On Sunday, a meeting of something called Democracy Alliance kicked off with attendees and presentations from powerful Democrats including Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and the party’s wealthiest donors, including George Soros.
On the agenda, according to The New York Times, is a discussion about Democrats, who this election lost the White House and Senate, needing to “go on offense in a splintered media environment where conservatives have amassed more influence.”
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The progressive Knight Foundation held a seminar for journalists on Wednesday going over election law in preparation for the upcoming election. It was one of several virtual conferences the organization has held recently, focusing this time on “debunking common election law myths.”
Speakers included Bob Bauer, who served as general counsel to the Democratic National Committee and in various positions for Barack Obama, and David Becker of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, who co-authored a book with journalist Major Garrett titled The Big Truth, arguing that the 2020 election was the most secure in American history.
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Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate J.D. Vance spent more than half of his time at the rally in Phoenix at the Arizona Biltmore on Thursday answering questions from the media. Unlike Vice President Kamala Harris, who does not answer even off-the-cuff softball questions from sympathetic mainstream media reporters, Vance does not shy away from antagonistic reporters.
Balin Overstolz of KTAR News, a Phoenix radio station known for its attacks on MAGA candidates, which refused to run an ad in 2022 critical of then-Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, asked why the polls were so close between the Trump and Harris campaigns, “even with high frustration regarding the border?”
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The decline of the mainstream media continued in the first month of 2024, with over 500 journalists being fired in January alone.
As Politico reports, there were 538 layoffs in the month of January in the media industry, including jobs in print, broadcast, and digital media. The report from Challenger, Gray, & Christmas suggests that the trend first seen in 2023 will not be slowing down in 2024. Last year, there were 3,087 layoffs in the news industry, which marked the highest annual total since the 16,060 firings in the year 2020, which was primarily due to the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.
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President Joe Biden’s administration is getting some big-name allies as it defends against a landmark free speech infringement lawsuit. Their argument: protecting Americans from indirect censorship by government officials undermines the First Amendment, national security, and public health.
Advocacy groups for journalists, academics, doctors, technologists, and big business, and a powerful senator, made various forms of these arguments in friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court in the days before and after Christmas.
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Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and James McGovern, D-Mass., are leading a House of Representatives letter demanding President Joe Biden to stop prosecuting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who is fighting extradition to the U.S.
The two congressmen asked fellow House lawmakers to join their bipartisan attempt to “strongly encourage the Biden administration to withdraw the U.S. extradition request currently pending against Australian publisher Julian Assange and halt all prosecutorial proceedings against him as soon as possible,” according to a “Dear Colleague” letter, Fox News Digital reported Monday.
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An internal investigation from TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has confirmed that its employees used the social media app to track the physical locations of several journalists.
The investigation revealed that several employees had worked to uncover the source of internal leaks and in so doing had used the app to obtain the IP addresses and user data of journalists to determine their physical proximity to any ByteDance employees, according to Forbes.
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Facing intensifying criticism from Democratic lawmakers, journalists, and even some federal judges for not seeking harsher punishment against January 6 protesters, Attorney General Merrick Garland finally produced charges to appease his detractors. Last week, more than a year after the so-called insurrection, Garland charged 11 members of the Oath Keepers with seditious conspiracy.
The star of the new indictment, handed down by a grand jury on January 12, is Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the alleged militia group. (His co-defendants were charged with several other offenses months ago.)
Rhodes, described only as “person one” for nearly a year in numerous criminal indictments related to his organization, has been a free man since January 6, 2021, raising plausible suspicions that he may have been a government informant at the time. After all, the FBI has a longstanding pattern of infiltrating fringe groups such as the Oath Keepers and moving them to commit indictable crimes.
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Employment in journalism has taken a hit in recent years, and The Arizona Republic, known as AZCentral online, is no exception. The Republic was bought by the left-leaning publisher Gannett in 2000, which bought up several large newspapers in the 2000s. The paper took a sharp lurch to the left politically, and since then, there have been numerous high-profile layoffs and furloughs as the paper shrank faster than most other large newspapers.
Rebekah Sanders, a consumer protection reporter and the president of the paper’s union, Arizona Republic Guild, tweeted about the latest cutback on Dec. 2. “The company is planning to discontinue work cell phones,” she complained. “A [bat sh*t crazy] idea for a company whose entire workforce depends on phone calls! But we will push back and make sure our members are taken care of.”
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Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it has amended its lawsuit against Democratic Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who claims to be “unapologetic” about her previous policy to only grant interviews to journalists of color.
Lightfoot told the New York Times in a podcast released Monday that she “would absolutely” implement the interview policy again. “I’m unapologetic about it because it spurred a very important conversation, a conversation that needed to happen, that should have happened a long time ago,” Lightfoot said.
Judicial Watch, which sued Lightfoot on behalf of the Daily Caller News Foundation and its reporter Thomas Catenacci, said the mayor’s office has ignored calls to sign an agreement to not use race-based criteria for interview requests for the remainder of her term.
