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      Washington Post columnist says she was fired over posts after Charlie Kirk’s killing

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      Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah says she has been fired from the newspaper over social media posts about gun control and race in the aftermath of far right commentator Charlie Kirk’s killing.Attiah, 39, recounted in a Substack post that she had been dropped as a Post columnist after 11 years for “speaking out against political violence, racial double standards, and America’s apathy toward guns”.The Post, she wrote, accused “my measured Bluesky posts of being ‘unacceptable, ‘gross misconduct’ and of endangering the physical safety of colleagues – charges without evidence, which I reject completely as false”.Attiah continued: “They rushed to fire me without even a conversation. This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”The columnist’s job was understood to be in jeopardy after she clashed with Post opinion editor Adam O’Neal, formerly of the Economist and the Wall Street Journal, who has reportedly offered buyouts to writers whose work does not fit with the editorial mix of the newspaper owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos.The Bezos-founded Amazon contributed $1m to the fund for the inauguration of the second presidency of Donald Trump, for whom Kirk was a close ally. And the Post decided to forego endorsing a candidate in the November election won by Trump, a Republican, after the newspaper’s editorial board had voted to endorse Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.In her Substack post, Attiah noted that she “was the last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist” on the paper and blasted that Washington DC, “one of the nation’s most diverse regions, … no longer has a paper that reflects the people it serves”.Attiah said her firing was “part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media – a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful – and tragic”.The Washington Post is under an editorial mandate for the newspaper’s opinion section to focus specifically on supporting and defending “personal liberties and free markets”.A Washington Post spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters and pointed to the organization’s policies and standards, including a section governing social media use.In writings on Bluesky, Attiah lamented that the US, in her opinion, “accepts and worships” gun violence.“My only direct reference to Kirk was one post – his own words on record,” she said in her Substack letter. The letter included a screenshot of a Bluesky post alluding to a 2023 remark from Kirk about how several prominent Black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.“You have to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”Attiah continued that she was pointing “to the familiar pattern of America shrugging off gun deaths and giving compassion for white men who commit and espouse political violence”.The firing described by Attiah came after the Status media newsletter – citing sources – reported in August that she had refused a buyout offer. It also comes days after MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd was dismissed for describing Kirk – in the aftermath of his killing – as a “divisive” figure who pushed “hate speech”.Some accused Dowd of implicitly justifying the violence against Kirk by having said that “hateful words” lead to “hateful actions”. Dowd has since written his comments were “misconstrued” and MSNBC caved to pressure from a “rightwing media mob”.Dowd was one of the earliest instances of people across the US either being fired from or disciplined at their jobs amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on commentary that is critical about Kirk.In August, the Post published an opinion piece by Trump administration official Jay Bhattacharya to argue that the federal health and human services department’s decision to cut to support to mRNA vaccine development was a “necessary” step. Experts have warned that the approach is wrongheaded, with mRNA vaccines having saved millions of lives during the Covid-19 pandemic.The editorial page also published an opinion from Jeanine Pirro, a former host at the conservative Fox News network who is now serving as a Washington DC district attorney, that promoted the administration’s decision to deploy national guard troops on the streets of the capital to allegedly make them safer – even though the city’s violent crime rate is at 30-year low.O’Neal reportedly sent a memo on 14 July asserting that his “top priority will be to significantly increase the reach and effect of our work”.“Advocating for free markets and personal liberties will be critical as we rebuild trust with more Americans and scale our high quality journalism,” the memo reportedly said. It said the changes were “not a partisan project” and the paper “won’t let sentimentality slow down much-needed reform”. More

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      Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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      1. The astonishing story of the aristocrat who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa bed – and other German rebels who defied the NazisView image in fullscreenFrom a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped “non-Aryan” students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What, asked Jonathan Freedland, in this extract from his new book, The Traitors Circle, made them risk it all?Read more2. The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ worksView image in fullscreen“One of the most marvellous properties of the brain,” wrote Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in this fascinating piece from Well Actually, is its ability to continue working unconsciously when the conscious mind has moved on to something else.Read more3. Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?View image in fullscreenAfter leaving the New York Times, Weiss turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, David Klion profiled a writer who is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites.Read more4. Israel is forcing us to leave Gaza City. We know they may never let us returnView image in fullscreenIn this deeply personal piece, Gaza reporter Malak A Tantesh wrote about her family’s decision to leave northern Gaza, the area they call home, for the tents of the south where they had also endured last year’s winter. The family has stayed in 10 locations since they were first forced out of their prewar home in Beit Lahia.Read more5. Boom times and total burnout: three days at Europe’s biggest pornography conferenceView image in fullscreenIn this powerful feature, Amelia Gentleman, alongside photographer Judith Jockel, reported from the biggest pornography conference in Europe, where she spoke to entrepreneurs who were excited about AI and soaring profits, and creators who were battling burnout and chronic illness due to the industry’s gig-economy structure.Read more6. ‘I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to leave my kids’: Davina McCall on addiction, reality TV and the brain tumour that nearly killed herView image in fullscreenWhen the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was “the healthiest woman you’ve ever met”. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she told Simon Hattenstone, she’s re‑evaluating everything.Read more More

