Media Nation

On the new ‘Beat the Press,’ we dissect Trump’s media ban and marvel over the Globe’s lesbian-bar story

Click here or on image to watch on Contrarian Boston.

We’re back with another edition of “Beat the Press with Emily Rooney,” hosted by Contrarian Boston. Our lead topic this week is Donald Trump’s illegal ban on three news organizations, which seems to keep popping up even though it’s been knocked down in court.

Our other topics: the debut of Trump TV, which at one point was drawing an unimaginably minuscule audience of about 500 viewers; and why The Boston Globe’s story about a lesbian bar (sub. req.) that’s struggling with its longtime masking requirement went viral — and brought several thousand new subscribers to the Globe. Our guess is that it’s all about the revolutionary praxis.

We round out the show with our panel’s Rants and Raves. Mine is for California Attorney General Rob Bonta and Gov. Gavin Newsom, who folded on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit when Paramount major domo David Ellison threatened to move his operations out of the state. Their cowardice delivers CNN into the same MAGA-friendly hands that are wreaking havoc with CBS News.

Our host, as always, is Emily, joined by Contrarian Boston‘s Scott Van Voorhis and Jon Keller of WBZ-TV and me. Our producer extraordinaire is Tonia Magras of Hull Bay Productions.

And that’s the way it isn’t: An embarrassing anecdote about Walter Cronkite’s years in Moscow

Walter Cronkite in 1976. Photo in the public domain.

If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend M. Gessen’s essay in The New York Times opinion section about their grandmother’s work as a censor for the Stalin regime. Among other things, she had the task of bowdlerizing Harrison Salisbury’s Times dispatches, a source of endless frustration for Salisbury.

One detail that caught my eye was this slam of Walter Cronkite, the saint of broadcast news, who was the Moscow bureau chief for United Press in the late 1940s.

Continue reading “And that’s the way it isn’t: An embarrassing anecdote about Walter Cronkite’s years in Moscow”

My Northeastern ethics students identify news stories that should get more attention

Sudanese refugees seeking food aid in neighboring Chad. Photo (cc) 2025 by the U.K. Foreign Office.

If you’ve been reading Media Nation for a while, you know that I like to ask my journalism ethics students to find stories that they think have been underreported. The definition is elastic. Even a prominently played story in The New York Times can be underreported if it isn’t repeated enough to enter the public discourse.

This semester I’ve got 29 advanced undergraduates, and I’ve boiled down their responses to 10 stories. What I looked for in presenting here was a range of topics and a diversity of media outlets, including stories published by non-mainstream outlets. I could have shared all of them, but I think this is a good sample.

UN Agencies Warn Humanitarian System in Sudan “Could Collapse,” UN News, Sept. 14. “Sudan has been embroiled in a brutal civil conflict since 2023 between rival militaries and their backers. Some 8.6 million people remain internally displaced and 19.5 million people currently face crisis levels of food insecurity, which has been compounded by maritime disruptions and drought caused by the El Niño weather pattern.”

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Talking about threats to shut the Toledo Blade, cuts at McClatchy and rural news deserts

The Blade building in Toledo, Ohio. Photo (cc) 2019 by David Wilson.

I had a chance to take part in a conversation Wednesday on “All Sides with Amy Juravich” on WOSU Radio in Ohio. Our topics included the Block family’s threat to shut down The Blade of Toledo if a buyer isn’t found, devastating cuts at the McClatchy newspaper chain, and the ongoing problem of rural news deserts.

Dee Drummond, a former Blade reporter now at the University of Toledo, and First Amendment lawyer Michael Berry were Juravich’s other guests, though we were not on at the same time.

If you’d like to give it a listen, you can click right here.

Bringing CBS News and CNN under one Trump-friendly roof is a disaster for freedom of the press

David Ellison, right, and his billionaire father, Larry Ellison, are now calling the shots at two major news organizations — CBS News and CNN. Photo in the public domain.

My students and I were talking this morning about press freedoms in the U.S. and in other Western democracies. How, I asked, could countries like Britain, Canada, Germany and France ensure such freedoms in the absence of something like the First Amendment?

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The answer is that they can’t, at least not as comprehensively as we do. Libel protections and the right to publish information about criminal trials, government secrets and the like are in fact more robust here than they are in other countries. Yet according to the Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders, the U.S. ranks just 64th, behind Botswana but ahead of Panama. Norway is No. 1.

How can this be? A large part of the explanation came Monday, when the last remaining legal opposition to Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery melted away, transforming two behemoths into one super-behemoth. Nearly all of this corrupt (as in the sense of rotting flesh, not whether it’s legal) transaction involves entertainment properties, which is where the money is. But what many of us really care about is that CNN is moving under the same corporate umbrella as CBS News.

Continue reading “Bringing CBS News and CNN under one Trump-friendly roof is a disaster for freedom of the press”

Margaret Sullivan tells us how national media failures connect with the local news crisis

Margaret Sullivan. Photo (cc) 2016 by Michaelbenabib.

The “What Works” podcast is back after our summer hiatus. My co-host, Ellen Clegg, was feeling under the weather, so I’m flying solo. But no worries — Ellen still handled editing and production, and she should be back for our next episode.

