Attention to the Unseen

Margaret Sullivan writes: Scott Pelley of CBS pushed back hard when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy tried to spin him on Sunday’s “60 Minutes.” So did Chris Wallace of Fox News when Trump aide Stephen Miller refused to accept reality on the same subject: President Trump pressing Ukraine’s president to provide dirt on his political opponent. So did Jake Tapper of CNN with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking Republican on the House Oversight Committee, and Chuck Todd of NBC…

Read More Read More

A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, writes: Two years ago, we got a call from a United States government official warning us of the imminent arrest of a New York Times reporter based in Egypt named Declan Walsh. Though the news was alarming, the call was actually fairly standard. Over the years, we’ve received countless such warnings from American diplomats, military leaders and national security officials. But this particular call took a surprising and distressing turn….

Read More Read More

The Intercept reports: The Center for Immigration Studies, a far-right, anti-immigrant group, was frequently cited by major U.S. newspapers in the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — without mention of the group’s deep ties to the Trump administration, according to a report released Thursday. Ninety percent of news articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today that cited the Center for Immigration Studies from 2014 to 2017 did not mention “the extremist…

Read More Read More

Bernie Sanders writes: Walter Cronkite once said that “journalism is what we need to make democracy work.” He was absolutely right, which is why today’s assault on journalism by Wall Street, billionaire businessmen, Silicon Valley, and Donald Trump presents a crisis—and why we must take concrete action. Real journalism is different from the gossip, punditry, and clickbait that dominates today’s news. Real journalism, in the words of Joseph Pulitzer, is the painstaking reporting that will “fight for progress and reform,…

Read More Read More

Adriana Carranca writes: On June 9, The Intercept began publishing a series of investigative stories that sent shocks through Brazil. The pieces appeared to supply evidence that Sergio Moro, Brazil’s Justice Minister and the former top judge in a major corruption investigation, colluded with federal prosecutors to convict prominent political figures—among them, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had been leading 2018 election polls and was rendered ineligible to run. Drawing from private chats leaked to Glenn Greenwald—the Intercept’s…

Read More Read More

The Associated Press reports: Several weeks after publishing explosive reports about a key member of Brazil’s far-right government, U.S. journalist Glenn Greenwald was called before a congressional committee to face hostile questions. “Who should be judged, convicted and in prison is the journalist!” shouted congresswoman Katia Sastre, an ally of President Jair Bolsonaro. And by some accounts that wasn’t an empty threat: A conservative website reported that federal police had requested that financial regulators investigate Greenwald’s finances. The Pulitzer Prize-winning…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: She was once one of China’s most feared journalists, roaming the country uncovering stories about police brutality, wrongful convictions and environmental disasters. But these days, Zhang Wenmin struggles to be heard. The police intimidate Ms. Zhang’s sources. The authorities shut down her social media accounts. Unable to find news outlets that will publish her work, she lives largely off her savings. “The space for free speech has become so limited,” Ms. Zhang, 45, said. “It’s…

Read More Read More

Brian Stelter writes: In the past year the Jeffrey Epstein case was catapulted onto the national news radar by one newspaper, the Miami Herald, and by one reporter in particular, Julie K. Brown. The paper’s “Perversion of Justice” series came out last November, and Brown has stayed on the story ever since. As soon as The Daily Beast broke the news that Epstein had been arrested on Saturday evening, fellow journalists and other observers credited Brown and thanked her for…

Read More Read More

Margaret Sullivan writes: As Iowa journalist Robert Leonard talks to voters around his state, he finds himself baffled at the national portrayal of Joe Biden’s dominance in the presidential campaign. The local Democrats he encounters respect the former vice president, he told me, but many of them also feel his time has passed. They’re far more excited about other candidates, five in particular: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.); Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind.; Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.);…

Read More Read More

Jason Rezaian writes: Even after spending a year and a half in prison in Tehran, I knew that if I wanted to go on writing about Iran, I would be a target for plenty of public attacks despite the abuse I had suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic. And so it has been. But I never imagined the U.S. State Department would be funding my attackers. Last week, several astute Iran watchers drew attention to a series of…

Read More Read More