Attention to the Unseen

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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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…

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The Daily Beast reports: Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos alone made the decision to block The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate. The Daily Beast has learned that even Will Lewis, Bezos’ hand-picked publisher, fought Bezos “tooth and nail” to prevent him from squelching the prepared editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president. It’s a surprising twist, given that it was Lewis who announced the paper’s decision. The news organization’s most senior opinion columnists Friday night fired back…

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Parker Molloy writes: I woke up this morning thinking about authoritarianism. In his 2017 book On Tyranny, historian Timothy Snyder introduced the concept of “anticipatory obedience,” warning that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” He argued that in uncertain times, individuals and institutions might preemptively adjust their actions to align with what they believe a more repressive regime would want—often without being asked. Forward to the final weeks of the 2024 presidential campaign, and Snyder’s warning feels…

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NPR reports: Even though the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is neck and neck, The Washington Post has decided not to make a presidential endorsement for the first time in 36 years, the publisher and CEO announced Friday. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Will Lewis wrote in an opinion piece published on the paper’s website. He referenced the paper’s policy in the decades prior to 1976, when,…

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Columbia Journalism Review reports: Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” On October 11, Patrick Soon-Shiong,…

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  Armed Israeli soldiers storm and shut down Al Jazeera’s bureau in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank for 45 days, forcing staff to leave the premises and destroying equipment. During the raid on Al Jazeera’s office, Israeli soldiers tear down a large banner of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank two years ago. Al Jazeera’s Zein Basravi has more from Amman, Jordan, because the Israeli government has also banned Al…

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Jonathan Chait writes: In the immediate aftermath of the presidential debate, most reporters and analysts conveyed a similar narrative of what had transpired: Kamala Harris baited Donald Trump into an angry, frequently incoherent performance. Why did so many journalists who witnessed the same event describe it so similarly? To Matt Taibbi, a popular commentator who has migrated from liberal-hating leftist to liberal-hating Trump apologist, there could be only one explanation: The entire news media was taking orders from the Democratic Party. Taibbi’s post-debate column,…

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Rebecca Solnit writes: The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the…

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