On the brand-new “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we take a look at the Trump regime’s thuggish attempts to control coverage of the war in Iran.
Our other topics: the possibility of a merger between Boston’s two public radio stations, GBH, which is gung-ho, and WBUR, which isn’t; and why The Washington Post is refusing the Pentagon’s demands that it take down its confidential tip line. Plus our Rants & Raves.
Our panel is helmed by Emily and hosted by Scott Van Voorhis of Contrarian Boston, joined by Lylah Alphonse of The Boston Globe and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.
Four and a half months after being laid off, the state’s most prominent political journalist is returning to the airwaves. Jon Keller, whose job was claimed in a nationwide purge at CBS News after its parent network was acquired by Paramount, will be back on the 5 p.m. news later today on WBZ-TV (Channel 4), where he had worked for many years. The news comes in the form of an Editor’s Note at the bottom of today’s column for MASSter List:
Some good news for those who appreciate Jon Keller’s commentaries: after a hiatus of several months, he will be returning to WBZ-TV as a Special contributor starting tonight (Monday, March 16) on the early-evening WBZ news. Keller will be providing analysis of important political developments on WBZ’s newscasts and moderating major political debates on the station. His Sunday morning “Keller At Large” interview program, a staple of the city’s public affairs TV scene since 1991, resumes this Sunday at 8:30 a.m. with guest Gov. Maura Healey. Keller will continue his weekly column and event hosting for MASSterList as well as occasional articles for Boston Magazine.
In a funny coincidence, Channel 4 ran an old “Keller at Large” Sunday morning on which I appeared as a guest. I heard from a number of people, and I was puzzled. I later learned that the station has been broadcasting reruns of “Keller at Large” since his layoff.
For the rest of this item, I’m going to recycle part of what I wrote last October:
Jon and I go way back. He was the political columnist at The Boston Phoenix when I arrived there in 1991. He also worked as the producer for the late David Brudnoy’s outstanding talk show on WBZ Radio (AM 1030) and as a reporter for WLVI-TV (Channel 56) before moving to WBZ-TV. He did a stint as an op-ed-page columnist for the Globe. Both of us were also panelists on the now-defunct “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” on GBH-TV (Channel 2). (Note: Emily has revived “Beat the Press” on Scott Van Voorhis’ political newsletter, Contrarian Boston.)
Jon is known for dogged reporting and incisive, often caustic political commentary. He’s also a skilled debate moderator and has presided over some of the state’s highest-profile encounters, including Senate debates between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha Coakley in 2010 as well as Democratic primary foes Ed Markey and Joe Kennedy in 2020.
This isn’t the first time Keller has been caught up in corporate machinations. He lost his gig doing commentary for WBZ Radio some years ago when the station was sold to iHeartMedia; the TV operation remained part of CBS.
Back to the present: Jon’s return to the airwaves is good news for those of us who value his analysis, and a sign that someone at CBS recognizes that they made a mistake last fall.
If you’ve canceled your subscription to The Washington Post because of the rightward lurch of its opinion section, the decimation of the newsroom or both, I have news that might surprise you: The paper is involved in a vitally important First Amendment battle over its right to report on the Pentagon.
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Erik Wemple, himself a Post alumnus, reports in The New York Times that the Trump regime’s objection to a tip box the Post has been publishing has emerged as an issue in a lawsuit brought by the Times over the Pentagon’s restrictions on journalists.
Perhaps the most fraught topic during the first week of the war in Iran was the bombing of an elementary girls’ school, a horrendous event that killed about 165 people.
Some of the first reports, including one in Al Jazeera, claimed that Israel was responsible. That was followed by a social media campaign claiming that the Iranian government itself had admitted that the bombing was caused by one of its missiles that had gone astray. That was debunked by PolitiFact. Finally, investigations by media outlets like The New York Times and Bellingcat found that it was almost certain that the United States was responsible. The most likely explanation is that U.S. forces had targeted a Revolutionary Guard facility that was adjacent to the school.
I’m going to discuss with my graduate ethics students this evening how the story unfolded, and I’ve put together the slideshow you see here to go with it. You can also click here for a larger view.
Barbara “Bob” Allen with Penn State student Sarah Grosch. Photo by Al Tompkins is used with permission.
On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Barbara “Bob” Allen, a Los Angeles-based journalist, trainer and consultant who founded CollegeJournalism.org in 2025. The site provides resources and news for journalism educators and student media advisers across the country.
