Attention to the Unseen

Noah Berlatsky writes: The White House is punishing the Associated Press for defying President Donald Trump’s petty and Orwellian censorship. Trump insists that journalistic outlets refer to the Gulf of Mexico solely as the “Gulf of America.” The AP has continued to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico. In retaliation, Trump barred the AP’s reporters from attending presidential press availabilities. But the AP refused to knuckle under. The organization’s stand provides a model for resistance…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: The tech entrepreneur and close adviser to Donald Trump Elon Musk has taken a stunning new public step in his support for the far-right German political party Alternative for Germany (AfD), publishing a supportive guest opinion piece for the country’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper that has prompted the commentary editor to resign in protest. The commentary piece in German was launched online on Saturday before being published on Sunday in the flagship paper of the Axel Springer…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: President-elect Donald J. Trump on Wednesday night chose Kari Lake to lead Voice of America, aiming to put a fierce loyalist who has called journalists “monsters” in charge of a federally funded news outlet that reaches hundreds of millions of people around the globe. Mr. Trump was accused of using his appointees to try to turn Voice of America, whose aim is to offer unbiased news to audiences around the world, into a pro-Trump propaganda…

Read More Read More

Amanda Moore writes: A white nationalist worked on the Trump campaign in an important position in Pennsylvania for five months — until Friday, when the Pennsylvania GOP fired him after learning about his views from my reporting. Last week, I confirmed that Luke Meyer, the Trump campaign’s 24-year-old regional field director for Western Pennsylvania, goes by the online name Alberto Barbarossa. As Barbarossa, he co-hosts the Alexandria podcast with Richard Spencer, organizer of the 2017 white nationalist Unite the Right…

Read More Read More

NPR reports: The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure…

Read More Read More

Will Bunch writes: In a famous monologue [in the Watergate movie, All The President’s Men], [Washington Post executive editor, Ben] Bradlee (played by Jason Robards, who won an Oscar) tells Woodward and Bernstein to keep reporting the story, that “nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country,” adding his trademarked newsroom cynicism, “not that any of that matters.” Yet perhaps an even more revealing scene occurs…

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: The Washington Post’s outgoing editor-at-large and longtime columnist has made explosive claims that its owner Jeff Bezos struck a deal with Donald Trump in order to kill the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Robert Kagan, who resigned from his position on Friday after more than two decades at the publication, told the Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives of Bezos’ Blue Origin space company the same day that the Amazon founder killed a plan to…

Read More Read More