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      The real bias monitor at CBS is Donald Trump | Seth Stern

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      News outlets, including CBS, are free to run their editorial operations as they see fit. If they independently decide to hire a bias ombudsman, that’s their prerogative. If they think the best person to monitor bias at this moment is a career partisan like Kenneth Weinstein, that’s cause to question their judgment, but not necessarily a first amendment concern.That all changes, however, when the monitoring is at the behest of the federal government. And that’s what’s going on at CBS. The creation of the ombudsman role was one of many capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger.Other concessions included a commitment to end DEI and, of course, the $16m dollar bribe to Trump, laundered as a settlement payment to resolve his frivolous lawsuit over 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with then vice-president Kamala Harris. Two days after the check hit, the FCC approved the merger. And though Paramount denies it, Trump claims there was also a side agreement to sweeten the deal with $20m in pro-Trump PSAs.Given the original sin of that rotten transaction, there is no room for benefit of the doubt when it comes to Weinstein’s hiring.The day the hire was announced, the FCC chair, Brendan Carr – known for his lapel pin with a golden bust of Trump – told the Wall Street Journal that his supposedly independent agency was “fully aligned with the agenda that President Trump is running”. When it comes to the press, that agenda is clear: censorship and retribution.Weinstein’s past Trump bootlicking raises questions about whether he’s too biased to monitor bias. Soon after the administration extracted its latest surrender from CBS – a commitment to no longer exercise its constitutional right to edit interviews, in response to criticism from the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem – it was reported that Weinstein had deleted his X account.So the man tasked with policing transparency at CBS is already obscuring his own words? Not a great start as a journalistic ethicist.David Ellison, CEO of the new Paramount Skydance Corporation and son of Larry Ellison, who recently became the world’s richest person, insists Weinstein won’t report to the government. The ombudsman role is about transparency, not oversight, he claims. It will ensure that CBS showcases “varied ideological perspectives”, presumably including that of his dad’s buddy in the White House, who also wants to broker a deal for the Ellison family to control TikTok.One might argue that a serious bias monitor would focus on whether journalists’ biases (and yes, journalists have biases like everyone else) interfere with their pursuit of truth rather than implementing a nonsensical “all perspectives are created equal” policy. But again, absent government interference, Ellison’s entitled to write the job description as he sees fit.The government, however, apparently does intend to oversee – and, if it sees fit, interfere with – CBS’s bias policing. Carr reportedly said his agency was in a “trust but verify posture”, when it comes to the anti-bias commitments it unconstitutionally extracted. He noted: “When you make a filing at the FCC, we have rules and regulations that deal with false representations to the agency,” adding that his agency was “going to stay in touch with [Paramount] and track this issue”.In other words, the FCC is positioned to use Paramount’s seemingly coerced commitments during the merger process – including the bias ombudsman – to punish CBS if it steps out of line, or better yet, make it think twice about doing so in the first place. An independent bias cop would be all over the Columbia Journalism Review’s reporting on Thursday on alarming corporate meddling, by old and new ownership alike, in an effort to slant the network’s coverage in Israel’s favor. What an opportunity to hit the ground running! But don’t hold your breath.Legally, the government cannot use regulatory penalties as an end run around the constitution to control the news. As a prior version of Carr said in 2021: “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.”But that assumes a government that respects the limits of its authority. The United States doesn’t have one of those. If this administration needs a pretext to punish CBS, it’ll find one – whether it’s alleged misrepresentations to regulators or some other bizarre theory government lawyers have yet to dream up.And don’t expect the FCC to push back. My employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation, filed an attorney disciplinary complaint against Carr in July, which included a laundry list of his overreaches and extra jurisdictional actions, from threatening corporate owners of cable news networks that don’t air Trump’s press conferences to efforts to meddle in online content.The FCC regulates neither cable news nor online speech, and Carr knows that. He also knows he can’t force even those he does regulate to broadcast whatever he wants. But those on the receiving end of Carr’s correspondence understand that he’s not speaking to them as an independent regulator but as one of Trump’s henchmen. It isn’t about whether they violated whatever regulation he cites (if he even bothers), it’s about whether they’re kissing the ring emphatically enough for his boss’s liking.The Trump administration has abused its powers to shake down Paramount and secure a foothold inside CBS’s newsroom. That doesn’t mean CBS will never criticize Trump again – that would be too obvious. But its owners know they might get slapped if it goes too far. That’s enough to tame a watchdog – especially a corporate one that prioritizes endeavors more lucrative than defending the first amendment.The new CBS might not quite be state media, but it’s certainly going to be state-supervised media. Congratulations to Weinstein on the title, but the real bias ombudsman is Donald Trump.

