democracy hinges on those decisions.

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Paul Krugman’s final NYTimes column, on ‘finding hope in an age of resentment’

The Nobel-prize-winning economist and author of 27 books, who’s retiring from The New York Times, reflects on what's changed since he began writing his opinion column in 2000. 

 

“What strikes me, looking back, is how optimistic many people, both here and in much of the Western world, were back then and the extent to which that optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.”

 

“Why did this optimism curdle? As I see it, we’ve had a collapse of trust in elites: The public no longer has faith that the people running things know what they’re doing, or that we can assume that they’re being honest.”

 

For example, “the financial crisis of 2008 undermined any faith the public had that governments knew how to manage economies.”

 

“And it wasn’t that long ago that technology billionaires were widely admired across the political spectrum, some achieving folk-hero status. But now they and some of their products face disillusionment and worse; Australia has even banned social media use by children under 16.”

 

“These days there has been a lot of discussion of the hard right turn of some tech billionaires, from Elon Musk on down. I’d argue that we shouldn’t overthink it, and we especially shouldn’t try to say that this is somehow the fault of politically correct liberals. Basically it comes down to the pettiness of plutocrats who used to bask in public approval and are now discovering that all the money in the world can’t buy you love.

 

“So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.

 

“We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.”

Grateful

This Thanksgiving, as always, I’m grateful for you, dear readers.

 

And, as I’ve said before, I’m specifically grateful to the reader who alerted us to the good news aggregators at Australia’s Fix the News.

 

Fix the News founder Angus Hervey, who grew up in apartheid South Africa, wrote in a long essay in response to our U.S. election results, which I ran on Nov. 15:

 

"For the first time since I can remember, I'm not sure the good guys are going to win.

 

"I find myself returning to the lessons of South Africa. That change happened, not because it was inevitable, but because people made it inevitable. Each step forward mattered and people kept on believing in the right thing, even when that belief seemed foolish. In the end the impossible happened not because history ordained it, but because ordinary people kept pushing against the darkness until finally, impossibly, the light broke through.”

 

He said Fix the News will be writing “stories about how progress happens not through some invisible hand of history, but through the visible hands of people who refuse to give up on it.”

 

I emailed Hervey to let him know how much his work means to us here, while, as he put it in his essay, "every media outlet in the world” is "shrieking about Trump,” one way or the other.

 

He emailed back saying he appreciates the encouragement he’s gotten in response to his essay and that he’s feeling "more resolute than ever about the mission of Fix the News.”

 

As Stephen Hawking said, “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star.” And blogger Maria Popova pointed out that we’re early in our evolution, so it’s to be expected that we mess things up a lot.

 

I’m grateful for the feeling of belonging and empowerment I get from our global connection to Hervey and others as we all stumble forward as best we can.

The election: Legacy media is told, again, 'They’re just not that into you'

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

In a better world, there would be a period of quiet, of licking wounds, of taking stock, after the shock suffered by both Democrats and legacy media in the presidential election. But in this world, the world we’ve created, the demand for content — always fresh, yet always familiar — is unrelenting. Thus we are subjected to opinions without supporting facts, recriminations without self-reflection, certainty where none exists — and simple explanations for the collective decision of more than 153 million people.

“Devastated Democrats play the blame game,” reads a New York Times headline.

“Where Harris’ campaign went wrong,” CNN was prepared to tell us — on Nov. 6, the day after the election.

“This is all Biden’s fault,” the headline reads on a New York Times op-ed piece by the journalist Josh Barro, who at least took till Nov. 9 to have it all figured out.

Talking heads gonna talk. Pontificators gotta pontificate. Our content-generation enterprises had airtime and screens to fill. And for members of the media, the Democratic defeat was a target-rich environment.

Pundits also scratched their heads at the failure of the public to heed their warnings about Donald Trump, but that didn’t seem to open the floodgates of self-reflection in the most influential newsrooms.

 
New Yorker staff writer Nathan Heller had a thoughtful piece about the way the flow of information had changed, a change that the Trump campaign understood and Harris’ didn’t. He concluded: “In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. It has been the Democrats’ long-held premise that access to the truth will set the public free. They have corrected misinformation and sought to drop data to individual doors.

