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      The Trump Books Are Coming. Cue the War of the Excerpts.

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      As a handful of authors compete to recount President Donald J. Trump’s last year in office, Twitter is strewn with vividly reported snapshots of a monumental year in American history.WASHINGTON — The capital was just beginning to quiet down for the summer when the buzz over the books began: Several seeking to explain the final year of Donald J. Trump’s presidency are landing so closely together over the next month that publishers have hastily changed publication days to avoid mid-scoop collisions.It’s enough to give an author nightmares.“I literally just wake up every day waiting to find out that someone else has jumped in front of us, and some book that I had no idea was coming is going to be announced,” Michael C. Bender, the author of “Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost,” said in an interview.Really, it is not the most unfounded fear. Mr. Bender is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. “Frankly,” his first book, will be published on July 13. But he fast-tracked its publication, originally slated for August, after his publisher snooped on Amazon and uncovered the release dates of two other Trump-related books this summer: “Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency,” by Michael Wolff, and “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year,” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters at The Washington Post.What has ensued is a war of excerpts among writers who are realizing their juiciest material may not hold. Twitter is now strewn with the most unsettling moments from Mr. Trump’s last year in office. Vividly reported snapshots of a monumental year in American history are proliferating like cicada shells on city pavement.Mr. Bender’s book, in excerpts shared with CNN, Vanity Fair, Axios, The Daily Mail and others, lays bare the leadership failures of Mr. Trump and his team. “Frankly” is full of expletive-laden interactions, including one particularly colorful exchange between Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Mr. Trump’s immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, over the protests that roiled the country last summer.The drip-drip of material is the extreme version of a commonplace promotion strategy, intended to get Mr. Bender, a lesser-known writer than some of his competitors, maximum publicity. But others seeking to claim their territory are aggressively following suit: Jonathan Karl of ABC News, whose book does not come out until later this year, published his own excerpt in recent days in The Atlantic.David Kuhn, a literary agent at Aevitas Creative Management, said the cascade of Trump books could end up “cannibalizing each other.”“There’s so many different planets that have to align for a book to truly break out,” he said.But the reporters are betting frequent promotion in a crowded market will improve their fortunes.An excerpt from Michael Wolff’s “Landslide,” which will be published on July 27, is the cover story for New York magazine, and outlines a scene in which Mr. Trump told his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he “didn’t mean it literally” that his supporters should march to the Capitol on Jan. 6.And more details of Mr. Trump’s illness from the coronavirus were shared before the publication on Tuesday of “Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History,” by Damian Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, journalists for The Post.Mr. Trump has invited some of the authors of books on his presidency to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., more than once.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesIn their book, Mr. Paletta and Ms. Abutaleb present gripping evidence that Mr. Trump received a strong cocktail of drugs — “Trump’s doctors threw everything they could at the virus all at once,” they write. Robert R. Redfield, then the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had prayed that a serious bout with the coronavirus would change Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic. It did not.