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      Behind One New York Times Pulitzer: Hundreds of Journalists

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      When The New York Times was honored with the prestigious prize in the category of public service for its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, it reflected the contributions of the entire newsroom.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.This month, from a steep red staircase overlooking The New York Times’s newsroom, Dean Baquet, the executive editor, announced that the staff had won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the coronavirus.The Times, which has received 132 Pulitzers since they were first awarded in 1917, has won in the public service category, regarded as the most prestigious of the prizes, six times. Wesley Morris, a Times critic at large, also received a Pulitzer, his second, for criticism for his writing on the intersection of race and culture in America.The Pulitzer board recognized several facets of the coronavirus coverage. The Times reported early on the outbreak in China in January 2020. Tracked cases across the nation and the world through an intensive data project. Relayed developments 24 hours a day. Reported on the race to understand the virus and the failure of governments to respond. Documented racial and social inequities of the pandemic. Provided vivid accounts of suffering worldwide. And observed the monumental death toll.That coverage encompassed not just articles but graphics, video, data journalism, design, photography and podcasting. The effort drew upon the full resources of the newsroom, with many staff members putting themselves at personal risk and others taking on new roles to meet the demands of the coverage or provide support. And all of it was executed with nearly all employees working remotely and as The Times also covered the nation’s racial unrest, the impact of climate change and a tumultuous presidential campaign and election.Speaking to employees, many of whom were watching the livestreamed awards ceremony at home, Mr. Baquet, along with other newsroom leaders, reflected on what it meant to be honored at this time.“I just want to pause for a moment on the full power of these prizes and what they say about what you accomplished in a year when many of you suffered from your own loss and disruption,” he said. “Literally, hundreds of people had a hand in this coverage.”A key component of the coverage was a tracking project that compiled virus data on a variety of measures. The Times released the data, which has been used by medical researchers and government officials.More than 100 people from across the newsroom, as well as 50 freelancers and students, have worked on the tracking effort. Reporters and researchers filed more than 700 public records requests for data on populations like nursing homes and prisons. Engineers created a database to manage hundreds of data sources.The team has now published more than 3,000 daily tracking pages, covering subjects that include country, state and county trends, reopenings and vaccinations.“It was easily the largest and probably the most ambitious data project our newsroom has ever taken on,” Archie Tse, the graphics director, said.At the same time, the National desk helped reveal the disproportionate toll that the virus took on people of color. And when the overall U.S. death toll reached 100,000 people, a team of journalists marked the staggering figure with a front page consisting of victims’ names and biographical details.“We strove every day not to be so focused on the numbers that we forgot the people behind them,” said Marc Lacey, an assistant managing editor and the former National editor.On the Health and Science desk, journalists followed the efforts to explain how the virus spread, its effect on the body and the development of a vaccine. Members of the desk edited more than 1,100 online articles on the virus and assisted other journalists in the newsroom on hundreds more.“We covered Ebola and Zika, but none of us had ever experienced such a ravenous hunger for science news,” said Celia Dugger, the Health and Science editor.Some of the earliest work began with the International desk, which reported from the front lines in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak first emerged, then charted the failures in Italy and later examined the impact of the virus all over the world.The desk also was instrumental in the live briefing on the virus, a constantly updated news feed that would go on to involve multiple departments in the newsroom and that remains a staple of the coverage, more than 500 days later. Chris Buckley, a Times correspondent previously based in China, was on a train on his way to cover the lockdown in Wuhan in January 2020 when his editor called him and asked him to start writing for the live briefing. At the time, Mr. Buckley was skeptical: “Live briefing? About this story? From a train? So, that call was one of those reminders that sometimes our editors are actually right,” he said, joking.“Since then our coverage of Covid has never stopped.”Many of the leaders and staff members who played critical roles in the two Pulitzer Prizes this year gathered for the ceremony.Damon Winter/The New York Times More

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      Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is key source for media he ‘hates’, columnist says