      Seth Stern is the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation and a first amendment lawyer More

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      Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right

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      After clinching the title of top conservative podcast in America (and second overall news podcast, according to Apple’s ranking) in March, Charlie Kirk said: “We’re not just talking. We’re activating a revolution.”In the hours after his killing at age 31 on the first stop of a buzzy college campus tour, the rightwing activist’s words echoed through young conservative circles. Social media eulogies rolled in, with users reposting clips of Kirk with his wife and children. Parents of teens wrote on X of learning about Kirk’s death through their children. “My 17 year old is bumming. Told me he plays Charlie in the background on his computer when he’s on it,” the conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on X. Another X user wrote about speaking to teens at a church youth group: “Everyone I talked to is so distraught and heartbroken at his passing.”A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Kirk’s ideology was caustic; he espoused openly homophobic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and Christian nationalist views while uplifting misinformation and conspiracy theories. He also campaigned on issues that mattered to young Americans, engaging directly with them – no matter how virulently – on hot-button topics such as abortion, transgender rights, race and Palestinian solidarity.View image in fullscreenAmy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who studies politics and education, describes Kirk’s values as “insurgency conservatism” that was “designed to get attention”.It worked: TikTok users under 30 who voted for Trump in 2024 said they trusted Kirk more than any other individual, according to a New York Times profile, despite the fact that he never held office or a role in the White House. That election saw male voters ages 18 to 29 swing hard to the right; Trump also made inroads with gen Z women. Earlier this year, Trump praised Kirk for “what he’s done with the young people”.As a millennial growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kirk was obsessed with Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement. His fans also felt like outsiders within the American political system.“After Trump was elected in 2016, I was really surprised to see just how many students who were conservative were no longer identifying with the Republican party or with college Republicans, and had instead pivoted over to being really intrigued with what Turning Point was doing on campus,” Binder said. “They were doing much more exciting programming. It was less electorally focused, less about campaigning, and more about having events that were really confrontational.”Kirk appeared equally at ease chumming it up with high-powered donors as he did debating 20-year-olds in sweatpants. Kirk sparred directly with young people through video templates such as “prove me wrong” (a one-on-one debate, where students could wait in line to ask him a question), and he was an early guest on the YouTube series Surrounded, where he sat in a room with 25 liberals and goaded them with statements such as “abortion is murder and should be illegal” and “trans women are not women.”Turning Point USA raked in funding – the New York Times estimated a $92.4m revenue in 2023 – while advancing campus culture wars. Kirk’s content brought classic and extreme rightwing ideals to young people’s media feeds; he looked like both an old-school, suited conservative in the style of a Fox News host, and a social media-savvy man of the times. His video titles usually bent toward hyperbole (“Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State,” was posted less than a week before the shooting). There were gonzo premises, such as when Kirk and the YouTube prank team Nelk Boys showed up at a Wisconsin frat party to get out the vote in 2024. His meme literacy showed when he handed out hats that read: “White Boy Summer”, a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” catchphrase.With his wife, Erika, owner of a faith-based fashion brand and a former Miss Arizona USA, Kirk softened his image, presenting himself as devoted husband, father and a bit of a lifestyle influencer. He talked to tweens in Maga hats about his preferred Starbucks order and promoted “cuteservatives” like Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster who branded her show on Maha culture as a rightwing Call Her Daddy. After Kirk’s death, Brett Cooper, a 23-year-old conservative influencer in the “womanosphere” with more than 1 million Instagram followers, reposted a video homage that depicted him as a champion for girls and young women. (Yet this was a man who compared abortion to the Holocaust and claimed that women over 30 “aren’t attractive in the dating pool”.)View image in fullscreenFor 10 years, Turning Point USA hosted a “women’s summit”, where Kirk and others like Clark and Cooper encouraged attenders to focus on finding husbands. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, published an obituary that called Kirk a “loving father, patriot, and husband”.Even young people who were disgusted by Kirk’s rhetoric could not deny his impact. Hasan Piker, the hugely popular leftwing Twitch streamer whose ideology stands in direct contrast to Kirk, was scheduled to debate with Kirk at the end of September at Dartmouth University. Both Piker and the gun control activist David Hogg spoke against political violence in the wake of the shooting (as did many Democratic figures such as Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani). Piker told his followers not to make jokes about Kirk’s shooting. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. Hogg called the news “horrifying” on X.“I think it’s undeniable to say that Kirk was one of the first and most prominent people to shape what it means to be young and on the right in the US,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies extremism.After Kirk’s death, Braddock said he had seen “individuals calling this an inflection point, or a turning point where the left can no longer be tolerated”. Rightwing pundits have been eager to blame the left for the shooting.Adam Pennings, 25, is the executive director of Run Gen Z, a non-profit that supports young Republican candidates. “He’s always just been such an important part” of the young conservative party, Pennings said of Kirk. “He was everywhere.”Pennings knew Kirk through his work, but the two were not close. Still, Pennings said, due to Kirk’s omnipresence: “I feel like I lost a friend.” More

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      Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?