 
“This year’s contest shows that this premise is wrong. A majority of the American public doesn’t believe information that goes against what it thinks it knows—and a lot of what it thinks it knows originates in the brain of Donald Trump. He has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. And, until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that conclusion. Here’s what jumps out at me: While Heller poses “ambient information” as a puzzle for Democrats to solve, he makes no mention of journalists. 

 
But aren’t we are all living in an age of babel? The clash of ideas in the public sphere — for which journalism provides a stage — is no longer an intellectual contest. The truth may set you free, but if it can’t garner market share, it’s not winning the day. Election coverage with a primary goal of serving citizens would look very different from coverage with a need to make as much money as possible off the election.

Also, I wonder: How is any of this considered new? Newsrooms have been coping — unsuccessfully — with ambient information for years. A lot of news is now free. Journalism enterprises are struggling against free.  

 

Poynter reporter Angela Fu wrote last December:

“The U.S. has lost more than 130 newspapers — or 2.5 a week — this year, according to the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Since 2005, the country has lost nearly 2,900 newspapers and 43,000 journalists.

“‘A lot of news consumption is happening on social media and even from search,’ said Pew Research Center senior researcher Elisa Shearer. ‘You’re less likely to be getting something directly from a news outlet when you’re getting it in that way.’”

As we’ve discussed repeatedly, the business model on which newspapers were based for more than a century has collapsed, newsrooms have contracted, quality plummeted. News is everywhere in the air, plenty for the average consumer, and it doesn’t cost a thing.

Newsrooms have had a tendency to view the business model as a thing apart — someone else’s problem to solve — while they stayed focused on the important thing: their journalism, writing and editing narratives about the world.

 
But it’s not enough to believe that news is important. The product no longer meets the consumer need. Whatever else it was, the 2024 election was yet another reminder for legacy media that “they’re just not that into you.”

 

 

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Good news — about us!

As our Australian friends at Fix the News published their most recent edition, the first results were coming in from our election.

 

They’ve been pretty snarky about us in the past, but this time, they wrote:

 

"For what it's worth, the US stock market is at all-time highs, the uninsured rate is near an all-time low, life expectancy is at highest level ever, apartment construction hasn’t been this hot in half a century, inflation, illegal immigration, crime and obesity are falling, wages are higher than any point in history, the percentage of the population that is employed is near an all-time peak, productivity is outpacing every other comparable country, carbon emissions are declining, clean energy production is soaring, next month America's factories will start mass producing the most advanced technology on Earth, and it's still the wealthiest and most important nation in the world."

The stakes or the horserace: A tale of two post mortems

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

 

Margaret Sullivan posted a piece Monday reflecting on whether political coverage was any better this year, or whether it was still the same old horserace approach. Her conclusion: Despite some exemplary moments, the coverage was largely unchanged and did not meet the moment.

Meanwhile, the newsroom leadership of the New York Times recently told its reporters and editors that the critics were wrong and the Times was right.

Sullivan used as a prism the phrase coined by media critic and NYU professor Jay Rosen, who for years has urged journalists to focus on “not the odds, but the stakes.”

Sullivan wrote: “A couple of days ago, I talked with Rosen about how he thinks it all played out. The short answer? It made a difference but didn’t fundamentally change politics coverage, which for the most part continued down its frustratingly flawed path — the addiction to polls, pundits and 'neck and neck' predictions.”

Sullivan also discussed the media frenzy that accompanied President Biden’s comment about garbage, referring to Donald Trump’s extraordinary display at Madison Square Garden last week of hostility and derision toward so many elements of American society.

She wrote: “As Greg Sargent of the New Republic put it in a smart X thread: ‘The news hook is literally that it provided ‘grist’ to Republicans,’ and this in effect ‘outsources the judgment about the newsworthiness of the event to bad-faith actors.’ He’s right. It’s also classic false equivalence — as Trump devolves into simulating oral sex with a microphone, there must be something bad to say about Harris’ campaign, right?”

Sullivan also mentions that the New York Times coverage became increasingly stark in its characterization of Trump and his behavior.

She wrote: “A couple of weeks ago, I observed to a friend who works in Big Media that I thought the New York Times had reformed its coverage somewhat — including a new section in which previous stakes-related coverage had been compiled, as well as a strong endorsement of Harris and some effective special sections, both on the news side and the opinion pages.

“‘Has the Times finally gotten religion?’ I asked.“The half-joking response: ‘Deathbed conversion.’”