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      Tucker Carlson of Fox News is a “go-to source” for the US political media he claims to “hate” and has called “cowards” and “cringing animals not worthy of respect” – according to a columnist for the New York Times.Ben Smith, a former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, outed Carlson as “the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J Trump and for coverage of the internal politics of Fox News (not to mention stories about Mr Carlson himself)”.Carlson has become a star of the pro-Trump right – even figuring in polls regarding the next Republican presidential nomination, although he told a podcast last week he will not run – and a hate figure on the US left.Referring to Carlson’s role stoking culture wars over Covid-19, Smith wrote that he dodged the question of whether he has been vaccinated himself.Carlson reportedly replied: “When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position? … We can trade intimate details.”Smith wrote: “Then we argued back and forth about vaccines and he ended the conversation with a friendly invitation to return to his show.”Smith also quoted a leading recycler of Washington gossip, Michael Wolff, who has written two Trumpworld tell-alls and last week announced a third.“In Trump’s Washington, Tucker Carlson is a primary supersecret source,” Smith quoted Wolff as writing in a new book of essays. “I know this because I know what he has told me, and I can track his exquisite, too-good-not-to-be-true gossip through unsourced reports and as it often emerges into accepted wisdom.”Smith also quoted a heavily trailed book by Michael Bender, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, entitled Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost.According to Smith, Bender recounts a call between Trump and Carlson after the first debate last year, when Trump interrupted and hectored Joe Biden. Carlson is shown letting Trump go to voicemail, then telling him he did not do a good job onstage.“Mr Bender declined to comment on the sourcing that allowed him to so precisely reconstruct a conversation only two people were privy to,” Smith wrote.According to publicity material, Bender spoke to Trump. So have many other authors. Jonathan Karl of ABC News, author of Front Row at the Trump Show, told Axios on Monday: “If you thought there was no more to know, it’s been mind-blowing.”Brian Stelter of CNN, author of Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of the Truth, told Smith “you can see Tucker’s fingerprints all over the hardcover”.But in a week when Carlson pushed conspiracy theories about the 6 January attack on the Capitol, Stelter told Smith they had not spoken for his paperback.Carlson called mainstream US reporters “animals” and “cowards” in April.“I just can’t overstate how disgusted I am,” he told Outkick, “not simply by the details of the lying of the medium, but disgusted by the emphasis. The media is basically Praetorian Guard for the ruling class … I really hate them for it, I’ll be honest.”Detailing the collapse of Times and Politico stories critical of Carlson under attack from the host, Smith compared Carlson to Trump and Joe McCarthy. The senator from Wisconsin fueled anti-communist hysteria in the 1950s and was recently the subject of a biography entitled Demagogue.Carlson told Smith: “I don’t know any gossip.”But Smith said he spoke to 16 journalists from publications other than the Times.One “reporter for a prominent publication who speaks to Mr Carlson regularly” said: “It’s so unknown in the general public how much he plays both sides.”Another said: “If you open yourself up as a resource to mainstream media reporters, you don’t even have to ask them to go soft on you.”Smith said he would not reveal the contents of his own off-record chats with Carlson. More

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      Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Seized Records of Democrats