“Nightmare Scenario” is focused on the federal government’s handling of the coronavirus — Ms. Abutaleb and Mr. Paletta do not examine the events of Jan. 6, for instance, and they did not interview Mr. Trump. Still, so many reporters covering the same material at the same time made for a crowded reporting process.“We definitely would hear from sources that they had gotten calls from other reporters,” Mr. Paletta said in an interview. “That was quite intimidating for us.”Some of the more decorated reporters in Washington’s press corps have chosen silence as a strategy as they complete books scheduled to be published this year.Little is known about when Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of The Washington Post may publish their book on Mr. Trump’s final days, but the best guess from agents and authors alike is that it will be in September. (Neither author replied to requests for comment.)The list of summer releases does not include titles coming next year from reporters for The New York Times. Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, is working on a definitive account of the Trump presidency with his wife, Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. Maggie Haberman, a former Trump White House reporter and current Washington correspondent for The Times, is also working on a book about Mr. Trump. Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, national political correspondents, are writing a book on the presidential race between Mr. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr., and Jeremy Peters, who covers the Republican Party for The Times, is working on a book that assesses the G.O.P.’s attempts to wrangle Mr. Trump.Mark Leibovich, a political correspondent for The Times, is working on a sequel to “This Town,” a book on Washington culture, that will touch on the Trump era.At the center of the publishing frenzy is the subject himself. Aware of the barrage of books about his presidency and lacking a book deal that could give his grievances another formal platform, Mr. Trump has tried a charm offensive. He has invited some writers to Mar-a-Lago, his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., more than once, serving them steak and seating them in his estate’s great room, where the visiting journalists can be part of the political pageant that happens there each night.Mr. Trump, who keenly understands his own place in the news media ecosystem, has turned down only a few interview requests, including one from Mr. Woodward. Mr. Woodward’s 2020 book, “Rage,” included several interviews with Mr. Trump, who told Mr. Woodward he had downplayed the threat of the coronavirus pandemic.But Mr. Trump has quizzed other visiting journalists on the people they are talking to, the questions they are going to ask and the stories they plan to tell about his presidency.“We were really surprised by how much time he spent talking to us,” Mr. Rucker said. “And by, frankly, how interested he was in our book and the subjects we were covering. He very much wanted to be a part of trying to shape the historical narrative of his presidency.”(Given Mr. Trump’s history with reading books — he does not read them — Mr. Rucker does not expect that the former president will provide a full review.)As Mr. Bender readied another excerpt for publication — this time detailing the long-running animosity that existed between Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s counselor, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — he said Tuesday evening that the breakneck pace with which he has written and promoted his book mirrored the hectic nature of four years on the Trump beat.“When this is all done I want to ask my publisher how this is supposed to work,” Mr. Bender said. “Nothing about this has felt normal. Which is kind of the experience of covering Donald Trump in a nutshell.” More