We’re pleased to have Margaret Sullivan as our guest. Sullivan has spent the last decade or so doing the toughest of jobs: telling the country’s most powerful newsrooms what they’re getting wrong. She was the fifth public editor at The New York Times, from 2012 to 2016. Somebody once called it the worst job in journalism, but she took it anyway. Then she went to The Washington Post as its media columnist, where she covered the 2016 and 2020 elections, the Trump years, and the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. She left the Post in 2022, which, in hindsight, looks like excellent timing.

Sullivan writes a weekly column on media, politics and culture for The Guardian US, and she publishes a fearless newsletter on Substack called American Crisis, where she calls out lapses in how the media are covering Donald Trump’s authoritarianism.

But she also has deep roots in local journalism. She was a summer intern at her hometown paper, The Buffalo News, and worked her way up to become its first woman editor-in-chief. So she knows firsthand what happens to a community when its newspaper is gutted. In 2020, she published a book about the local news crisis called “Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy” and, we’re pleased to say, she blurbed our book, “What Works in Community News.”

I’ve got a Quick Take that Yogi Berra would have called déjà vu all over again. The Block family, which owns The Blade newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, says it will shut down the paper if they can’t find a buyer by the end of 2026. Now where have we heard that before? I also dive into the new impact report from the American Journalism Project, a philanthropic organization that turns out to be one of the biggest funders of nonprofit news in the country. AJP makes the case that nonprofit news as a business model has moved past the experimental stage.

You can listen here, or you can subscribe through your favorite podcast app.

Just say no: Trump’s illegal ban on three news outlets demands massive solidarity

Donald Trump’s edict banning three news organizations from the White House is illegal, and I have little doubt that the courts will overturn it in due course. The question is: How should the rest of the media respond?

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Trump said on Friday that CNN, MS NOW and Politico would no longer be allowed access, writing on Truth Social: “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” adding: “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine, but I don’t have to let them into my — into the people’s house.” And sure enough, CNN and MS NOW were turned away at the gate earlier today.

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In the midst of a national freakout over AI, here’s the latest on what it’s doing to journalism

It’s time for a check-in on how digital outlets that rely partly or entirely on artificial intelligence are hollowing out the already-beleaguered news business. What better time than now, while we’re in the midst of a national freakout over AI? (The latest: Karen Weise and Mike Isaac report in The New York Times on concerns within Microsoft and OpenAI that AI scraping amounts to “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions.”)

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I’ll begin with what strikes me as the most well-intentioned of the projects that have caught my eye recently: Nanopress, which produces morning newsletters for more than 70 communities and neighborhoods in the Boston area by scraping information from local government, civic groups and news organizations.

Continue reading “In the midst of a national freakout over AI, here’s the latest on what it’s doing to journalism”

In ‘Deserted,’ Nick Mathews explains how the local news crisis is devastating rural communities

*Old store in Nelson County, Va., a focus on Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted.” Photo (cc) 2010 by Ted Hodges.*

Local news is in crisis everywhere, but the challenge is more daunting in rural areas than it is in cities or affluent suburbs.

Consider the Storm Lake Times Pilot, which serves a farming community in Iowa. As co-founder Art Cullen explains in the 2021 documentary “Storm Lake,” the rise of agribusiness wiped out much of the local advertising that had once sustained the paper while the spreading tentacles of social media grabbed another large chunk. When Cullen appeared that same year on the podcast that Ellen Clegg and I host, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” he told us that both he and his brother, John Cullen, were living on Social Security rather than take a salary out of their precarious newspaper revenues.

The Storm Lake Times Pilot is emblematic of a national phenomenon. In 2025, the Local News Initiative at Northwestern’s Medill School found that 213 U.S. counties lacked a local news outlet, and that nearly 80% of those counties were in rural areas.

This depressing state of affairs is the focus of Nick Mathews’ new book, “Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America.”

Read the rest at The Arts Fuse.

Three local news outlets unveil a detailed guide to this fall’s state ballot questions

*Illustration by Field Nine Group / CommonWealth Beacon*

Mystified by that inscrutable guide to this fall’s ballot questions sent out by the secretary of state’s office? You’ll want to check out “The Massachusetts Ballot Questions, Explained,” a special project published by CommonWealth Beacon in partnership with The Bay State Banner and El Planeta.

The digital version was posted Tuesday by CommonWealth, but there’s more to come, including a print version and explainer videos on social. (Note: I’m a member of CommonWealth’s editorial advisory board.)

Voters could find the ballot especially confusing this year because there are nine questions they will be asked to sift through, including public records reform, a switch to all-party primaries and the repeal of marijuana legalization. The project comprises an overview, explainers, data visualizations, pro and con mini-essays and links to past coverage.

Like all of CommonWealth’s journalism, the ballot-questions project is freely available for republication either in print or online. Or local news outlets could just link to it in a prominent place on their homepages.

Government by ballot question isn’t ideal, but legislative inaction has made it an increasingly important outlet for voter frustration. Don’t go into the ballot booth without knowing what you’re voting for.