The New York Times newsroom leadership would beg to differ.

Max Tani of Semafor obtained a recording of an Oct. 24 internal Times question-and-answer session with Executive Editor Joe Kahn and Managing Editor Carolyn Ryan. Whatever the criticism, Kahn wasn’t having it.

In that meeting, according to Tani, Kahn said: “What [critics are] interested in is having us be a mouthpiece for their already predetermined point of view. That’s what the most vocal critics are asking for. They’re asking us to do a better job projecting their point of view to more people. That of course is not our role, that is actually the opposite of independent journalism. That’s agenda-driven partisan journalism. They want to see The New York Times reaffirming their own priors. They’re not really interested in fact-based reporting — or frankly, independent polling — that doesn’t line up with their priors.”

Tani wrote: “Kahn pointed out that despite the intense polarization, the Times’ audience had never been larger, with over 10 million subscribers and an enormous base of non-paying readers and listeners. The readers who angrily comment on New York Times stories represent just a fraction of the paper’s overall audience, he said, a sign that most people were not outraged by its coverage.”

In an interview in the spring with Ben Smith of Semafor, Kahn, in a similar moment of deep introspection, had cited public opinion polls to justify the Times’ coverage decisions.

I’m compelled to repeat the remarks of Kathryn Schulz, author of the book “Being Wrong,” a wonderful exploration of human error, when she posed the question to the audience at her related 2011 TED talk: “How does it feel to be wrong?”

The replies were what you might expect: “dreadful … thumbs down … embarrassing.”

Schulz then pointed out: “These are great answers, but they’re answers to a different question. You guys are answering the question, how does it feel to realize you’re wrong.”

Up until that point, she observed, “It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right.”

As the campaign comes to a close, the Times, as a matter of course, is sure it’s right. Other observers are not so sure.

 

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Bezos’ explainer of Post’s non-endorsement

The Washington Post published “A note from our owner” in its opinion section Monday night, in which billionaire Jeff Bezos says, "Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election … What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. … Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

 

"I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” he says.

 

His note has gotten 13,000 comments as I type this.

 

And more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Post as of midday on Monday, NPR reports.

 

Margaret Sullivan writes in her Substack newsletter about her experience working at two newspapers owned by billionaires — one of them the Post.

 

And she says in her column in The Guardian of the no-endorsement decisions by Bezos and by the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, "The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins.”

 

The Bulwark, a conservative website that opposes Trump, says his planned use of federal tariffs would "mean a massive increase in the president’s discretionary control over various parts of the economy through the distribution of waivers and exclusions.” 

 

"To punish Harris-backing CEOs, all Trump has to do is hurt their companies with onerous new trade policies, then decline to pick up the phone when they petition for relief,” the Bulwark says.

 

A separate Bulwark article cites Judd Legum, who writes the newsletter Popular Information.

 

Legum says, "Bezos believes that former President Trump's hostility toward the Washington Post, which produced critical coverage of Trump's presidency, cost his companies billions in government contracts."

 

In addition to Amazon, Bezos founded and owns Blue Origin, the private space exploration company.

 

Legum says: "In a few months, it is possible that Trump will be president again. This time, Bezos faces an even more acute threat to his business interests. Elon Musk, who owns Blue Origin's chief rival SpaceX, has aligned himself closely with Trump, spending tens of millions in support of Trump's campaign and making appearances in swing states on Trump's behalf. 

 

Hours after the announcement of the Post's non-endorsement, "Trump was seen meeting with Blue Origin CEO David Limp. Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign's chief spokesman, embraced the suggestion that the meeting and the announcement of the non-endorsement were linked,” Legum says.

 

Meanwhile, The Hill reports that more 200 U.S. news outlets owned by Gannett — including longtime, respected outlets The Arizona Republic, The Des Moines Register and the Detroit Free Press — won't endorse presidential candidates.

Good news on global health, environment, much more

But I’ll leave it to you to scroll through all the items, so we can focus here on Fix the News’ latest schedule — and content — change:

 

“A few months ago, in an attempt to make room for more content, we upped the frequency of our emails from once to twice a week. We should have known better,” Fix the News says. 

 

There turned out to be “too much for anyone to take in … so we're moving back to one edition per week … with more of an emphasis on curation and less on comprehensive coverage … choosing 10-12 top stories.”