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      An Accusation Blew Up a Campaign. The Media Didn’t Know What to Do.

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      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More

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      in Elections

      As Scott Stringer's Campaign Reeled, the Media Was Confounded

      by

      Handling a delicate allegation of sexual misconduct is a lot more challenging than covering a horse race.Two days after coming in fifth in the election night count of votes for New York mayor last week, Scott Stringer was sitting in a high-polish diner in TriBeCa, drinking his second bottle of Sprite and trying to figure out what had happened.He held up his iPhone to show me a text message he had received on Election Day from one of the progressive elected officials who had endorsed him and then dropped him after a woman accused him of sexually assaulting her more than 20 years ago. In the text was a photograph of the official’s ranked-choice ballot. Mr. Stringer was ranked first.“This profile in courage,” he began, half laughing. “You can’t make this up. Who does that?”Mr. Stringer, the 61-year-old New York City comptroller, isn’t the only one trying to puzzle out what happened over a few days in April in the campaign. Mr. Stringer, a geeky fixture in Manhattan politics, had been among the leading candidates when the woman, Jean Kim, accused him of touching her without her consent in the back of taxis. Suddenly he, the media covering him, his supporters and Ms. Kim were all reckoning with big questions of truth, doubt, politics and corroboration.The allegations against Mr. Stringer did not divide a nation, as Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations against Brett Kavanaugh did. Nor did his candidacy carry the kind of high national stakes that came with Tara Reade’s allegations against Joseph R. Biden Jr. last spring. But maybe for those reasons, Ms. Kim’s claim that Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001 offers an opportunity to ask how journalists, political actors and, most important, voters are supposed to weigh claims like Ms. Kim’s. They also raise the question of how and whether to draw a line between those claims and the ones that helped ignite the #MeToo movement.As much as the exposure of police brutality has been driven by cellphone video, the #MeToo movement was powered by investigative journalism, and courageous victims who chose to speak to reporters. The movement reached critical mass with articles by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey of The New York Times and Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker on the movie producer Harvey Weinstein, which the Pulitzer Prize committee described as “explosive” revelations of “long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing.” Those stories and other notable sets of revelations — about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, the sports doctor Larry Nassar, the singer R. Kelly, the comedian Bill Cosby — drew power from rigorous reporting that helped develop new standards for covering what had long been dismissed as “he said, she said.”Crucially, reporters honed the craft of corroboration, showing that an accuser had told a friend, a relative or a therapist at the time of the episode and that the accuser wasn’t simply relying on old memories. The reporters also looked for evidence that the accuser’s account was part of a pattern, ruling out a single misunderstanding.Those technical aspects of the stories weren’t always widely understood. But the landmark investigations were, even in this divided moment, unifying. There was no serious partisan division over any of those men’s guilt because the journalistic evidence was simply so overwhelming. But not every allegation — and not every true allegation — can meet that standard. Not every victim is able to talk about it immediately; not every bad act is part of a pattern.In the case of Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim, observers were left simply with his claim their relationship was consensual, and hers that it wasn’t. Ms. Kim’s lawyer had circulated a news release, which didn’t mention Ms. Kim, to reporters the evening of April 27.At her news conference on April 28, Patricia Pastor, Ms. Kim’s lawyer, read a statement based on Ms. Kim’s recollection, which didn’t include contemporaneous corroboration, which Ms. Kim said didn’t exist, or a suggestion of a pattern. And the lawyer angled the statement for maximum impact: The statement referred to Ms. Kim, for instance, as an “intern,” when she had been a 30-year-old volunteer. And Ms. Pastor claimed, incorrectly, that Ms. Kim had been introduced to Mr. Stringer by Eric Schneiderman, who was forced to resign as New York’s attorney general in 2018 after a report that he had physically abused at least four women.Mr. Stringer said he had a passing, consensual relationship with Ms. Kim and was stunned by her claims that they had never had a relationship. But he said that he understood why the media picked up the story, even if it hadn’t been corroborated.