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      Last month, federal regulators approved the long-anticipated merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, positioning David Ellison – the founder of Skydance and the son of megabillionaire Larry Ellison – as one of the most powerful figures in US media. Paramount Skydance Corporation, as it is now officially known, is one of a small handful of American media conglomerates, with Paramount Pictures, cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, and CBS all under its umbrella. CBS, in turn, runs one of the major US news operations, with nightly news viewership in the millions and 60 Minutes still being the most watched news program on network television.The implications of the merger are far-reaching and were already being felt ahead of its final approval. In July, Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment the president disapproved of, and a few weeks later, CBS controversially cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which many observers speculated was at least partly about jettisoning an outspoken critic of Trump in anticipation of the deal.But one of the most buzzed-about aspects is Paramount’s possible acquisition of the Free Press, the digital media company founded by Bari Weiss as a Substack newsletter in 2021, and Weiss’s potential new role steering CBS’s editorial slant. In July, the Financial Times reported that Weiss was seeking at least $200m for her website – more than double its valuation a year earlier and more than the site’s admittedly impressive 155,000 paid subscribers (roughly a 10th of total subscribers) would seem to justify. That same week, the media newsletter Puck published an anonymously sourced report that Weiss would possibly be advising David Rhodes, a former CBS and Fox News executive and the current chair of Sky News, in the event that Rhodes resumes running CBS. And just last week, Puck reported that the deal was all but finalized, with the Free Press to be acquired for somewhere in the $100m to $200m range (less than Weiss sought but nothing to sneeze at) and with Weiss tasked with “guiding the editorial direction of the [CBS news] division”.If all this comes to pass, it will cement Weiss as a key figure in shaping the national news environment, just five years after her much publicized resignation from the New York Times over what she characterized as a censorious and hostile workplace. This came in the wake of the resignation of the editorial page editor, James Bennet, after a staff uproar over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter protesters.Weiss, 41, is no stranger to publicity; since 2019, she has been the subject of mostly fawning profiles in Vanity Fair, Semafor, Los Angeles Magazine, the Times of London, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, and her former employers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The product of an idyllic and fiercely Zionist upbringing in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, she first gained notice for her campaign against pro-Palestinian faculty during her undergrad years at Columbia University. A stint at the Bret Stephens-run neoconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page followed, before she and Stephens both departed for the New York Times, where her tenure as an opinion editor and writer was stormy well before her resignation. She and her wife, fellow voluntary Times exile Nellie Bowles, decamped to Los Angeles, where she wasted little time launching new projects: she co-founded the “heterodox” University of Austin and launched a Substack, originally dubbed Common Sense and then rebranded as the Free Press, which quickly acquired venture capital backers, a sizable subscriber base, and an editorial staff numbering in the dozens and including many media industry veterans. Her triumphant return to New York City last year marked her as a power broker in her own right. More than any other figure in her age cohort, Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and “woke” progressives, even as she decried “cancel culture” and claimed to champion free speech – and with the Free Press, she has developed a whole newsroom around that mission. The Guardian put detailed claims in this piece to Bari Weiss and the Free Press and did not receive an official response.View image in fullscreenWhen New York Magazine convened 57 of “the most powerful people in media” to discuss the industry’s future last year, Weiss was on the list. A month later, after Trump’s victory, the Free Press co-hosted an inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X and Uber, attended by the former British prime minister Liz Truss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Dr Mehmet Oz. For each of her haters, and there are many, Weiss counts Jeff Bezos, Jerry Seinfeld (whose daughter is on staff at the Free Press), and Sheryl Sandberg among her fans, and Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Howard Schultz among her financial backers. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” the conservative pollster Frank Luntz told the New York Times last year. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”In just a few years, Weiss has gone from a punchline in media circles to one of the most influential names in the industry, one with a genuine popular following beyond insiders and donors. Her stunning comeback is a tribute to her hustle, her oft-acknowledged personal charisma, and above all her unapologetic support for Israel and attacks on progressive social justice dogmas, often disparaged as “wokeness” – both of which align her with some of the most powerful people alive even as they alienate her from many of her generational peers in journalism.But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions, and how her efforts have been turbocharged by Trump’s return to the White House. If Weiss does join CBS, it will only formalize the role she has already carved out as the Trump administration’s de facto ally in its effort to silence progressive and pro-Palestinian voices. Weiss will be an ideological commissar situated within the highest levels of the media business, wielding her considerable platform to help the White House enforce compliance in spaces that fostered resistance during Trump’s first term: the media, academia and civil society.To get a sense of the kind of opportunities Weiss might have to influence decisions and coverage at CBS, it is worth flashing back a year to the fall of 2024. On 30 September, Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS’s morning news show, where he was interviewed by anchor Tony Dokoupil over Coates’s new book, The Message, which includes a scathing firsthand account of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dokoupil questioned Coates aggressively (some would say condescendingly) over what he called a one-sided depiction of Israel, and the interview was litigated on social media for days, pitting supporters of Israel and Palestine against each other on predictable lines.A week later, the Free Press joined the fray with an exclusive from inside CBS News, where the Coates interview was at least as divisive as it was to the wider public. On the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, someone high up at CBS leaked recordings of an editorial meeting to the Free Press, revealing that, as the site’s editors put it, “the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’” Though the article acknowledged that CBS’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, defended Dokoupil’s tough questions, it portrayed the meeting overall as an example of the woke conformity endemic to institutions such as CBS.“The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” the Free Press editorialized, in a sweeping indictment both of CBS and of elite liberalism writ large. “He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful. One can find more sophisticated versions of The Message in the course catalogs of Ivy League universities, the editorial pages of leading newspapers, and in the reports of well-funded NGOs. It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus.”A month later, Trump won the presidential election. Since then, what the Free Press editors termed “this new elite consensus” has been under siege from the federal government, which has openly sought to purge anything it considers “wokeness” from universities, newspapers and NGOs, and in particular has sought to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. Weiss, who has presented herself as a leading defender of free speech, has in effect leveraged her publication to help the government suppress it.The Free Press’s involvement in the administration’s war on Columbia University, Weiss’s alma mater (and, full disclosure, mine; I socialized with Weiss as an undergraduate, though we have not spoken in years) has been a case in point. Trump’s joint task force to combat antisemitism chose the Free Press to break the news on 7 March that the administration was withholding $400m in federal grants to Columbia over the university’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks – essentially the opening volley in Trump’s assault