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      in US Politics

      Godfrey Hodgson obituary

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      The journalist and historian Godfrey Hodgson, who has died aged 86, was among the most perceptive and industrious observers of his generation, particularly in the field of American society and politics.His reputation was founded on his landmark study, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon (1976), acknowledged by the Cambridge historian Gary Gerstle as “one of the great works of political and social history written in the past half century”. At 600 pages long and in continuous print since its first publication, it was but one item in a prolific output that ran to more than 15 books, extensive university teaching and a lifetime of newspaper and television reporting (as well as numerous Guardian obituaries). As a journalist, Hodgson reckoned he had worked in 48 of the 50 US states.The central thesis of America in Our Time was that, from the end of the second world war until the mid-1960s, what Hodgson called a “liberal consensus” defined American politics. Conservatives accepted most of the New Deal domestic philosophy espoused by Democrats, and liberals mostly accepted the aggressive foreign policy advocated by Republicans to contain and defeat communism. In theory, the free enterprise system would create abundance at home, leaving America free to civilise the world. The term “liberal consensus” had been used before, but Hodgson was responsible for its entry into the lexicon of American history.Viewed from an age thrown into turmoil by Donald Trump, this analysis appears sadly optimistic. But it held sway as a key tenet in American academia for many years – a considerable achievement for a British writer in US scholarship. It was a measure of Hodgson’s intellectual honesty that in 2017 he could contribute to a collection of essays, The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered (edited by Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan), reflecting on the inadequacies of his earlier theory and analysing why the period had come to an end; the answers were mainly to do with race, Vietnam and the failure of US capitalism.Born in Horsham, now in West Sussex, Godfrey returned to the Yorkshire of his family roots at the age of three when his father, Arthur Hodgson, was appointed headteacher of Archbishop Holgate’s grammar school, York. Two tragedies overshadowed his childhood. At the age of two, he contracted osteomyelitis, a bone infection; when he was seven, it became clear that his mother, Jessica (nee Hill), was suffering from untreatable multiple sclerosis.The former left him with a disfigured right arm and an iron determination to succeed: one of his proudest achievements was later to bowl for the Winchester college first XI. The latter resulted in his being packed off to the Dragon school in Oxford at the age of nine, to shield him from his mother’s illness. He learned of her death in 1947 as a lonely 13-year-old far from home. Perhaps in part to compensate, he poured his considerable intellectual energies into study, winning scholarships to both Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a first in history in 1954.Hodgson’s introduction to the US came in the form of a copy of John Gunther’s classic study Inside USA, a gift from his father on his 14th birthday. He first encountered the real thing in 1955, when, aged 21, he sailed on the Queen Mary to take up a postgraduate scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There he worked in the college library, and wrote his MA thesis on the civil war – not the American one of Lincoln but the English one of Cromwell. He also discovered jazz, and the American south, a region for which he developed a special affection.Back in Britain, he learned his reporting skills on the Times before joining the Observer in 1960, initially to write the paper’s Mammon column. His great opportunity came two years later, when, aged 28, he returned to Washington as the Observer’s correspondent (1962-65), appointed by the editor, David Astor, as one of the gifted young men who would elevate his paper’s foreign coverage. This was a golden time to be a reporter in America and Hodgson loved it.He covered the push for civil rights in the south, witnessing the tense confrontations as the first black students were escorted into the universities of Mississippi and Alabama, and he was at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to hear Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Events just kept on coming: the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination and the complex presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who, even then, Hodgson rated more highly than the liberal commentariat of the day.Returning to London, he developed his coverage of America as a reporter on the ITV current affairs programme This Week (1965-67) and as editor of the Sunday Times Insight team (1967-71), during which time he co-wrote An American Melodrama (1969) with Bruce Page and Lewis Chester, the story of the 1968 election that brought Richard Nixon to the White House. He anchored LWT’s The London Programme (1976-81), was one of the four founding presenters of Channel 4 News (with Peter Sissons, Trevor McDonald and Sarah Hogg) from 1982 until 1985, and for two years from 1990 was foreign editor of the Independent. He was also a stalwart of Granada’s late-night What the Papers Say.He enjoyed showing that the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated with turkey and cranberry sauce – because there wasn’t anyFriends observed in the younger Hodgson a rumbling tension between his yearning for academic recognition and his enjoyment of the more material pleasures of journalism, a trade that suited his gregarious personality well. He was fortunate in being able to reconcile these conflicting needs as director of the Reuters Foundation (1992-2001), a post that combined mentoring bright young foreign reporters with a fellowship at Green Templeton College, Oxford. The move opened up a world of graduate teaching, both in Britain and the US, which he continued into his 80s.His Oxford appointment chimed well with the generosity he showed towards aspiring young colleagues. I experienced this personally as we travelled through the American south together in the summer of 1967, researching a television documentary on the civil rights movement. Each day would begin with a reading from the appropriate state guide of the Federal Writers’ Project, an inspiration of FDR’s New Deal, and continue as a free-flowing lecture often late into the evening.The same spirit inspired his involvement in starting up, with the journalist Ben Bradlee and the literary agent Felicity Bryan, the Laurence Stern fellowship. Since 1980 it has funded a three-month summer programme on the Washington Post for a young British reporter (Guardian beneficiaries of the scheme have included David Leigh, Gary Younge, Audrey Gillan, Jonathan Freedland and Ian Black); after the Covid-19 pandemic it will return as the Stern-Bryan fellowship.Hodgson’s later books ranged from biographies of the US statesmen Henry Stimson (The Colonel, 1990) and Edward House (Woodrow Wilson’s Right Hand, 2006) to critical studies of the rise of conservatism, including The World Turned Right Side Up (1996) and More Equal Than Others (2004). Always at his best when challenging conventional wisdoms, as in The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009), he enjoyed particularly showing in A Great and Godly Adventure (2006) that the first Thanksgiving was not celebrated with turkey and cranberry sauce – because there wasn’t any – and that the early American settlers did not see themselves as revolutionaries against the British crown.Following a serious fall in 2007, he nursed himself back to health by writing a delightful history of the local river near his West Oxfordshire home, Sweet Evenlode (2008). Above all, Hodgson could tell a good story.In 1958 he married Alice Vidal, and they had two sons, Pierre and Francis. They divorced in 1969, and the following year he married Hilary Lamb, with whom he had two daughters, Jessica and Laura. Hilary died in 2015, and he is survived by his children.• Godfrey Michael Talbot Hodgson, journalist and historian, born 1 February 1934; died 27 January 2021• John Shirley died in 2018 More

