Trevor Hale 何川’s Post

How did the Wall Street Journal react to and "manage" internally the hostage-taking of its reporter, Evan Gershkovich, in Russia? The Journal’s experience, spelled out in detail here for the first time, can aid those responsible for bringing their colleague home, says the Columbia Journalism Review. The author, Paul Beckett, an assistant editor at the WSJ, was largely in charge of the paper's campaign to free its reporter. His article provides a trove of ideas on how to address such an emergency. It shows how the WSJ was able to engage with the US highest authorities, relate with Evan's family, choose between publicity and discretion, etc. A benevolent remark though: the author mentions "the hundreds, if not thousands, of stories being written about Gershkovich around the world", and the relay in German media in particular. But the solidarity of international media and journalists might have been more visibly mentioned and its impact more closely assessed : as it came from non-US circles such support helped greatly to debunk Russia's baseless accusations of espionnage against the WSJ reporter. The Council of Europe's Journalist Safety Platform, for instance, issued an alert and, besides the Committee to Protect Journalists, a host of international organizations, like the International Press Institute, the Association of European Journalists, Article 19, the European and International Federation of Journalists, The Justice for Journalists Foundation, Index on Censorship, Reporters without Borders were also very active in their advocacy for Evan's freedom. In a global world this form of support matters. https://lnkd.in/dVrU5bnh Ricardo Gutiérrez Jon Allsop Thibaut Bruttin Renate Schroeder Joel Simon Andrew Stroehlein

#politics #unitedstates #NobelPrize Veteran CBS News journalist Dan Rather co-writes on Substack that the owner of The Washington Post Jeff Bezos is wrong in overriding the journalists at the flagship newspaper of the nation’s capital to stop the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, citing similarities to Watergate. Bezos may have made a sound decision. We are currently communicating misdirection and lies as a society leading to self-destructive actions. This is weapons of war being used in domestic politics. Similarities to Watergate, in fact, do exist but it is the Obama/Harris Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and its antecedents since 1989 of the national security leadership comprising of all the Democrats, Bush/Cheney Republicans, and Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and National Security Agency who had exiled Edward Snowden to Russia for blowing the whistle on unhinged and illegal domestic surveillance, not the Donald Trump campaign which was harassed by them. Now Joe Biden The White House advised by these very same guys, reported The New York Times, instead of deescalating tensions, had ordered a nuclear confrontational posture in March this year once again since Japan in 1945 against Russia, China, and North Korea, which is criminal insanity. Our leaders must lead by example in communicative action. At the moment nobody is, including the most polished of them all @BarackObama: I will say what I need to say to win an election to do whatever I want to do after winning it. Misleading and lying in democracy for votes before election and acting in tyranny after winning. Communicative action = Communication in civil society that leads to action rooted in reason. Do we have an example from American history? World history that it worked? Examples abound. 1. American founding 2. Gandhi 3. MLK 4. Mandela 5. Reagan-Gorbachev Why should straight talk, as John McCain who lost to Barack Obama in 2008 and whom I supported and voted for but the Post did not, telling things as they are, good and bad, truth, be this distorted, contorted and painful, unless you have something to hide? The Post is an institution which has been recently plagued by allegations of the paper buying news akin to a tabloid to increase its circulation instead of its reporters gathering news honestly as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had done during Watergate. If the newspapers report honestly, perhaps they can do another Watergate to clean up America’s mess. © 2024 One World tamirisa.com TAMIRISA

#politics #economics #NobelPrize Roger Myerson The Nobel Prize, in a continuing conversation https://lnkd.in/eCt-j6bN, has posted on X an open letter from 300 economists https://lnkd.in/ebD--25s urging Americans not to vote for Donald Trump. As I said in an earlier post I am not voting for President, Harris or Trump, but voting in the Congressional election and down ballot https://lnkd.in/eZugpZRW. My analysis of the 2024 election to the White House https://lnkd.in/eigJG4HV. All presidents must be held accountable since the end of the Cold War and, in particular, since 9/11 for the American predicament today given the shift in balance of power by de facto unitary executive authority to the Executive Branch: 1. American constitutional framework still held on January 6, 2021. Trump was impeached twice and acquitted in accordance with the political process reserved for American presidents. Applying the same legal standard equally under law, let us prosecute every American politician for violation of campaign finance laws just as Trump was prosecuted in Manhattan and bring the Citizend United v. FEC decision back into play. If the economists answer “yes” to this recommendation, then Trump should be disqualified by the Congress under Constitution as it ought to have been done after January 06, 2021. 2. A lot of people called all presidents, without exception, including Washington, a lot of things many people may not like. Such name calling in politics comes with the territory. If politicians in democracies do not like it, they do not belong in politics. Read my comment on Retired General Mark Milley calling Trump a fascist to The Washington Post Bob Woodward https://lnkd.in/eXztdWhw. There are Constitutional safeguards against fascism and the system must work as written under law just as it did on January 06. 3. Those who work for any president work at the pleasure of the president and if they do not like it, they are free to resign or decline to accept when offered a job in the Executive Branch by the president. Why complain after taking the job? United States, as John Adams said, is a country of laws and not men, Clinton, Bush, Obama, or Trump. If you take a job in the Executive Branch, do it in allegiance to the Constitution not the president, or quit. 4. Decline of labor share of output is real, no matter who is president, Harris or Trump. Read my response to Larry Summers about China, WTO, and the problem of tariff design in political economy https://lnkd.in/eFT6HEHb. The general trend since Industrial Revolution as the internal logic of capitalism is for capital to fully displace labor in the production function. At issue, therefore, is restructuring ownership of capital in democracy as we approach total automation, not Ludditism or remaining with the current economic model biased in favor of concentration of wealth among the very few globally. © 2024 One World tamirisa.com TAMIRISA