on elite higher education. Two weeks later, on 21 March, Columbia conceded to Trump’s blackmail, agreeing to place its Middle East studies department – which Weiss has been crusading against since she was an undergraduate two decades ago – under academic receivership. Just four days after that, the Free Press published a leaked transcript of a private Zoom call in which the university’s then president, Katrina Armstrong, told about 75 faculty members that she did not intend to comply with all of Trump’s demands, despite her public surrender. Three days later, Armstrong resigned – and according to the New York Times, a key reason why was that Trump’s antisemitism task force expressed concern over the transcript leaked to the Free Press.Weiss’s publication, in short, was the preferred vehicle for conveying information from Columbia insiders who wanted to purge all criticism of Israel from the university to Trump administration officials who were using unprecedented financial pressure to help them do exactly that. Just as with CBS a year ago, Weiss and the Free Press were there to help reactionaries at elite institutions advance their internal turf wars – and unlike a year ago, those reactionaries can now count on the full weight of Trump’s authoritarian administration to back them up.The same playbook can also be seen in the Free Press’s efforts to discredit National Public Radio, which from 1971 until this summer served as America’s major publicly supported broadcaster. Last April, the Free Press published an error-laden article by a disgruntled NPR business editor, Uri Berliner, who accused his employer of pervasive liberal bias and of betraying America’s trust. Berliner was predictably hired by the Free Press two months later, and within a year, he was being invited by House Republicans to testify against his former employer. In July of this year, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill voted to defund NPR, and the Free Press published Berliner’s victory lap. The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.These are the real stakes of Weiss potentially joining CBS. If Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press goes through, Weiss will probably be in a position to recruit a network of snitches and rightwing thought police, both from within existing CBS staff and from her own publication, ensconced throughout one of the four largest US media conglomerates. CBS staffers are reportedly “apoplectic” at the news of her impending role, with some raising concerns about a “hall monitor” approach to coverage and others threatening to resign – resignations Ellison and Weiss might welcome, as it would give them an opportunity to start fresh. Weiss could be responsible for shaping coverage and enforcing her own orthodoxy, especially with regard to Israel and its critics – an issue around which Weiss has consistently provided cover for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government. This would represent a shift for CBS; Paramount’s outgoing chair, Shari Redstone, is an avowed supporter of Israel who has reportedly been outraged by 60 Minutes’s coverage since the 7 October attacks, and has openly expressed hope that the Trump administration could force CBS to clamp down on “anti-Israel bias”, which Weiss is ideally suited to facilitate.View image in fullscreenLast month, the Free Press sparked widespread outrage by publishing an article by staffers Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, who reported that the starving Palestinian children whose images appeared in multiple mainstream outlets were all suffering from pre-existing conditions such as cystic fibrosis or rickets – a clear attempt to bolster a narrative the publication has been pushing for months that widely reported famine conditions in Gaza are a hoax. Reingold and Lukyanova’s article drew condemnation from many quarters, including from the president of Refugees International, who pointed out that it is precisely children with such conditions who are most vulnerable in a famine. But the Free Press brushed off its critics and claimed credit for pushing CNN and the Washington Post to caveat their coverage in light of their reporting. “Journalistic outlets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this story has had more than its share,” wrote the editors. As if to prove their point, Netanyahu himself posted a video of Reingold defending her work, with the caption: “Facts matter.” (The Guardian stands by the stories it published that included the image and says the photo did not act to deceive.)One of the critics the Free Press singled out was Ben Rhodes, a former top adviser to Barack Obama, who, the Free Press noted, was once nicknamed “Hamas”, an epithet used by his Obama administration colleague Rahm Emanuel (who sat for a friendly interview with Weiss in July) for his willingness to criticize Israel. In an appearance on Pod Save the World – which is part of Crooked Media, the independent progressive podcasting network run by former Obama staffers – Rhodes called Reingold and Lukyanova’s reporting “sociopathic” and “grotesque”. “There’s something wrong with you, deeply, deeply fucked up,” he added. These would be harsh words coming from anyone, but Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, who has been floated as CBS’s next executive and who reportedly would be working closely with Weiss. In Ben Rhodes’s 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, he acknowledged political differences with his brother while also saying they have always been close. That he would speak publicly with such undisguised contempt about Weiss’s media company in that context suggests serious alarm at the possible direction of CBS News.Alarm is a justifiable reaction. Weiss has often been underestimated, but the success of the Free Press to date vindicates her seemingly limitless ambition. That is in spite of internal turmoil: in May, the media newsletter Breaker reported that the Free Press had seen a number of notable departures amid its rapid expansion and that staff had been skeptical of Weiss’s “chaotic” management style.But in the context of Trump’s federally funded culture war, it is unclear any of that will matter. In order to avoid the president’s disfavor and present themselves as worthy of access, legacy media companies are desperate to tap into the audience and the relationships that Weiss has so effectively courted.Although the Free Press did not respond on the record to the Guardian’s questions, a source within the Free Press defended the range of views the organization publishes and emphasized that it was not a partisan shop.When Trump first ran for office, Weiss positioned herself as a “Never Trumper”, following the lead of her mentor Stephens and other prominent neoconservatives, and in 2017 she described the first Trump administration as “shambolic”. But this February, as Trump kicked off his second term, Weiss told Fox News’s Howard Kurtz that her stance on Trump had softened. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said, claiming she cried at her desk the first time Trump won. Now, she explained, she had come to appreciate Trump for two main reasons: first, she saw the left’s “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him” as “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”, and second, she approved of some of his actual policies, noting particularly his Israel-aligned moves in the Middle East.The Free Press claims to be independent and non-partisan, and ahead of the 2024 election it canvassed its own staff and determined that it was equally divided between supporters of Trump, Kamala Harris and neither. But during Trump’s second term, the site has been noticeably sympathetic to the administration. As the UnPopulist has carefully documented, Weiss has made a choice in the Trump restoration era – rather than position the Free Press as a heterodox champion of “classical liberalism”, as it was initially presented during the Biden years, she has aligned herself with the White House’s priorities. The hiring of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a formerly left-leaning journalist turned fervent Maga pundit, this April was a clear signal of Weiss’s repositioning. This choice has alienated many of her former champions – for instance, Glenn Greenwald, who achieved a public rapprochement with Weiss in the early days of the Free Press (both Weiss and Greenwald have thrived and handsomely profited on Substack), has since excoriated her for consistently attacking the free speech rights of Israel critics. But it has also set her up well to ascend to even greater influence.Weiss is not afraid to burn bridges, scandalize critics or be branded a hypocrite in pursuit of power. In that sense, she has something in common with the president who has done so much to enable her rise. But Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish. With her education, experience and extensively cultivated networks, she is uniquely well-suited to champion the prerogatives of those in academia, media, publishing and similar sectors who feel threatened by progressive social movements. Liberal institutions produced Bari Weiss, and now at least one could be hers to remake.

