Media History

NYT – A Dubious Win?

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alson, 4/23/25

Headline: “Q&A: Bill Grueskin on the New York Times Beating Sarah Palin (Again)”

Subhead: ” ‘Two things can be true: you can publish something about a public figure that is clearly false, and you can avoid being held financially liable for having done so.’ ”

“. . .the gods of the media beat soon handed down another big story. Compared with the 60 Minutes and USAGM imbroglios, which are relatively recent, this one concerned a much longer-running drama and a central character—Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate—who can perhaps be seen as an ur-Trump. Back in 2017, after a gunman opened fire on a congressional baseball practice, Palin sued the Times for defamation over an editorial that wrongly suggested she had helped incite the shooting of a different member of Congress, Gabby Giffords, six years earlier. (Palin’s PAC had published a map with crosshairs drawn over Giffords’s district. . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/qa_grueskin_palin_new_york_times_sullivan.php

Media and the Vatican

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 4/21/25

Headline:  “The Pope and the Press”

“In late February, with Pope Francis critically ill in the hospital, CJR’s Sacha Biazzo spoke with members of the Vaticanisti, the Italian term for the press corps that covers the pope.. .”

“From his early days as pope, however, he appeared to be savvy about countering negative narratives while, intentionally or not, cultivating an image as a common man (by doing things precisely like canceling his own newspaper subscription); he didn’t put the papacy on Twitter—that was Benedict, at the very end of his tenure—but as the years rolled by, he harnessed it as he ‘revolutionized the Vatican’s media strategy with his direct and personal approach to communication,’ as my colleague Biazzo put it, “making him one of the most accessible popes in history. . . .”

“In 2018, he made a major intervention on “fake news,” which he likened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden; his analysis, the Times wrote at the time, was partially “questionable,” not least in its apparent conflation of disinformation with “an incremental and sensational style of journalism he dislikes,” but otherwise “offered a largely cleareyed assessment of the problem, its social impact, and the responsibility of social media giants and journalists. . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/pope_death_journalists_media.php

When You Jilt Your Media Fans

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Article in Politico by Michael Kruse, 4/18/25

Headline:  ” Trump’s Most Important Relationship Is Ending. And the Break-Up Isn’t Pretty.”

Subhead:  “For a half-century Trump and the mainstream media have mutually benefited from a stormy symbiosis. Why is he trying to kill the institution that made him?”

“. . .“I’m thinking seriously of running for president,” Trump said. “Why aren’t you writing about me?”

“ ‘He knew that you couldn’t be a serious presidential candidate in this country at that time unless your name showed up in every newspaper in the country,’ Fournier told me. ‘And if the AP wrote about you, that’s what would happen,’ he said.

“Trump used to court the AP. Today he’s in court with the AP — key members of Trump’s administration are defendants in a lawsuit filed by the flagship wire service after he booted its reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One for not following his order to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. . .”

Because his relationship with the media is his most important relationship. More than his three wives — more than any business partners — Trump’s symbiotic relationship with the media helped him craft an identity that has fueled every other achievement.

No longer. In the wake of his election last fall and at the outset of his second presidential term, Trump has turned his performative anti-media schtick into actual anti-media deeds. Wielding lawsuits, executive actions and the unleashing of allies and aides, he’s attempting to starve, squelch or shutter network television stations, global news agencies and reporters in Washington and beyond — a roster of targets ranging from ABC to CBS to NPR to the publication you’re reading right now. . .”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/18/trump-media-history-ap-apprentice-00271192

Press Freedom Essential!

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Article in Poynter by Ren LaForme, 4/2/25

Headline:  “Max Frankel on how news became the oxygen of our liberty”

Subhead:  “In a foreword written after 9/11, the late New York Times editor captured journalism’s essential role — and warned what happens when we forget it”

“. . .only honest and reliable news media could instruct the world in its vulnerability, summon Americans to heroic acts of rescue, and ignite the global search for meaning and response. Only trusted news teams could discern the nation’s anxiety, spread words of hope and therapy, and help to move us from numbing fear toward recovery.

Here, then, lies above all the ultimate demonstration of the danger that Americans invited when they lost their interest in the world beyond the self and in serious news coverage of those other realms. Another generation has been awakened, summoned to recognize that dependable news occupies a precious but vulnerable place in our society. . .”

“News is not neutral. Like literature, the most important news dwells on stories of conflict, on the rivalries and casualties of life. Yet while conflict is universal, so is the human desire to avoid and reduce it. And so news also serves the armies of reform and implicitly holds out hope and a faith in progress. . .”

Since a free and open society is, by definition, a constantly self-correcting organism, it is constantly nourished by news that exposes flaws and failures and so stimulates debate about how to overcome them. News is the enemy of certainty, and therefore of tyranny.

https://www.poynter.org/ethics-trust/2025/max-frankel-september-11-2001/