In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, reporter Evan Gershkovich’s family speaks out for the first time since he was detained in Russia on March 29.
The Daily Beast reports: On Wednesday night, MSNBC aired explosive audio recordings of former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and Trump campaign officials telling Fox News after the 2020 election that there was no evidence Dominion voting machines flipped votes for President Joe Biden. The existence of the tapes, recorded by former Fox News producer Abby Grossberg, was first revealed in an amended legal complaint by Grossberg earlier this week. Grossberg is suing Fox News for harassment and discrimination, accusing…
The Guardian reports: The German CEO of Europe’s largest media publisher tried to use his flagship tabloid, Bild, to influence the outcome of Germany’s last election and fed the newspaper his personal views attacking climate change activism, Covid measures and the former chancellor Angela Merkel, leaked messages suggest. The internal chats, emails and text messages published by the German weekly Die Zeit on Wednesday clash with the public presentation of Axel Springer SE’s chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, who recently said…
Gabriel Sherman writes: On the afternoon of July 2, 2022, Rupert Murdoch’s black Range Rover pulled up to a 12th-century stone church in Westwell, a storybook Cotswolds village 75 miles west of London. The then 91-year-old Fox Corporation chairman traveled to the Oxfordshire countryside to attend his 21-year-old granddaughter Charlotte Freud’s wedding. Invitations instructed the 70 guests to wear “formal theatrical” attire. Murdoch emerged from his SUV looking like Tom Wolfe in a white suit, red suede shoes, and red…
The New York Times reports: The judge overseeing Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit against Fox News said on Wednesday that he was imposing a sanction on the network and would very likely start an investigation into whether Fox’s legal team had deliberately withheld evidence, scolding the lawyers for not being “straightforward” with him. The rebuke came after lawyers for Dominion, which is suing for defamation, revealed a number of instances in which Fox’s lawyers had not turned over evidence in a…
NPR reports: NPR will no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform. In explaining its decision, NPR cited Twitter’s decision to first label the network “state-affiliated media,” the same term it uses for propaganda outlets in Russia, China and other autocratic countries. The decision by Twitter last week took the public radio network off guard. When queried by NPR tech reporter Bobby Allyn,…
Matt Novak writes: Twitter added a warning to NPR’s Twitter account on Tuesday, declaring it as “state-affiliated media,” a label that’s typically been reserved for foreign media outlets that represent the official views of the government, like Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua. In fact, several people on Twitter pointed out that the social media company specifically said that news outlets like NPR are not state-affiliated media because they have editorial independence, despite getting some funds from the government. “State-affiliated media…
BBC News reports: The BBC’s Disinformation Team can reveal that a UK-registered media company is spreading Russian state disinformation to millions of people in the Arab-speaking world. Yala News claims to offer impartial news, but BBC analysis has shown most of its content directly mirrors stories on Russian state-backed media sites – and that it actually operates out of Syria. Yala Group, the parent company of Yala News, has a strong social presence. It’s 20 or so Facebook pages are…
CNN reports: News organizations have a message for Elon Musk: We are not going to pay you for checkmarks on Twitter. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, BuzzFeed, POLITICO, and Vox all scoffed at the notion on Thursday that they would pay Twitter for the feature, which has been free since it was introduced years ago but will soon be phased out. CNN said it has no intention of paying for Twitter’s subscription service for its…
Margaret Sullivan writes: His face stared out from news stories on Thursday morning, accompanied by headlines like this one in the Guardian: “Russia arrests reporter and accuses him of espionage.” Oh, that’s awful, I thought at first, reflecting that we really are involved in some kind of new cold war, and there is no end to the toll that authoritarian governments will take on journalists. The imprisonment of journalists is at a historic high worldwide; I’ve written columns about that….
The Moscow Times reports: Russia on Thursday arrested Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on espionage charges in a major escalation of the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown on independent journalism. After being detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, Gershkovich was formally arrested by a Moscow court in a hearing held behind closed doors. Russia’s State Security Service (FSB) alleged that Gershkovich, a U.S. citizen, was involved in the collection of “secret information” about a Russian defense company, state-run news…
Jack Shafer writes: The basest complaint in newsrooms is that AI will “steal” publishing jobs by deskilling work that “belongs” to people. Without a doubt, technology has been pilfering newsroom jobs for more than a century. The telephone increased reporter efficiency by allowing journalists to remain in the newsroom instead of wasting time traveling to collect stories. Photographs replaced newspaper and magazine illustrators. Computer typography displaced make-up room artists, typesetters and pressmen. Answering machines displaced telephone operators and secretaries. Word…
Mike Masnick writes: Over the last few months, Elon Musk’s handpicked journalists have continued revealing less and less with each new edition of the “Twitter Files,” to the point that even those of us who write about this area have mostly been skimming each new release, confirming that yet again these reporters have no idea what they’re talking about, are cherry picking misleading examples, and then misrepresenting basically everything. It’s difficult to decide if it’s even worth giving these releases…
The New York Times reports: Since 2002, when Fox News first overtook CNN as the most-watched cable news channel, one thing has been as certain and predictable as its dominance: Every time a Democrat wins the White House, the right-leaning network’s ratings take a momentary dip. That happened after the election of President Biden in 2020, too. But the reaction inside Fox was far different than before. There was panic. From the chairman of Fox Corporation on down, executives scrambled…
NPR reports: Last Oct. 18, Rolling Stone served up a foreboding scoop: The FBI had raided the home of a renowned journalist at the top of his game months earlier, and he had disappeared from public view. It should have been a coup. Instead, acrimony inside the newsroom over how that scoop was edited led to accusations that the magazine’s brash leader pulled punches in overseeing coverage of someone he knew. The reporter who wrote the story, enraged, accepted a position at…
Julia Davis writes: When Russia invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s elite propagandists wanted to drink champagne in the studio to properly celebrate the moment. Head of state propaganda agency, RT, Margarita Simonyan, expressed “an overwhelming sense of euphoria” and added: “I’ve been waiting eight years for this . . . it finally happened. This is true happiness.” With the bloody all-out invasion now in its second year, the euphoria has been replaced by a lingering sense of dread, with Putin’s mouthpieces…