      David Klion is a columnist for the Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and currently working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism More

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      Trump’s anti-press tactics are bad enough in the US. Now Reform is importing them to the Midlands | Jon Allsop

      by

      On the day that he returned to office in January, Donald Trump signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. A few days later, the Associated Press, a leading global news agency that is also a linguistic bible for newsrooms across the US, said that while it would acknowledge Trump’s order, it would mostly continue to use the original name. In response, the White House banned AP journalists from certain media availabilities. Trump accused the agency of failing to follow the law. The AP said the government was trying to dictate what words it can and cannot use.This week, Nottinghamshire’s Reform-led county council said that it would impose a sweeping ban on the Nottingham Post, its affiliated website and BBC-funded reporters who work there. At issue, apparently, was a story that the paper had written about a proposed reorganisation of local government. The leader of the council insisted that he welcomes scrutiny, but has a “duty” to combat “misinformation”. The Post’s editor called the decision “a massive attack on local democracy” – and it’s hard to disagree.The ban has clear echoes of Trump’s tactics, and some critics said as much explicitly. In the US, there is a clear longer-term trend of Republican officials imposing poorly justified restrictions on the press. But one doesn’t need to look as far as that to understand the Nottinghamshire ban. Indeed, Reform has been accused before of shutting out reporters, or otherwise treating them with disrespect: last year, the party reportedly excluded certain adversarial outlets and journalists from its conference; earlier this summer, Reform’s leader Nigel Farage accused local reporters in Scotland of helping to coordinate protests against him. It all seems to add up, on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, to a moment in which hard-right politicians, in particular, feel that they don’t need to engage with traditional news outlets to get their message out, and that they won’t suffer electoral consequences for shutting them out. They might even benefit from doing so, turning the media into a foil as part of a broader war against the establishment.And yet, there are also reasons to doubt these conclusions, or at least to texture them. It’s true that Trump, for example, has shut out journalists whose stories displease him. (In addition to the AP imbroglio, his White House recently barred a reporter from the Wall Street Journal from a trip to the UK, after that paper reported unflatteringly on Trump’s alleged ties to Jeffrey Epstein.) At the same time, though, Trump will routinely talk to pretty much anyone who will listen, the mainstream media very much included. (Earlier this year, he called the editor of the Atlantic a “sleazebag” – then granted him an interview not long after.) Indeed, Trump has long used media coverage successfully to set the political agenda.In the UK, Farage seems to be using the same playbook. Sure, he has leaned, in particular, on the rightwing press. But such papers aren’t necessarily natural allies for Reform given their deep cultural ties to the Conservatives. And Farage has sucked up oxygen in more hostile quarters, too. This week, just as Nottinghamshire council was banning journalists, Farage was being praised, by Politico, for answering questions about his mass deportation plans with a directness that other parties should seek to emulate.Trump has clearly proven that there aren’t hard electoral consequences for press-bashing. But there are still important differences between UK and US political culture. Trust in the media is at a low ebb here, too. But in the recent past, rightwing political figures who have used Trumpian rhetoric to deflect blame for their own failures on to the media haven’t always been successful. Dominic Cummings goaded the press after his Covid-era drive to Barnard Castle, but could not escape massive public anger. Boris Johnson dodging tough questions – from the Today programme, for example, which his government boycotted – didn’t spare him from the glare of scandal in the long run.This doesn’t guarantee that the leaders of Nottinghamshire council will suffer from banning their local paper. Indeed, it might very well be to Reform’s advantage to let Farage suck up attention nationally while dodging scrutiny for the actions of the party’s councillors across the country; the party surely wants the media talking about immigration, not the reorganisation of local government. And local outlets might seem an easy target, diminished in power and reach in an age of cuts to local news and unchained online discourse.View image in fullscreenAnd yet Reform’s leadership of councils is an important test for the party in a country where voters still, to some extent, value competent governance. “If Reform can’t even face questions from the Nottingham Post,” the Conservative party chair Kevin Hollinrake wondered this week, “what hope is there that they could ever face the serious responsibilities of government?” He’s surely not the only one asking that question. Even in the US, where the culture of political press-bashing is more entrenched, local Republican legislators in some states are cooperating with proposals to steer more resources to their dwindling local news outlets. This isn’t some act of altruism, advocates say, but one born of the realisation that they need voters to know what they’ve been doing when elections roll around.The Reform ban might hold. But at some point, local Reform councillors will want to trumpet an achievement, and when they do, it would not be a massive surprise if they go running to the Nottingham Post. Politicians can, of course, reach voters on social media these days. But established local news brands can still confer prestige. And good publicity is good publicity. For now, Trump hasn’t let up on the AP. But he hasn’t been shy about showcasing its journalism when it suits him. An artwork based on the iconic image of Trump pumping his fist after his attempted assassination last year now adorns a White House wall. It was taken by an AP photographer.

      Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes Columbia Journalism Review’s newsletter The Media Today

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ audiences face discrimination from advertisers, editors warn

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      Publications aimed at LGBTQ+ and other diverse audiences are facing “good old-fashioned discrimination” as advertisers avoid them after political attacks on diversity and inclusion campaigns, editors have said.Senior figures at publications aimed at the gay community and other minority groups said a previous “gold rush” to work with such titles was over.There has been a backlash in the US over corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the past 18 months, which has led to some big names rolling back their plans.Tag Warner, the chief executive of Gay Times, said his publication, which had been growing digitally in the US, had lost 80% of its advertisers in the past year. It has also lost in excess of £5m in expected advertiser revenue.Warner, who has led the outlet since 2019, said his title’s growth had been accompanied by an enthusiasm from brands to embrace LGBTQ+ audiences. He blames an anti-DEI drive in the US for the dramatic shift.“I know that media and marketing is also going through a challenging year anyway, but when we’re thinking about other organisations that don’t talk to diverse themes, they’re not nearly as impacted as we are,” he said. “This is just good old-fashioned discrimination. Because discrimination doesn’t have to make business sense. Discrimination doesn’t have to be logical. Discrimination is discrimination.“We’re really experiencing the impact of what happens when voices that are pressuring organisations to give in to less inclusive perspectives start winning. Then it creates this massive behavioural shift in brands and organisations.”Nafisa Bakkar, the co-founder of Amaliah, a publication aimed at “amplifying the voices of Muslim women”, said there had been a “change in mood” among brands and advertisers. “There was this DNI [diversity and inclusion] gold rush,” she said. “It is, I would say, well and truly over.“We work with a lot of UK advertisers, but I would say that the US has a lot more emphasis on what they would call ‘brand safety’, which I think is a code word for ‘we don’t want to rock the boat’. I would say there is a lot more focus on this element.”Ibrahim Kamara, the founder of the youth platform GUAP, which has a large black and ethnically diverse audience, said he had detected a “relative difference” from 2020 in approaches from brands.He and others cited the economic pressures on advertisers generally in recent years. However, he said the “hype and the PR around wanting to support and connect with diverse audiences” had also subsided.“The thing that most people within these kind of spaces can probably agree on is that the energy and the PR is very different now,” he said. “It was almost a badge of honour to be able to say that you’re supporting certain communities. Now, I’ve seen that lots of the diversity and inclusion people that were hired around that period have probably lost their jobs. It doesn’t have the same PR effect any more.”Warner said the anti-DEI impact pre-dated the return of Donald Trump to the White House. Figures such as the conservative pundit Robby Starbuck have been engaged in a long-running anti-DEI campaign, pressuring firms to drop their diversity efforts. However, Warner said Trump’s arrival “gave everyone, I think, permission to be honest about it”.Not all publications in the sector have been hit in the same way as Gay Times. Companies with business models less reliant on US advertising, as well as some big players with long-established relationships, said they had managed to negotiate the changing political environment.“Brands are nervous, that’s for sure, or careful – or a combination of both,” said Darren Styles, the managing director of Stream Publishing, which publishes Attitude magazine. “They’re aware it can be a lightning rod for a vocal minority. But our experience is that most people are holding their ground, if not doubling down.”Styles also said he was not complacent, however, given the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the UK and its lack of historical support for the LGBTQ+ community.“I’m not incautious about the future,” he said. “Who knows what next year will bring, because that narrative is not going away. Obviously, there’s the rise of Reform in the polls.“[Farage] is quite clearly not an ally to our community and he’s expressed disdain in the past at the awards we’ve given out to people in the trans community. So it is a worry as political momentum gains around there. But I think broadly, consumers in the UK are a bit more capable of thinking for themselves.”Mark Berryhill, the chief executive of equalpride, which publishes prominent US titles like Out and The Advocate, said some brands and agencies “may have been a little bit more cautious than they have been in the past”. However, he said it had so far meant deals had taken longer to be completed, in a tough economic climate.He said the political headwinds made it more important to highlight that working with such titles was simply a sound business decision. “We’ve tried to do a better job in this political climate of just selling the importance of our buying power,” he said. “Everybody’s cautious and I don’t think it’s just LGBTQ. I think they’re cautious in general right now with their work with minority owned companies.“The one thing that maybe this whole controversy has helped us with a little bit is to really make brands realise it’s a business decision. It’s not just a charity or something you should do because you feel guilty.“You should do it because it’s the right thing to support LGBTQ journalism. We’re small. We need to get the word out. We have important stories to tell. But it’s also a good business decision. The more we show that side, certain brands will come along.” More