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      in Elections

      Can Trump do a Nixon and re-enter polite society? Elizabeth Drew doubts it

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      Asking if Donald Trump can rehabilitate himself in US public life as did a disgraced president before him, legendary Washington reporter Elizabeth Drew was not optimistic.“For all their similarities,” she wrote, “Nixon and Trump clearly are very different men. For one thing, Nixon was smart.”Drew, 85 and the author of the classic Washington Journal: Reporting Watergate and Richard Nixon’s Downfall, published her thoughts in the Washington Post.“Donald Trump and Richard Nixon both left Washington in helicopters and ignominy,” she wrote, “awash in financial problems and their customary self-pity.“Both were above-average paranoiacs who felt (with some justification) that the elites looked down on them and that enemies everywhere sought to undermine them; they despised the press, exploited racism for political purposes and used inept outside agents (the “plumbers,” Rudy Giuliani) to carry out their more nefarious plots.“Neither was inclined to let aides rein them in. Both faced impeachment for trying to manipulate the opposition party’s nomination contest. Both degraded the presidency. Both came unglued at the end.“But then, astonishingly, Nixon rehabilitated himself … [his] post-presidency was a quest to make himself respectable again and it worked … through wit, grit, wiliness and determination he wrought one of the greatest resurrections in American politics.“If he could do it, can Trump?”Her short answer? No.Impeached a second time, Trump now awaits trial in Florida, playing golf but keeping himself involved in Republican politics, making endorsements, sitting on $70m in campaign cash and entertaining thoughts of starting a new political party, if reportedly mostly as a way of revenging himself on Republicans who crossed him.Drew wrote of how after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, to avoid impeachment over the Watergate scandal, the 37th president went into exile in California. But she also cited his deep background in US politics and institutions – as a former congressman, senator and vice-president who “essentially understood the constitution and limits, even if he overreached at times” – and how, “interested in the substance of governing, he studied white papers and was conversant in most topics the government touched.”Drew also discussed the way Nixon set about re-entering public life, mostly as a sage voice on foreign policy, and eventually moved back east to become “the toast of New York” and, in 1979, one of Gallup’s “10 most admired people in the world”. Ruthlessly, she wrote, Nixon even managed to force his way back into the White House, visiting (under the cover of night) to counsel the young Bill Clinton.Trump, Drew wrote, “lacks discipline, intellectual rigour and the doggedness Nixon used to pull himself up from the bottom.”But on the day the solidly pro-Trump Arizona Republican party formally censured grandees Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake and Doug Ducey for daring to cross Trump, Drew also had a warning.“Trump has one advantage Nixon didn’t,” Drew wrote, “even after the assault on the Capitol this month: a large and fanatically devoted following.[embedded content]“According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released 15 January, 79% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still approved of his performance. Trump of course had the backing of many Fox News hosts, and … some still supported the Trump line about the 6 January attack on the Capitol (for example, that it was spawned by a leftwing group). There was no such thing as Fox in Nixon’s day.”Though Drew thought Trump unlikely to gain access to mainstream media, as Nixon famously did via interviews with David Frost, and has been suspended by Twitter and Facebook, she did note that he “still has the support of fringe networks like One America News and Newsmax”.“If Trump is canny enough and has the energy,” she wrote, “he will have already begun devising ways to heal his battered reputation with much of the public and, in particular, the Republican politicians who indulged him for years.“But unlike Nixon, Trump faces a paradox: how can he maintain the support of his rabble-rousing followers, particularly if he wants to run again in 2024 or simply remain a force in in the GOP, while building respectability among the broader public?” More