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      The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.WASHINGTON — As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had subpoenaed.Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.Prosecutors also eventually secured subpoenas for reporters’ records to try to identify their confidential sources, a move that department policy allows only after all other avenues of inquiry are exhausted.The subpoenas remained secret until the Justice Department disclosed them in recent weeks to the news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN — revelations that set off criticism that the government was intruding on press freedoms.The gag orders and records seizures show how aggressively the Trump administration pursued the inquiries while Mr. Trump declared war on the news media and perceived enemies whom he routinely accused of disclosing damaging information about him, including Mr. Schiff and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom prosecutors focused on in the leak inquiry involving Times records.Former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly attacked Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who worked on leak investigations. “In combination with former President Trump’s unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Barr and a representative for Apple.As the years wore on, some officials argued in meetings that charges were becoming less realistic, former Justice Department officials said: They lacked strong evidence, and a jury might not care about information reported years earlier.The Trump administration also declassified some of the information, making it harder for prosecutors to argue that publishing it had harmed the United States. And the president’s attacks on Mr. Schiff and Mr. Comey would allow defense lawyers to argue that any charges were attempts to wield the power of law enforcement against Mr. Trump’s enemies.But Mr. Barr directed prosecutors to continue investigating, contending that the Justice Department’s National Security Division had allowed the cases to languish, according to three people briefed on the cases. Some cases had nothing to do with leaks about Mr. Trump and involved sensitive national security information, one of the people said. But Mr. Barr’s overall view of leaks led some people in the department to eventually see the inquiries as politically motivated.Mr. Schiff called the subpoenas for data on committee members and staff another example of Mr. Trump using the Justice Department as a “cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media.”“It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears,” Mr. Schiff said in a statement. “The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.”He said the department informed him in May that the investigation into his committee was closed. But he called on its independent inspector general to investigate the leak case and others that “suggest the weaponization of law enforcement,” an appeal joined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Early Hunt for LeaksSoon after Mr. Trump took office in 2017, press reports based on sensitive or classified intelligence threw the White House into chaos. They detailed conversations between the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time and Mr. Trump’s top aides, the president’s pressuring of the F.B.I. and other matters related to the Russia investigation.The White House was adamant that the sources be found and prosecuted, and the Justice Department began a broad look at national security officials from the Obama administration, according to five people briefed on the inquiry.While most officials were ruled out, investigators opened cases that focused on Mr. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, the people said. Prosecutors also began to scrutinize the House Intelligence Committee, including Mr. Schiff, as a potential source of the leaks. As the House’s chief intelligence oversight body, the committee has regular access to sensitive government secrets.Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in 2017.Al Drago/The New York TimesJustice Department National Security Division officials briefed the deputy attorney general’s office nearly every other week on the investigations, three former department officials said.In 2017 and 2018, a grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider for the records of the people associated with the Intelligence Committee. They learned about most of the subpoenas last month, when Apple informed them that their records had been shared but did not detail the extent of the request, committee officials said. A second service provider had notified one member of the committee’s staff about such a request last year.It was not clear why family members or children were involved, but the investigators could have sought the accounts because they were linked or on the theory that parents were using their children’s phones or computers to hide contacts with journalists.There do not appear to have been similar grand jury subpoenas for records of members or staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to another official familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a question about whether they were issued subpoenas. The Justice Department has declined to tell Democrats on the committee whether any Republicans were investigated.Apple turned over only metadata and account information, not photos, emails or other content, according to the person familiar with the inquiry.After the records provided no proof of leaks, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington discussed ending that piece of their investigation. But Mr. Barr’s decision to bring in an outside prosecutor helped keep the case alive.A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.Revived CasesIn February 2020, Mr. Barr placed the prosecutor from New Jersey, Osmar Benvenuto, into the National Security Division. His background was in gang and health care fraud prosecutions.Through a Justice Department spokesman, Mr. Benvenuto declined to comment.Mr. Benvenuto’s appointment was in keeping with Mr. Barr’s desire to keep matters of great interest to the White House in the hands of a small circle of trusted aides and officials.William P. Barr brought a trusted prosecutor in from New Jersey to help investigate leak cases.Al Drago for The New York TimesWith Mr. Benvenuto involved in the leak inquiries, the F.B.I. questioned Michael Bahar, a former House Intelligence Committee staff member who had gone into private practice in May 2017. The interview, conducted in late spring of 2020, did not yield evidence that led to charges.Prosecutors also redoubled efforts to find out who had leaked material related to Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Details about conversations he had in late 2016 with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, appeared in news reports in early 2017 and eventually helped prompt both his ouster and federal charges against him. The discussions had also been considered highly classified because the F.B.I. had used a court-authorized secret wiretap of Mr. Kislyak to monitor them.But John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and close ally of Mr. Trump’s, seemed to damage the leak inquiry in May 2020, when he declassified transcripts of the calls. The authorized disclosure would have made it more difficult for prosecutors to argue that the news stories had hurt national security.Separately, one of the prosecutors whom Mr. Barr had directed to re-examine the F.B.I.’s criminal case against Mr. Flynn interviewed at least one law enforcement official in the leak investigation after the transcripts were declassified, a move that a person familiar with the matter labeled politically fraught.The biweekly updates on the leak investigations between top officials continued. Julie Edelstein, the deputy chief of counterintelligence and export control, and Matt Blue, the head of the department’s counterterrorism section, briefed John C. Demers, the head of the National Security Division, and Seth DuCharme, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, on their progress. Mr. Benvenuto was involved in briefings with Mr. Barr.Mr. Demers, Ms. Edelstein, Mr. Blue and Mr. Benvenuto are still at the Justice Department. Their continued presence and leadership roles would seem to ensure that Mr. Biden’s appointees, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, would have a full understanding of the investigations. More

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      U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs

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      A push by prosecutors to secretly seize data about four Times reporters’ emails began in the Trump administration and continued under Biden.WASHINGTON — In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.The disclosure came two days after the Biden Justice Department notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017. That notification followed similar disclosures in recent weeks about seizing communications records of reporters at The Washington Post and CNN.Mr. Baquet condemned both the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, portraying the effort as an assault on the First Amendment.“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Mr. Baquet said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”There was no precedent, Mr. McCraw said, for the government to impose a gag order on New York Times personnel as part of a leak investigation. He also said there was no precedent for the government to seize the Times’s phone records without advance notification of the effort.A Google spokeswoman said that while it does not comment on specific cases, the company is “firmly committed to protecting our customers’ data and we have a long history of pushing to notify our customers about any legal requests.”Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”He added: “The department strongly values a free and independent press, and is committed to upholding the First Amendment.”Last month, Mr. Biden said he would not permit the Justice Department during his administration to seize communications logs that could reveal reporters’ sources, calling the practice “simply, simply wrong.” (Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department had gone after such data in several leak investigations.)The letter this week disclosing the seizure of phone records involving the Times reporters — Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt — had hinted at the existence of the separate fight over data that would show whom they had been in contact with over email.The letters said the government had also acquired a court order to seize logs of their emails, but “no records were obtained,” providing no further details. But with the lifting of the gag order, Mr. McCraw said he had been freed to explain what had happened.Prosecutors in the office of the United States attorney in Washington had obtained a sealed court order from a magistrate judge on Jan. 5 requiring Google to secretly turn over the information. But Google resisted, apparently demanding that the Times be told, as its contract with the company requires.The Justice Department continued to press the request after the Biden administration took over, but in early March prosecutors relented and asked a judge to permit telling Mr. McCraw. But the disclosure to him came with a nondisclosure order preventing him from talking about it to other people.Mr. McCraw said it was “stunning” to receive an email from Google telling him what was going on. At first, he said, he did not know who the prosecutor was, and because the matter was sealed, there were no court documents he could access about it.The next day, Mr. McCraw said, he was told the name of the prosecutor — a career assistant United States attorney in Washington, Tejpal Chawla — and opened negotiations with him. Eventually, Mr. Chawla agreed to ask the judge to modify the gag order so Mr. McCraw could discuss the matter with the Times’s general counsel and the company’s outside lawyers, and then with two senior Times executives: A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, and Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive.“We made clear that we intended to go to court to challenge the order if it was not withdrawn,” Mr. McCraw said. Then, on June 2, he said, the Justice Department told him it would ask the court to quash the order to Google at the same time that it disclosed the earlier phone records seizure, which he had not known about.He described the position he was in as “untenable,” especially when it came to talking with Times reporters about chatter involving some kind of fight involving Google and a leak investigation related to The Times.The Justice Department has not said what leak it was investigating, but the identity of the four reporters who were targeted and the date range of the communications sought strongly suggested that it centered on classified information in an April 2017 article about how James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential campaign.The article included discussion of an email or memo by a Democratic operative that Russian hackers had stolen, but that was not among the tranche that intelligence officials say Russia provided to WikiLeaks for public disclosure as part of its hack-and-dump operation to manipulate the election.The American government found out about the memo, which was said to express confidence that the attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch, would not let an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server go too far. Mr. Comey was said to worry that if Ms. Lynch made and announced the decision not to charge Ms. Clinton, Russia would put out the memo to make it seem illegitimate, leading to his unorthodox decision to announce that the F.B.I. was recommending against charges in the matter.The Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump, who fired Mr. Comey and considered him an enemy, sought for years to see whether it could find evidence sufficient to charge him with the crime of making unauthorized disclosures of classified information — a push that eventually came to focus on whether he had anything to do with The Times learning about the existence of the document Russian hackers had stolen.The long-running leak investigation into Mr. Comey was seen inside of the Justice Department as one of the most politicized and contentious, even by the standards of a department that had been prevailed upon in several instances to use leak investigations and other policies concerning book publication to attack former officials who criticized Mr. Trump.Throughout last year, prosecutors talked about whether or not to close the leak investigation into Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the case, in part because there seemed to be little evidence to show that the former FBI director had shared classified information with the press.Last fall, department officials discussed whether the investigation had run its course and prosecutors should draft a declination memo that would explain why Mr. Comey would not be prosecuted, one of the people said. But the F.B.I. and the career prosecutors working on the case wanted to keep the investigation open, the people said, and in January prosecutors obtained a special court order to require Google to turn over data on the reporters’ emails.With Mr. Trump soon to be out of office, the order was controversial among some inside of the department, according to two people with knowledge of the case. It was seen as unusually aggressive for a case that would likely end in no charges. During the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo that the case should be closed, according to a person familiar with the transition.In the court filings seeking to compel Google to turn over logs of who was communicating with the four reporters who wrote that story, the Justice Department persuaded the judge that the secrecy was justified because, as the judge wrote on Jan. 5, “there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of this order will seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation, including by giving targets an opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence.”The Jan. 5 document does not acknowledge that the existence of the leak investigation into Mr. Comey and its subject matter was by then already known, because The Times had reported on it almost a year earlier. It is not clear whether the Justice Department told the judge about that article, or instead suggested that the inquiry was still a well-kept secret. More