Journalists must be free to publish leaked documents From the Pentagon Papers to Hunter Biden’s laptop, it’s a legitimate and necessary public service Hamish McKenzie ........................................................................................................................................................... On Tuesday, the independent journalist Judd Legum published  a story on his Substack-hosted publication, Popular Information, revealing that “malign actors” were still hacking the emails from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He, like other reporters before him, had been offered the stolen internal campaign materials.   Major news outlets—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico—have been sitting on these materials for weeks, apparently deciding that they didn’t warrant coverage. In all cases, the materials had clear journalistic value and were in the public interest. Media institutions and platforms must recognize Klippenstein’s situation as an opportunity to affirm their commitment to the freedom of the press and to free speech.  Journalism is done in the public interest. It’s about finding and sharing the truth, as best it can be determined, and it is essential to a functioning democracy. A journalist’s job can be difficult, especially when it comes to reporting on public figures and those who aspire to high office. Such figures are willing to go to great lengths to hide unfavorable information, and their communications with the public are typically obscured by layers of spin, deflection, misdirection, and sometimes outright lies. These tactics are non-partisan and have been deployed by candidates of all parties in all countries for time immemorial.  The truth can arrive in many guises: an informant, a whistleblower, a leaked document, even stolen materials. In all cases, parties that don’t want that information to come to light will aggressively move to prevent its distribution. Often they will sow fear and doubt and resort to smearing the reporter. But in many cases, it’s this kind of reporting that is the most indispensable. Think of the New York Times and Washington Post’s coverage of the Pentagon Papers, based on stolen documents, that revealed that the U.S. government had secretly expanded its war in Vietnam; or the Abu Ghraib scandal, in which Seymour Hersh and CBS revealed the U.S. military’s torture and abuse of prisoners in Iraq; or Glenn Greenwald’s coverage for The Guardian exposing the widespread tapping of ordinary Americans’ phones, revealed by the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. It’s in these moments that journalism fulfills its highest calling: holding power to account. It is the journalist’s burden to resist the pressures of antagonists in pursuit of the truth.

Grumpy about undermining the free press: In an unusual show of solidarity the publisher of the New York Time writes in the Washington Post about the threats to free press in the US. Drawing on examples from Hungary (a particular favorite of the right), India, Brazil, Venezuela and elsewhere, Arthur Sulzberger, outlines how the take-over will be boring, "so plodding and complicated that no one wants to watch it" or acts to stop it. Steps that include: -- ...a climate hospitable to crackdowns on the media by sowing public distrust in independent journalism -- ...legal and regulatory authority — such as taxation, immigration enforcement and privacy protections — to punish offending journalists and news organizations. -- ...the courts, most often through civil litigation, to effectively impose additional logistical and financial penalties on disfavored journalism, even in cases without legal merit. -- ... attacks on journalists and their employers by encouraging powerful supporters in other parts of the public and private sector to adopt versions of these tactics. -- ...levers of power ... to punish independent journalists and reward those who demonstrate fealty to their leadership." At the beginning of the Trump presidency, a friend warned about the authoritarian playbook: control the courts, the media, and voting. These are the pillars our democracy stands on. All three are under attack in THIS country right NOW. As Sulzberger concludes "Even in the face of relentless efforts to undermine and punish their work, there are those who fight back by continuing to bring the public the news and information it needs. I hope our nation, with protections for a free press explicitly enshrined in the First Amendment, will maintain its distinctively open path, regardless of the outcome of this election or any other. No matter what happens, we must be ready to continue to bring the truth to the public without fear or favor." We can support these journalists and we can vote.