Allen brings decades of experience mentoring student journalists. She was the adviser to the student newspaper at Oklahoma State University and most recently served as director of college programming at the Poynter Institute in Florida. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Missouri, home to both a campus paper — The Maneater — and the Columbia Missourian, a lab newspaper covering the city of Columbia.
Allen has also led an ambitious project to map every college newspaper in the country, in collaboration with the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News. That effort found more than 1,100 college newspapers, with 766 located in or adjacent to counties with little or no local news access.
Ellen’s Quick Take is about a three-bedroom, three-bath condo in Provincetown. The Local Journalism Project, a nonprofit that partners with The Provincetown Independent, raised money from more than 100 donors to buy the condo to house reporters. Ed Miller, editor and co-founder of the Indie, told Mike Blinder of Editor & Publisher that housing was a major barrier to attracting staff to his well-regarded newspaper on the Outer Cape.
We used Otter, an AI-powered tool, to produce a transcript of our conversation, then fed it into Claude and asked it to write a 1,200-word summary, which was then read by us for accuracy. The results are below. Do you find this useful? Please tell us what you think by using the Contact form linked from the top of our website.
Barbara “Bob” Allen, founder and director of CollegeJournalism.org, joined Dan Kennedy and Ellen Clegg on “What Works: The Future of Local News” to discuss the state of college journalism in the United States — its promise, its financial struggles, and its role in addressing the local news crisis.
Public domain Illustration of Jeffrey Epstein, left, and Donald Trump by Michael Gode.
The Jeffrey Epstein story is getting weirder, more disturbing and is moving ever closer to Donald Trump. The latest details come from Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald, who has done more to expose Epstein’s depravity than any other journalist.
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Brown’s latest comes in the form of two articles. The first, published on Friday, advances earlier reporting by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and NPR that the Justice Department had withheld some of the Epstein files regarding a woman who told the FBI that Trump sexually assaulted her around 1983, when she was about 13 years old. Those files have now been produced. Brown writes that in one of the interviews:
She said he unzipped his pants and forced her head to his penis. She said she immediately bit him and Trump struck her, the report said. She told the FBI agents that she bit him because he “disgusted” her.
In a follow-up interview, she said that after she rebuffed him, he “pulled her hair and punched her on the side of the head.”
The New Haven Independent newsroom. Photo (cc) 2021 by Dan Kennedy.
Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”
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I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”
The Massachusetts Statehouse. Photo (cc) 2024 by Dan Kennedy.
Massachusetts has long been notorious for being one of the least progressive states with regard to government transparency. The state’s public records law is alone in exempting the governor’s office, the Legislature and the judiciary, leaving cities, towns, counties and the state’s executive agencies as the only government bodies that may be compelled to produce documents when requested to do so by journalists or members of the public.
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What’s worse, there are few penalties for failing to comply with the law. As John Hilliard observes (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe:
Michael Morisy, the chief executive of Boston-based MuckRock, who’s been helping people file public records requests for years, told the Globe: “It’s among the worst states when it comes to public records access.”
On the brand-new edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” we analyze media coverage of the war against Iran.
In other topics, we examine the implications of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will put CNN in the hands of Trump-friendly executives Larry and David Ellison, and the failure of Bari Weiss — who may soon be running CNN in addition to CBS News — to hang on to a Jeffrey Epstein associate. We also give the hairy eyeball to AI’s ongoing encroachment into journalism and weigh in with our Rants and Raves.
Fox News anchor Will Caine, left, with retired Lt. Col. Allen West.
With Donald Trump plunging us into a new war in the Middle East, I was curious about how it was being covered on MAGA-TV, also known as Fox News. I decided to watch the 8 p.m. hour on Sunday.
Overall, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be. The real problems weren’t what was said so much as what wasn’t. But since I spent the weekend keeping up on developments primarily with The New York Times, I’m not sure whether other television news outlets were doing a better job.
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If I’d tuned in Fox at 8 p.m. on a weekday, I’d have encountered the loathsome Jesse Watters, a racist misogynist who once “joked” about killing Dr. Anthony Fauci. Instead, the hour was hosted by Dallas-based Will Caine, about whom I know nothing, but who came across as a fairly conventional anchor. Apparently that was a last-minute switch; the hour is normally given over to “Life, Liberty & Levin,” helmed by right-wing zealot Mark Levin.