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      Trump justice department secretly obtained New York Times reporters’ phone records, paper says

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      The justice department under Donald Trump secretly obtained the phone records of four New York Times reporters as part of a leak investigation, the newspaper has reported.The case announced on Wednesday is the third instance in the past month in which a news media organisation has disclosed that federal authorities seized the records of its journalists in an effort to identify sources for national security stories published during Trump’s administration.President Joe Biden has said he would not allow the department to continue the practice of obtaining reporters’ records, calling it “simply, simply wrong”.A department spokesman, Anthony Coley, said it notified the four reporters on Wednesday that it had obtained their phone toll records last year and that it had sought to obtain non-content email records as part of “a criminal investigation into the unauthorised disclosure of classified information”.The newspaper said the records that were seized covered a nearly four-month period in 2017 and belonged to reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S Schmidt. Lichtblau has since left the newspaper.The journalists are neither the subjects nor the targets of the investigation, Coley said.Coley added: “Forthcoming annual public reports from the department covering 2019 and 2020 will indicate that members of the news media have now been notified in every instance in this period in which their records were sought or obtained in such circumstances.”The department did not disclose which article it was investigating, according to the newspaper.The period covered by the phone record seizure encompasses an April 2017 story from the four journalists that described the decision-making of then-FBI director James Comey during the conclusion of the Hillary Clinton email investigation, and that referenced a classified document obtained by Russian hackers.Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, said in a statement published by the newspaper that seizing reporters’ phone records “profoundly undermines press freedom”.“It threatens to silence the sources we depend on to provide the public with essential information about what the government is doing,” Baquet said.The Washington Post disclosed last month that the justice department had last year obtained phone records belonging to three of its journalists who covered the investigation into 2016 Russian election interference. CNN later revealed that the department had seized phone records of its Pentagon correspondent, Barbara Starr.After those disclosures, Biden told a reporter he would not allow the department to persist in obtaining reporter phone records. That would mark a break from Democratic and Republican predecessors alike, whose administrations have seized reporter call logs in an effort to identify sources of classified information.The justice department under former attorney-general Eric Holder announced revised guidelines for leak investigations, requiring additional levels of review before a journalist could be subpoenaed – though it did not end the practice.Jeff Sessions, who served as Trump’s first attorney-general, announced in 2017 an aggressive government crackdown on leaks. More

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      How Four Years Shaped Girls’ Political Views