"The antidemocratic counterrevolution would enjoy nothing more than our surrender. Recognizing the existential threat around us is the most piercing alarm to change how we do what we do, to redefine our profession and indeed our mission for the technological, commercial, and political challenges we face as both journalists and citizens. That old toolbox of mine belongs in the rubbish heap." ... "Faced with the intended demolition of democracy, the news organizations that you will be populating and perhaps leading must regard themselves as part of a principled resistance. The weapons will still be truth and facts, but they must be explicitly deployed in opposition to authoritarianism, the way journalists in countries from Mexico to the Philippines to Russia have been operating all along. You will endure risks that I never did. You will also experience a sense of purpose exponentially greater than any I ever knew. The risk and the purpose will be inextricably bound, the way they have been for journalists like Maria Ressa and Vladimir Kara-Murza.  My second big admonition to you will seem very different, though I believe it’s part of a greater whole. The gap that has opened within America between the more and less educated, between urban centers and rural or small-town regions, is a reality. A demagogue like Trump can cynically expand the divide, but he didn’t invent it. And, from my own career, I am convinced that the divide has cracked as deep and wide as it has partly because of the evisceration of local journalism. One part of your mission is to rebuild it. ... What’s lost in their absence cuts two ways. There haven’t been enough reporters and editors in these communities—suburbs, small towns, midsize cities—to chronicle for us coastal elites the depredations that deindustrialization, agribusiness, and global free trade have brought. To focus on the opioid epidemic in Appalachia, to mention one favored topic these days, is to look at the symptom rather than the disease. The sense of being unseen, unheard, and unfelt surely has helped propel the votes of so many people in Red America for a candidate promising to be their retribution. Hopelessness loves revenge. In the other direction, the people in these news deserts rarely get to know any journalists as people, as friends and neighbors. When local journalism was a viable industry, you would run into a reporter or editor or photographer coaching a Little League team or playing in a bar band or standing next to you in the supermarket checkout line. You can’t so easily demonize journalism and journalists after such intimate, everyday contact. You might think more than twice about rooting for reporters to be tossed in jail. ... Samuel Freedman https://lnkd.in/e9KitNbJ #journalism #cjs #democracy

The era of the power of the press. Edward Murray evoked the spirit of journalism. Seek the truth where it would take the courageous investigators. NO LONGER! I'll just list a few phrases which underline facts not only ignored, but buried. We believed the press had returned to their mandate, by at least ASKING questions, after the abysmally low energy 6/27 debate. In retrospect, I believe that too, was orchestrated. The summer of love (even if cities on fire were evident behind reporters). Hunter Biden's laptop - Russian disinformation. The border is secure. This borders (pardon the pun) on the criminal, as millions of illegal aliens and unvetted persons were welcomed in to this country, at the expense of citizens. With them, fentanyl and trafficking. Countless issues that were not covered at all. Scrubbing mention of Kamala Harris as border czar, to enable her chameleon policy changes. So too, her statements about fracking and the economy. Investigative reporters would have followed the scent of staged indictments, unproven assertions later found to be outright distortions of truth. They would not have believed that Mr. Biden was vital mentally and physically, when all signs screamed otherwise. When history is written about this perilous time in American history, the media will receive its due. Journalists who buried truth or distorted events will be excoriated. The "actors" parading as journalists of print and in front of the camera, will be introduced as purveyors of propaganda, at the expense of the welfare of the country and true democracy.

Crackdowns on the press are most effective when they’re at their least dramatic — not the stuff of thrillers but a movie so plodding and complicated that no one wants to watch it, writes AG Sulzberger in today's Washington Post - a message that resonates with our call to the public to Choose Truth (the focus of this year's World News Day - see link in comments). The New York Times Publisher and some colleagues have been analysing tactics of new would-be strongmen in Hungary, Brazil and India "who have developed a style more subtle than their counterparts in totalitarian states such as Russia, China and Saudi Arabia, who systematically censor, jail or kill journalists." He writes: "For those trying to undercut independent journalism in democracies, the attacks typically exploit banal — and often nominally legal — weaknesses in a nation’s systems of governance. This playbook generally has five parts. Create a climate hospitable to crackdowns on the media by sowing public distrust in independent journalism and normalizing the harassment of the people who produce it. Manipulate legal and regulatory authority — such as taxation, immigration enforcement and privacy protections — to punish offending journalists and news organizations. Exploit the courts, most often through civil litigation, to effectively impose additional logistical and financial penalties on disfavored journalism, even in cases without legal merit. Increase the scale of attacks on journalists and their employers by encouraging powerful supporters in other parts of the public and private sector to adopt versions of these tactics. Use the levers of power not just to punish independent journalists but also to reward those who demonstrate fealty to their leadership. This includes helping supporters of the ruling party gain control of news organizations financially weakened by all the aforementioned efforts.