“Running for mayor, every part of your life is an open book,” he said. “I didn’t begrudge anybody, including The Times, from writing about the charge. That would be silly.”And victims, of course, have no obligation to tell their stories through skeptical journalists. Ms. Pastor pointed out in an interview that “once the story was out, you still have time” to report it out and check the facts, and said she and her client didn’t object to that fact-checking. The Times’s Katie Glueck did that on May 9 and found Ms. Kim and Mr. Stringer telling very different stories in the absence of definitive evidence.Jean Kim said Mr. Stringer assaulted her when she worked on his New York City public advocate campaign in 2001. He has denied her claim.Sarah Blesener for The New York TimesBut by then, the story had jumped out of journalists’ hands and into politicians’. Mr. Stringer had painstakingly assembled a coalition of young progressives, including a cadre of state senators who had partly defined their careers by pressing to extend the statute of limitations in cases of child sexual abuse and telling their own harrowing stories. In a video call the day after Ms. Kim’s news conference, they pressed Mr. Stringer to issue a statement suggesting he and Ms. Kim might have perceived their interaction differently.When he refused, and flatly denied the allegation, 10 progressive officials withdrew their endorsement.That decision got journalists off the hook. Most were covering a simple, political story now — a collapsing campaign — and not weighing or investigating a complex #MeToo allegation.The progressive website The Intercept (which had exposed a trumped-up sexual misconduct claim against a gay Democrat in Massachusetts last year) also looked into Ms. Kim’s accusations, calling former Stringer campaign aides, and found that a series of widely reported details from Ms. Pastor’s statement — though not Ms. Kim’s core allegations — were inaccurate. A longtime New York political hand who had known both Mr. Stringer and Ms. Kim at the time, Mike McGuire, also told me he’d been waiting to talk on the record about what he saw as factual errors in Ms. Kim’s lawyer’s account, but that I was only the second reporter to call him, after Ms. Glueck. Ms. Kim, meanwhile, had been open about her motives — she wanted voters to know about the allegation.It’s easy to blame the relative lack of curiosity about the underlying story on the cliché of a hollowed-out local press corps, but that’s not really true in this case. The New York mayor’s race received rich and often ambitious coverage, as good and varied as I’ve seen at least since 2001, often from newer outlets like Politico and The City. The winner of the vote’s first round, Eric Adams, saw reporters investigate his donors and peer into his refrigerator.In an article in Columbia Journalism Review, Andrea Gabor examined coverage of the race and found that the allegations had prompted news organizations to stop covering Mr. Stringer as a top-tier candidate. She suggested that reporters “recalibrate the judgments they make on how to cover candidates such as Stringer in their wake.”In May, Mr. Stringer’s aides told me they were in talks with some former endorsers to return, as well as with the progressive movement’s biggest star, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, when they learned of an allegation from another woman: that some 30 years ago, Mr. Stringer had sexually harassed her when she worked for him at a bar. The Times reported the account of the second woman, Teresa Logan, with corroboration. The next day, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Maya Wiley, who came in second after the in-person voting ended. She said that time was running out and that progressives had to unite, a suggestion that the second allegation had made up her mind.But when you get beyond the reporters gaming out winners and losers, and beyond politicians weighing endorsements, here’s the strange thing: It’s not clear there’s anything like a consensus among voters on how the decades-old allegations should have affected Mr. Stringer’s support. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York, for instance, has weathered far more recent claims from his own aides. And even two of the legislators who dropped their support of Mr. Stringer told me they were still wrestling with the decision and their roles and that of the media. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to signal a similar concern when, on Election Day, she revealed that she had ranked Mr. Stringer second on her ballot.State Senator Alessandra Biaggi said that the moment had been “incredibly painful” but that she’d begun to feel that “my integrity was being compromised” by staying with Mr. Stringer. She also said that if she were a New York City voter, she would have ranked Mr. Stringer among her top choices, and wished there was space for more nuance in public conversations about sexual misconduct allegations.Yuh-Line Niou, a state assemblywoman from Manhattan, told me she thought the media had unfairly “put a lot of pressure on women who are survivors to speak up,” an experience that had been “scary and in a lot of ways violent.” She said she would have backed Mr. Stringer if he’d acknowledged that he’d harmed Ms. Kim, and added that his denial revealed that he had come from “a time when people don’t talk about what it is to be human, that you have to be perfect somehow.”“I ranked him, of course,” she said. “We didn’t have many choices.”Another progressive who had dropped Mr. Stringer, Representative Jamaal Bowman, said two weeks after Ms. Kim’s allegations became public that “I sometimes regret it because I wasn’t more patient and didn’t ask more questions.”Ms. Kim’s lawyer, Ms. Pastor, said she’d been perplexed by the pained progressives. “You ought to stick to your guns,” she said.It can be hard to separate the entangled roles of media and political actors.“The same way it’s obvious that the media didn’t make Adams rise, it should be obvious that the media didn’t make Stringer fall,” the Daily News columnist and Daily Beast senior editor Harry Siegel told me. “The decision by his lefty endorsers to almost immediately walk away, and before the press had time to vet Kim’s claim, did that. Understanding that the press — and media columnists! — like to center themselves, this is a story about the Democratic Party and its factions more than it’s one about his coverage.”Mr. Stringer said that he was resolved not to relive the campaign, but that he was worried about a progressive movement setting a standard that it can’t meet.“When I think about the future, there’s a lot of progressives who under these scenarios can’t run for office,” he said.Before he headed back out onto Church Street, I asked him what he was going to do next.“Probably just run for governor,” he said, at least half seriously. More

