Attention to the Unseen

The Observer reports: When some of the mind games and manoeuvres that turned a Murdoch family “retreat” into an ordeal appeared in Succession, the TV drama about squabbling family members of a right-wing media company, members of the real-life family started to suspect each other of leaking details to the writers. The truth was more straightforward. Succession’s creator, Jesse Armstrong, said that his team hadn’t needed inside sources – they had simply read press reports. Future screenwriters have been gifted…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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