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      More than 500 workers at Voice of America and other broadcasters to be laid off

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      The agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded international broadcasters is eliminating jobs for more than 500 employees, a Trump administration official said. The move could ratchet up a months-long legal challenge over the news outlets’ fate.Kari Lake, acting CEO of the US Agency for Global Media, announced the latest round of job cuts late Friday, one day after a federal judge blocked her from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA director.US district judge Royce Lamberth had ruled separately that the Republican administration had failed to show how it was complying with his orders to restore VOA’s operations. His order Monday gave the administration “one final opportunity, short of a contempt trial” to demonstrate its compliance. He ordered Lake to sit for a deposition by lawyers for agency employees by 15 September.On Thursday, Lamberth said Abramowitz could not be removed without the approval of the majority of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Firing Abramowitz would be “plainly contrary to law”, according to Lamberth, who was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan.Lake posted a statement on social media that said her agency had initiated a reduction in force, or RIF, eliminating 532 jobs for full-time government employees. She said the agency “will continue to fulfill its statutory mission after this RIF– and will likely improve its ability to function”.“I look forward to taking additional steps in the coming months to improve the functioning of a very broken agency and make sure America’s voice is heard abroad where it matters most,” she wrote.A group of agency employees who sued to block VOA’s elimination said Lake’s move would give their colleagues 30 days until their pay and benefits end.“We find Lake’s continued attacks on our agency abhorrent,” they said in a statement. “We are looking forward to her deposition to hear whether her plan to dismantle VOA was done with the rigorous review process that Congress requires. So far we have not seen any evidence of that.”They added: “We will continue to fight for what we believe to be our rights under the law.”In June, layoff notices were sent to more than 600 agency employees. Abramowitz was placed on administrative leave along with almost the entire VOA staff. He was told he would be fired effective 31 August.The administration said in a court filing Thursday that it planned to send RIF notices to 486 employees of VOA and 46 other agency employees but intended to retain 158 agency employees and 108 VOA employees. The filing said the global media agency had 137 “active employees” and 62 other employees on administrative leave while VOA had 86 active employees and 512 others on administrative leave.The agency also houses Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Martí, which beams Spanish-language news into Cuba. The networks, which together reach an estimated 427 million people, date to the cold war and are part of a network of government-funded organizations trying to extend US influence and combat authoritarianism.In March, Abramowitz warned that Trump’s attempts to dismantle the VOA would be a “self-inflicted blow” to American national security, saying: “If America pulls off the playing field and cedes it to our adversaries, then they’re going to be telling the narratives that people around the world are going to be hearing, and that can’t be good for America … They’re going to be hearing an anti-America narrative. We need to fight that with truth.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe added: “The major challenge for the United States in general is this global information war in which countries like China and Russia are essentially really having our lunch. … So, I really feel that we need an organization that is accurate, unbiased, objective, and that tells the truth about America to the rest of the world in the languages that they understand.”This week, Trump also moved to remove union protections from a handful of federal employees, including those from the VOA.In response, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest trade union of public employees, said: “AFSCME members who fulfill the Congressionally mandated mission to broadcast Voice of America around the globe shine the beacon of freedom on the most oppressive of regimes. Now, because they have been fighting to keep Voice of America’s mission alive, their own voice on the job has been stripped from them. AFSCME will fight this illegal action in court.”Earlier this year, foreign staff at US-backed media outlets voiced concerns over their safety following Trump’s shuttering of the global media agencies.Speaking to the Guardian in March, Jaewoo Park, a journalist for Radio Free Asia, said: “We have many co-workers in different services, several of whom came here and sought asylum visas. If their own government knew they worked for RFA [Radio Free Asia] and they went back to their own country, their lives would be at risk.”“Authoritarian governments have praised what Trump is doing right now … In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, there were people who fought for freedom and democracy, and they came to work at RFA. It’s very risky for them. Their lives are in danger if Radio Free Asia doesn’t exist,” he added. More