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      Behind One New York Times Pulitzer: Hundreds of Journalists

      by

      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 Intensifies Its Pro-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

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      Donna Brazile, a Democratic analyst, has left the Murdoch-owned network as some hosts and journalists who questioned Donald Trump have exited or been sidelined.Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump. More

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      Fox News Files to Dismiss Dominion's Lawsuit Over 2020 Election Coverage

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      Fox News Media, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled cable group, filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against it in March by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that accused Fox News of propagating lies that ruined its reputation after the 2020 presidential election.The Dominion lawsuit and a similar defamation claim brought in February by another election company, Smartmatic, have been widely viewed as test cases in a growing legal effort to battle disinformation in the news media. And it is another byproduct of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless attempts to undermine President Biden’s clear victory.In a 61-page response filed in Delaware Superior Court, the Fox legal team argues that Dominion’s suit threatened the First Amendment powers of a news organization to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims in a high-stakes political contest.“A free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy,” Fox says in the motion, “especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts.” The motion adds: “The American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss.”Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News presented the circumstances in a different light.Dominion is among the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment and its technology was used by more than two dozen states last year. Its lawsuit described the Fox News and Fox Business cable networks as active participants in spreading a false claim, pushed by Mr. Trump’s allies, that the company had covertly modified vote counts to manipulate results in favor of Mr. Biden. Lawyers for Mr. Trump shared those claims during televised interviews on Fox programs.“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” The lawsuit cites instances where Fox hosts, including Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, uncritically repeated false claims about Dominion made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.A representative for Dominion, whose founder and employees received threatening messages after the negative coverage, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.Fox News Media has retained two prominent lawyers to lead its defense: Charles Babcock, who has a background in media law, and Scott Keller, a former chief counsel to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Fox has also filed to dismiss the Smartmatic suit; that defense is being led by Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.“There are two sides to every story,” Mr. Babcock and Mr. Keller wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more.”The Fox motion on Tuesday argues that its networks “had a free-speech right to interview the president’s lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated.” It argues that the security of Dominion’s technology had been debated in prior legal claims and media coverage, and that the lawsuit did not meet the high legal standard of “actual malice,” a reckless disregard for the truth, on the part of Fox News and its hosts.Media organizations, in general, enjoy strong protections under the First Amendment. Defamation suits are a novel tactic in the battle over disinformation, but proponents say the strategy has shown some early results. The conservative news outlet Newsmax apologized last month after a Dominion employee, in a separate legal case, accused the network of spreading baseless rumors about his role in the election. Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” a day after Smartmatic sued Fox in February and named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant.Jonah E. Bromwich More

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      DeSantis Shuts Out Reporters as he Signs Florida Voting Restrictions Into Law

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      MIAMI — Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed new voting restrictions into law on Thursday that put him in line with other Republicans around the country — with a display of nose-thumbing contempt toward journalists that evoked former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. DeSantis’ brash style has made him stand out from other potential heirs to Mr. Trump’s populist legacy. But his actions are part of a national effort by Republicans to limit the use of popular ballot drop boxes, add identification requirements for voters requesting absentee ballots and do away with local laws that allow automatic registration for absentee voting.The next big move could happen in Texas, although the situation at the State Capitol in Austin is in flux. There is movement in virtually every state with a Republican-controlled legislature — including in Arizona, where G.O.P. lawmakers are conducting an audit of the November results, an exercise that has been plagued by lapses in basic security and accounting procedures.All of this comes in the wake of Mr. Trump’s loss, and his subsequent false claims that expansion of ballot access led to rampant voter fraud. Official audits of election results around the country, conducted by officials from both parties, found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.Mr. DeSantis enacted the legislation even after he had promoted Florida’s handling of the November elections. Mr. Trump won the state by three percentage points.The governor gave Fox News, his preferred major cable news outlet — and Mr. Trump’s — an exclusive to broadcast the bill signing ceremony from West Palm Beach on Thursday morning, in an event that resembled a campaign rally as much as an official act of state government.Supporters of Mr. DeSantis gathered inside a Hilton near the airport, donning DeSantis and Trump campaign gear. Before they entered, some people waved Trump-DeSantis and DeSantis 2024 banners, according to photos on social media shared by journalists locked outside the doors.“Right now, I have what we think is the strongest election integrity measures in the country,” a seated Mr. DeSantis told Fox as a rowdy crowd cheered behind him.Mr. DeSantis and his predecessors have been known to sign bills, especially controversial ones, in private. Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a lower-key politician who has kept Mr. Trump at a relative arm’s length, signed his state’s bill in a conference room in his office, as a Democratic state legislator knocked on the door, demanding to be let in.Giving exclusive access to a cable news network was unusual, if not unprecedented. A reporter from a local CBS station said it was supposed to carry the broadcast feed for other stations, a practice known as pooling, but was also not allowed inside.Florida is the latest state to pass voter restrictions as Republicans move to reverse gains made by Democrats in Georgia, Arizona and elsewhere. In Texas, Republicans in the legislature are brushing aside objections from corporate titans like Dell Technologies, Microsoft and American Airlines and moving on a vast election bill that would be among the most severe in the nation. It would impose new restrictions on early voting, ban drive-through voting, threaten election officials with harsher penalties and greatly empower partisan poll watchers. The main bill passed a key committee in a late-night session on Thursday, and could head to a full floor vote in the House as early as next week.Bills to restrict voting have also been moving through Republican-led legislatures in Arizona and Michigan. More