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      in US Politics

      'Democracy has prevailed': front pages across world hail Joe Biden's inauguration

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      Joe Biden’s declaration in his inauguration speech that democracy was the real winner of the presidential election has been used by many newspapers to mark his accession to the Oval Office.Along with several other titles, the Guardian employs a poster front page featuring a picture of the president making his speech on the steps of the Capitol alongside the headline: “Democracy has prevailed”.The New York Times chooses the same message with the headline “‘Democracy has prevailed’: Biden vows to mend nation” above a full-width picture of Biden and his wife Jill embracing.The normally typographically conservative Financial Times also goes with a huge picture of Biden and the same headline again: “democracy has prevailed”.The Scotsman’s front page is one picture of Biden and it splashes a longer excerpt of the same part of the new president’s speech. “Democracy is precious. Democracy is fragile. In this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed”.The Washington Post’s headline is “Biden: ‘Unity is the path’” above a photograph of the the 46th president taking the oath of office.The Telegraph headline is another choice quote from Biden – “End this uncivil war”, while the Times goes with “Time for unity”.The Mirror zeroes in on Biden’s opening lines with a “A day of history .. a day of hope”, and uses pictures of the president and his history-making female vice-president, Kamala Harris.The Mail hails a “new dawn for America” with pictures of Trump departing Washington and Biden and his wife, Jill, celebrating his inauguration. “Don’s gone … let’s go Joe!”, says the main headline.The i can’t resist a bit of rhyme either with its headline “Ready, steady, Joe!”The Express uses Biden’s “uncivil war” quote in one of its subheads but goes with a British angle and what the new president’s relationship with Boris Johnson might be like for its main headline: “Big moment for US and Britain”.Metro has opted to use Donald Trump’s words against him with the headline: “Now make American great again”.In Europe, El Mundo in Spain carries a picture of Biden and the headline “Joe Biden: ‘Hay mucho que sanar en EEUU’”, which roughly translates as “We have much to heal”.Bild, Europe’s biggest selling newspaper, has the headline “Comeback für Amerika”, while its more sober rival Suddeutsche Zeitung goes with “Zeitenwende in Amerika”, or “New era in America”.The South China Morning Post carries the Bidens, Harris and husband Doug Emhoff waving, underneath the headline: “World wakes up to new American leader”. More

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      in US Politics

      Kamala Harris and why politicians can’t resist Vogue (though it always ends in tears)