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      After Hillary Clinton’s loss and a tumultuous presidency, I reconnected with teens I had interviewed to get their sense of the world.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.In 2016, shortly before the presidential election, I interviewed teenage girls about how the campaign had affected them. Based on polls, it seemed as if the United States was about to elect its first female president, after a race that had been riddled with sexist insults.I followed up with them four years later, just after the 2020 election. We wanted to see how this tumultuous period had shaped them, because political science research shows that what people experience politically during their transition to adulthood often influences how they vote for a lifetime.It was challenging to find the girls again, because most didn’t live at home anymore and many were living in temporary locations during the pandemic. The first time, I had interviewed teenage girls at two high schools in Oregon — one in liberal Portland and another in conservative Moro. This year, all the young women from Portland agreed to talk with me again, but only one from Moro did.What I saw in them reflected the mixed message that girls frequently receive from society, something that has come up in other work I’ve done in my role writing about gender issues. Girls are told that they can become anything they want — they sign up for robotics clubs and sports teams and school government. But as young adults, they learn a more complicated message: More doors are open to women, but sexism, of all kinds, remains rampant.When I started covering gender for The Upshot, a team at The New York Times that examines politics and policy issues, Susan Chira, an editor who had covered the topic earlier in her reporting career, told me that stories about women’s issues must be retold again and again. Every new generation of young women faces the same issues as they start careers and families and come to terms with sexism and harassment, she said.I’ve found this to be true, and it highlights how unfinished the work of feminism is, and how little has changed. But reporting on stories like this also shows clearly that there has been progress, too.When I reconnected with the young women this year, they had all voted in their first presidential election and were well-informed on policy discussions. Some had become jaded about the ability of government to fix problems. They had been exposed to more sexism, and the ways in which sexism and racism intersect, in their own lives and on the public stage. They were less idealistic than they had been in high school — one, Sarah Hamilton, 21, said the sexism she had observed had extinguished any goals she had of becoming a leader.This change was also evident in two national polls we did for this reporting project. Shortly before the 2016 election, 83 percent of teenage girls surveyed said a candidate’s gender made no difference in running for public office. But this year, 80 percent said women face sexism when they run, and only half thought men and women had an equal chance of being elected.Despite those findings, the young women I interviewed all had high aspirations — they wanted to become a novelist, an animal scientist and a basketball player. One, Ana Shepherd, 18, had decided to pursue politics as a direct result of what she saw the last four years. She was born in Mexico and felt she could help give immigrants a voice in policy.Their thoughts had been molded by the racial justice protests, by Trump administration policies, by Hillary Clinton’s loss and those of other women in the 2020 Democratic primaries. They spoke eloquently about the importance of representation in government and giving voice to people who had been marginalized. In high school, they had named role models like Beyoncé, the Kardashians and their school principal. Now they mentioned Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vice President Kamala Harris.Jordan Barrett, 19, was a supporter of Donald Trump in 2016 and the sole student from Moro who agreed to talk. The last four years, she said, have made her learn about perspectives other than those she grew up with, and think about issues like refugee policy and access to health care. She voted for Joe Biden.I partnered with Ruth Fremson, a Times photographer, on this project, and she shot portraits of the girls in 2016 and this year. The photographs reflected the changes in their awareness, ambitions and sense of identity that I observed in my interviews. In the more recent set of photos, the young women are more mature and composed but still bright-eyed.Returning to the group also brought up new topics I hadn’t expected to explore in my reporting, most notably about race. Every one of them mentioned race in their discussions about leadership and sexism — they saw these issues as interlinked.The young women, even the more conservative ones, had progressive views about diversity — something that young people of both parties share, surveys show. They demand that leadership reflects the people leaders represent. Whether it’s in politics, their jobs or their daily lives, they are going to bring these values to the forefront.Maybe I’ll try to catch up with them again in 2024. More

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      The Improvement Association, Chapter Five: ‘Democrat, Republican, White, Black, Green’

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      Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | RSSFrom the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.In this episode: The Bladen Improvement PAC’s power is threatened when an unlikely candidate enters the race for county commissioner. People outside the PAC are starting to make clear that they have their own ideas about how to build Black political power in the county.A view along Hwy. 87 in Bladen County.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More

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      The Improvement Association, Chapter Three: The Ballad of the Nursing Home Ballots

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      Listen and follow The Improvement Association.Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherFrom the makers of Serial: The Improvement Association. In this five-part audio series, join the reporter Zoe Chace as she travels to Bladen County, N.C., to investigate the power of election fraud allegations — even when they’re not substantiated.In this episode, Zoe delves into one of the most serious allegations against the Bladen Improvement PAC: an accusation about stealing votes from vulnerable people that goes back 10 years. In trying to figure out if there is any truth in this particularly persistent rumor, Zoe comes to understand how and why election cheating allegations are so sticky.Camp Clearwater Campground in Bladen County.Jeremy M. Lange for The New York TimesBehind this series:Zoe Chace, the reporter for this series, has been a producer at This American Life since 2015. Before that, she was a reporter for NPR’s Planet Money team, as well as an NPR producer.Nancy Updike, the producer for this series, is a senior editor at This American Life and one of the founding producers of the show.Transcripts of each episode of The Improvement Association will be available by the next workday after an episode publishes.The Improvement Association was reported by Zoe Chace; produced by Nancy Updike, with help from Amy Pedulla; edited by Julie Snyder, Sarah Koenig, Neil Drumming and Ira Glass; editorial consulting by R.L. Nave and Tim Tyson; fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan; and sound design and mix by Phoebe Wang.The original score for The Improvement Association was written and performed by Kwame Brandt-Pierce.Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Julie Whitaker, Seth Lind, Julia Simon, Nora Keller, Emanuele Berry, Ndeye Thioubou, Alena Cerro and Lauren Jackson. More