 

Personally, I’ve been amazed by what two people have been able to do, often digging deep into complex reports to mine the good news, and coming up with such a comprehensive counterpoint to “if it bleeds, it leads” coverage elsewhere.

 

I’m not sure if this new approach reflects some burnout at Fix the News, but I’ll be celebrating what they’ve given us so far, in a note to them and in finally paying to subscribe.

PolitiFact founder: 'What I didn’t understand about political lying'

Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact and a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, has a book coming out Oct. 15 titled "Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy."

 

An essay adapted from the book was published Wednesday in The Atlantic.

 

Highlights of Adair's key points:

 

"For American politicians, this is a golden age of lying. Social media allows them to spread mendacity with speed and efficiency, while supporters amplify any falsehood that serves their cause. When I launched PolitiFact in 2007, I thought we were going to raise the cost of lying. I didn’t expect to change people’s votes just by calling out candidates, but I was hopeful that our journalism would at least nudge them to be more truthful.

 

"I was wrong. More than 15 years of fact-checking has done little or nothing to stem the flow of lies. I underestimated the strength of the partisan media on both sides, particularly conservative outlets, which relentlessly smeared our work. (A typical insult: 'The fact-checkers are basically just a P.R. arm of the Democrats at this point.') PolitiFact and other media organizations published thousands of checks, but as time went on, Republican representatives and voters alike ignored our journalism more and more, or dismissed it. Democrats sometimes did too, of course, but they were more often mindful of our work and occasionally issued corrections when they were caught in a falsehood.

 

"I spent the past four years asking members of Congress, political operatives, local officials, congressional staffers, White House aides, and campaign consultants this simple question: Why do politicians lie?

 

"In a way, these conversations made me hopeful that officials from both parties might curtail their lying if we find ways to change their incentives. The decision to lie can be reduced to something like a point system: If I tell this lie, will I score enough support and attention from my voters, my party leaders, and my corner of the media to outweigh any negative consequences? (Italics are Adair’s.)

 

"For my study of political lying, I took a particular interest in Mike Pence. We had been friends and neighbors when he was a member of Congress, and I saw him as a typical politician who would occasionally shade the truth. When he won the race for governor in Indiana, I watched his lies grow. By the time he became Donald Trump’s vice president, he was almost unrecognizable to me.

"Olivia Troye, who worked as a homeland-security adviser in Pence’s office from 2018 to 2020, saw two versions of him. 'It was like watching Jekyll and Hyde sometimes,' she told me. As a boss, he was concerned about details and wanted the facts. But he would compromise all of that when he was asked to recite the Trump administration’s talking points.

"Several people I interviewed described how partisan media, especially on the right, has fostered lying by degrading our shared sense of what’s real. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic representative from Charlotte, North Carolina, told me that outlets expect politicians to repeat falsehoods as the price of admission. 'If you’re not willing to treat certain lies as fact, then you simply won’t be invited to address the echo chamber.' Tim Miller, a former Republican operative who left the party in 2020, pointed out that gerrymandering, particularly in red states, has made it so 'most of the voters in your district are getting their information from Fox, conservative talk radio ... and so you just have this whole bubble of protection around your lies in a way that wouldn’t have been true before, 15 years ago.'

 

"The hollowing-out of local news outlets has also made lying easier. 'There’s no local reporters following these races,' Neil Newhouse, a Republican pollster, told me. 

 

"Experimental studies have found that fact-checking really can convince people. Often, however, the academic findings don’t reflect the real world. Voters rarely seek out fact-checking aimed at their party, and conservatives in particular hear constant criticism of the enterprise, which makes them doubt its validity. (According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, 70 percent of Republicans believe that fact-checkers favor one side, while only 29 percent of Democrats do.)

 

If politicians lie because they believe they’ll score more points than they’ll lose, we have to change the calculus. Tech and media companies need to create incentives for truth-telling and deterrents for lying. Platforms of all kinds could charge higher ad rates to candidates who have the worst records among fact-checkers. Television networks could take away candidates’ talking time during debates if they’re caught lying.

 

"But these reforms will demand more than just benign corporate intervention. They’ll need broad, sustained public support. Voters may not be willing to place truthfulness over partisan preference in every case. But more will have to start caring about lies, even when their candidate is the culprit."