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      When Theresa May appeared in US Vogue in 2017, even her deliberately anodyne choice of a posh-end-of-the-high-street dress by British label LK Bennett did not prevent this newspaper calling the Annie Leibovitz shoot a “defining moment” which, “like Margaret Thatcher in the tank turret looking like a cross between Boudicca and Lawrence of Arabia … might easily become a signifier of all that is flawed in her prime ministerial style”. Michelle Obama’s bare upper arms appeared no fewer than three times on the cover of Vogue during her White House years, causing pearl-clutching uproar at the sight of her toned triceps.A political Vogue appearance is such a white-hot issue that it causes controversy even when it doesn’t happen. Donald Trump recently weighed in to complain about “elitist” Vogue having snubbed Melania, notable by her absence from the magazine over the past four years. Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris’s Vogue debut, in the February issue of the magazine’s US edition, is the latest in a long line of political covers to have caused a media storm. Sunday’s release on social media of the rather different newsstand and digital covers quickly fuelled a wave of criticism. Had Harris’s skin tone been “washed-out” by thoughtless or even culturally insensitive lighting? Was it disrespectful, on the newsstand cover, to present Harris wearing her battered Converse trainers, rather than giving her a stately makeover? Was Harris’s team led to believe that the more formal portrait in Michael Kors tailoring, apparently destined for digital editions, would appear on newsstands, too?Vogue has sprung to the defence of images that show Harris at “her casual best” in “styling choices that were her own”. Tyler Mitchell, who in 2018 became the first African American photographer to shoot a US Vogue cover, explains in an accompanying online article that a much-maligned pink-and-green backdrop was chosen to honour Harris’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, of which Mitchell’s aunt was also a member. Mitchell, who “grew up from a young age deeply understanding the rich history of these sororities and their significance … wanted the set design to pay homage to that history, to [Harris’] status as an AKA, and Black sororities and sisterhoods worldwide.”A Vogue appearance is rarely anything but controversial for women in politics, but the invitation remains apparently irresistible, nonetheless. To be a cover star – and especially for Vogue – is to be the avatar of a cultural moment. To have your image publicly displayed beneath that Vogue font is perhaps the closest any public figure will ever get to having their profile on a stamp or, while still living, their face on a banknote. And in an increasingly atomised media landscape, a Vogue cover is one of the few platforms with the cut-through to reach disparate audiences. It is shared on Instagram, discussed in newspapers, and on display at the supermarket checkout.When Hillary Clinton appeared on the cover of Vogue in 1998 it was in a floor-length velvet gown and pearl drop earrings, smiling beatifically from a stateroom banquette beside an urn spilling red roses. The letters of Vogue were spelt out – in gold – directly on top of the curlicued gilt frame of one of the wall’s oil paintings. The message was clear: a Vogue cover is as close to an official portrait as pop culture gets. Which is why the row around Vogue’s latest cover is not really about Mitchell’s lighting rig, or Harris’s shoes. Rather, these portraits are a lightning rod for a country grappling with a moment of cultural reckoning around gender, race and power.Harris’s stretchy black trousers are a little wrinkled around the knees, the kind of imperfection you might expect to have been smoothed out by a watchful assistantThe relaxed and smiling images were taken in the dizzy post-election relief of November, but landed online a few days after the storming of the Capitol had dialled the emotional tone of politics back up to febrile. This, perhaps, has left them out of step with the particular moment. In the more casual of the two portraits, Harris’s stretchy black trousers are a little wrinkled around the knees – just a tiny imperfection, but the kind that you might expect to have been smoothed out by a watchful assistant before the shutter clicked. Perhaps the informality was judged by the editorial team to chime better with the era of WFH dressing than slick tailoring. Perhaps it was intended to channel Harris’s now famous leggings-clad victory moment. (“We did it, Joe!”).Certainly, any likeness to the 2009 cover for Newsweek of Republican former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, posing in her gym gear, is unintentional. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who after a close relationship with the Obamas has been in self-imposed exile from the circles of political power during Trump’s presidency, will surely be looking to align herself as friend and ally of the incoming Democrat administration.The current British Vogue is more overtly political than ever before, and wears its activist heart on its cover – the magazine equivalent of its sleeve. Recent cover stars have included frontline workers and the Man United and England striker Marcus Rashford who, as one of the most high-profile public figures driving legislation for progressive social change, surely counts as a political figure – and the prime minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, who was featured among 15 Forces for Change on the August 2019 cover.British politicians, however, have been notable by their absence. And should a flattering invitation find its way to a Westminster in-tray, it should be approached with caution. A Vogue cover is always a moment, but not always a flattering one. More