It appears to me that the police have a dwindling interest in communicating with journalists. This spells trouble for everyone. I've noticed a general, gradual decline in engagement from police over the past four years - but I think today's events really demonstrate the depth of the problem. Today, there was a clear and obvious bus crash outside Windsor Castle - a car crashed into its side, and about a hundred people took photos and put them on socials. The national papers were all over it. You would think, that under those circumstances, it wouldn't be unreasonable for a journalist to ask the police for the facts. You know - what was the damage, and was anyone injured? Since a BUS CRASHED in broad daylight in front of one of the UK's most famous landmarks, I thought our readers might like to know. But, perplexingly, I was told by the police that its 'usual policy' is 'not to respond' to media requests around car crashes 'unless it’s around an appeal requested by one of our officers,' which they didn't make this time. In other words, the police didn't put anything up on their own website about the crash, nor did they ask for witnesses to come forward (for whatever reason). So, as journalists, even if we ask about an event that literally everyone saw, they still can't tell us anything about it. This makes a mockery of the police force, and a mockery of journalism. The point of asking an official public body for information is to make sure that it is trustworthy and reliable - or at least, if it is not these things, that someone is accountable. The alternative is to go down to the scene and ask everyone EXCEPT the police what happened, and hope that twelve people don't tell you the driver was drunk, or that the only person left willing to talk on the record believes that aliens done it. The relationship between public bodies and the press is important. At its best, professional news reporting is how we take the wind out of mass hysteria, rather than whip it up. It's how we stop people from filling in the blanks with wild conspiracy theories. But this requires us being given official information from police and other bodies. If the police systematically wind back their engagement with journalists, members of the public ask why we're not doing our jobs. And then they try to do our jobs for us. Without knowing media law, or ethics - without knowing that it is defamatory and a suable offence to say someone is drunk on the record when you can't prove it - they trot down there with their camera phones and try to solve crimes and incidents by themselves. And the police should know this. They should know first-hand how frustrating it is when people trample all over crime scenes and badger witnesses, thinking that's what they have to do. My suggestion is that they go back to actually talking to journalists. Then maybe we can be seen to do our jobs, so members of the public don't feel they have to take matters into their own hands.

War Against Press Freedom Could Happen Here by A. G. Sulzberger (NY Times Publisher) After several years out of power, the former leader is returned to office on a populist platform. He blames the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection. As he sees it, tolerating the independent press weakened his ability to steer public opinion. This time, he resolves not to make the same mistake. His country is a democracy, so he can’t simply close newspapers or imprison journalists. Instead, he sets about undermining independent news organizations in subtler ways — using bureaucratic tools such as tax law, broadcast licensing and government contracting. Meanwhile, he rewards news outlets that toe the party line — shoring them up with state advertising revenue, tax exemptions and other government subsidies — and helps friendly businesspeople buy up other weakened news outlets at cut rates to turn them into government mouthpieces. Within a few years, only pockets of independence remain in the country’s news media, freeing the leader from perhaps the most challenging obstacle to his increasingly authoritarian rule. Instead, the nightly news and broadsheet headlines unskeptically parrot his claims, often unmoored from the truth, flattering his accomplishments while demonizing and discrediting critics. “Whoever controls a country’s media,” the leader’s political director openly asserts, “controls that country’s mindset and through that the country itself.” This is the short version of how Viktor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary, effectively dismantled the news media in his country. This effort was a central pillar of Orban’s broader project to remake his country as an “illiberal democracy.” A weakened press made it easier for him to keep secrets, to rewrite reality, to undermine political rivals, to act with impunity — and, ultimately, to consolidate unchecked power in ways that left the nation and its people worse off. It is a story that is being repeated in eroding democracies all around the world. Over the past year, I’ve been asked with increasing frequency whether The New York Times, where I serve as publisher, is prepared for the possibility that a similar campaign against the free press could be embraced here in the United States, despite our country’s proud tradition of recognizing the essential role journalism plays in supporting a strong democracy and a free people. It’s not a crazy question. As they seek a return to the White House, former president Donald Trump and his allies have declared their intention to increase their attacks on a press he has long derided as “the enemy of the people.” Trump pledged last year: “The LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.” A senior Trump aide, Kash Patel, made the threat even more explicit: “We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.” ©️Washington Post 2024