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A group of Democratic political operatives and journalists circulated a fake email on Twitter on Sunday that the Iowa Farm Bureau retracted its endorsement of Sen. Joni Ernst, a move which would have been a heavy blow to the Republican’s re-election bid.
The fabricated email asserted that the farm bureau was retracting its support for Ernst because of her debate performance earlier this week against challenger Theresa Greenfield.
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On Monday’s Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy, all star panelist Crom Carmichael commented on how he saw Washington journalists asking questions of the President that they themselves know nothing about. Towards the end of the show, he speculated how we would see Joe Biden as merely a prop and, if elected, would have his presidential decisions made by others with criminal intent.
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Newspaper giant Gannett announced Monday it will begin furloughing employees across the country over the next three months to cut costs during the economic slowdown caused by the novel coronavirus.
The Hill reports, “the publisher of more than 100 newspapers, including USA Today, the Detroit Free Press, The Columbus Dispatch and The Arizona Republic, is reportedly furloughing workers who make more than $38,000 a year and they will be required to take one week of unpaid leave per month in April, May, and June, according to a tweet from investigative reporter Gregory Holman of the Springfield News-Leader in Missouri, a Gannett-owned paper.”
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The former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch made a number of “strange” and “irregular” requests to monitor the communications of American journalists, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) claimed on Fox News Wednesday night.
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by Kevin Daley Professional journalism groups reacted with alarm after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas urged the high court Tuesday to reconsider a landmark freedom of the press decision called New York Times v. Sullivan. The Sullivan ruling generally shields reporters and news platforms from libel or defamation lawsuits, provided they were acting in good faith. Though journalists believe that protection is essential, Thomas said the high court was wrong to usurp the role of states in regulating libel. “[Sullivan] and the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law,” Thomas’s opinion reads. “We should not continue to reflexively apply this policy-driven approach to the Constitution,” Thomas added. “Instead, we should carefully examine the original meaning of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.” BakerHostetler’s Mark Bailen, who serves as outside counsel to the Society of Professional Journalists, found the timing of Thomas’s opinion unwelcome, given President Donald Trump’s adversarial relationship with the press. “It certainly strikes a nerve for journalists and news organizations at a time when some in government have called the press ‘the enemy of the people,’” Bailen told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s against this backdrop that you now have a Supreme Court…
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by Deion Kathawa More than two years into President Trump’s historic presidency, it behooves us to think more deeply about a persistent sticking point in the political life of the nation: Why do (most) right-wing intellectuals loathe him? This kind of nearly unified opposition cries out for explanation. After all, it is not simply that all left-wing intellectuals oppose him; that is baked into the political cake, a totally banal reality. (Is water wet?) What is more interesting is why most right-wing intellectuals despise him, wish for his failure, derive such glee from “dunking” on him on social media and in their think pieces, and the like. To understand this phenomenon, the late Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick’s essay, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?” is a veritable treasure trove of insight. Nozick’s 1998 explanation of intellectuals’ opposition to capitalism is remarkably relevant and can be transplanted with only minor cosmetic changes to understand why the vast majority of right-wing intellectuals oppose Trump. Nozick begins by explaining what he means by “intellectuals,” describing them as “those who, in their vocation, deal with ideas as expressed in words, shaping the word flow others receive. These wordsmiths include poets, novelists, literary critics, newspaper…
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by Joe Simonson The disturbing slaying of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian agents has rightfully garnered the attention of the national press. Yet the hours of coverage surrounding The Washington Post contributing columnist’s grim fate raises the question of why the hundreds of other journalists who have perished at the hands of dictators, such as Bashar al-Assad’s Syria — have not received similar concerns from America’s chattering class. Depending on the organization, the number of journalists or members of the media killed in Syria range from 123 to nearly 700. According to the American-based Committee To Protect Journalists, 18 of its estimated 123 reporters killed were murdered at the hands of the Syrian government or various rebel groups. Other groups, such as the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), believe the number killed from March 2011 to May 2018 is as high as 682. In addition, the SNHR believes as many as 1,116 journalists have been detained. A boy stands near a wall of his school riddled with holes, due to what activists said was an air strike carried out yesterday by the Russian air force in Injara town, Aleppo countryside, Syria. REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi. The SNHR also claims 556 of those murdered…
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The Department of Justice inspector general identified a number of times where FBI employees allegedly spoke with members of the media and received freebies, The Daily Caller and Breitbart say. On page XII in the report, the IG says the department “identified numerous FBI employees, at all levels of the organization and with no official reason to be in contact with the media, who were nevertheless in frequent contact with reporters,” The Daily Caller writes. The Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General made the discovery as it tried to identify “possible FBI agents improperly transmitting to reporters, according to its report released Thursday on the agency’s handling of the 2016 probe into Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, private email server,” Breitbart writes. The IG expressed “profound concerns about the volume and extent of unauthorized media contacts by FBI personnel that we have uncovered our review.” The IG report says, “In addition to the significant number of communications between FBI employees and journalists, we identified social interactions between FBI employees and journalists that were, at a minimum, inconsistent with FBI policy and Department ethics rules. For example, we identified instances where FBI employees received tickets to sporting events from journalists, went on golfing outings…
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