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      in US Politics

      'I figured I'd give it a year': Arthur Sulzberger Jr on how the New York Times turned around

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      Where does the New York Times reside in the subconscious of news hounds across America? Paul Rudnick wrote this answer for a New York City mother played by Bette Middler in Coastal Elites on HBO this year:
      I love the Times. I feel like it’s my child, or my parent. Do you know what the Times means to a liberal Jewish woman like me? On the census, when it asks for religion, I don’t put Jewish. I put the New York Times. Which I have delivered. The real Times. The newsprint Times. I know I’m old-fashioned, but reading the Times online is like having sex with a robot. I mean, it’s cleaner and it’s faster but you can tell the difference. OK, I’ll just say it. The New York Times online is the New York Times for the gentiles.
      The former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb put it slightly differently to me, long ago: “The Times is in the same position as the Jews: it’s expected to behave better than everybody else.”For a hundred years, for better or worse, no institution has played a larger role in American culture and politics. And no corporation with comparable clout has been continuously controlled by a single family since 1896.This month, at 69, Arthur Sulzberger Jr will retire as company chairman, after decades of speculation that he would be the last Sulzberger to run the business.In 2005, a vicious profile in the New Yorker asked: “Can Arthur Sulzberger Jr save the Times – and himself?” A couple of years later, Vanity Fair declared that he had “steered his inheritance into a ditch”.As the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, put it to the Guardian this week: “As recently as five years ago, the biggest question was: “Is [Mike] Bloomberg going to own the Times or [Mexican billionaire] Carlos Slim?”And yet, 11 days from now, Sulzberger will defy almost every expectation except his own and hand over a healthy, thriving enterprise to his son AG Sulzberger, giving the fifth generation of the Ochs-Sulzbergers the rudder of the enterprise.“It’s a rare thing and a wonderful thing to see someone exit the stage on a note of real triumph,” Remnick observed.‘I realized change needed to happen’I’ve been a student of the Times ever since I wrote my first story as a 20-year-old student at Columbia, working as the paper’s college correspondent, a part-time post that launched the careers of many Times editors. I only wrote for the paper for eight years, five as a reporter on the metro staff. But the Times tends to enter the bones of everyone who works there, and a preoccupation with its peculiarities has been my hobby ever since.The first time I met Arthur Sulzberger Jr was at a party of budding journalists in Washington at the end of 1980. I can still see him striding into the room with a swagger, a huge smile and his infant son, AG, on his shoulders. Back then, the father was just a young reporter in the Times Washington bureau. But like almost everyone else, I assumed I was watching the next publisher – and the publisher after that.In a series of conversations this month, father and son offered plenty of evidence that a love for journalism can indeed be passed down through DNA. But they also insisted that what looks like old-fashioned primogeniture is actually a bit more complicated. Each told me he had never felt the slightest pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps – and neither decided he wanted to become the boss until he was a young adult.For Sulzberger Jr, the lightbulb came on when he went to work in the advertising department.“I figured I’d give it a year, I’d hate it, and I’d go back to the newsroom,” he said. But then he made his first big ad sale and “realized that I had just covered Johnny Apple’s liquor bill for a year!” (RW Apple Jr, a fabled political correspondent and London bureau chief, had the traditional journalist’s goal: to always submit the largest possible expense account.)“Suddenly it came to me that this was supporting the enterprise. This was the critical part. It was a real eye-opener for me.”“And your father was completely silent about whether he wanted you to succeed him?” I asked.“Oh yes, very much so. You don’t want to pressure somebody to do something they don’t want. Because in the end, if they get it and they don’t want it, that doesn’t help the institution or the individual. Right?”So Sulzberger Jr adopted the same strategy with his own son.“He did not ever push me to be his successor,” AG Sulzberger said. “He was always really consistent about me following my passions. But I made the mistake of having my first job out of college being a reporting gig.” It was at the Providence Journal, and he fell in love with it.“I would have been very happy to spend my career as a reporter or editor,” he continued. But when he was 33, Jill Abramson, then executive editor of the Times, asked him to write an innovation report about the newspaper’s future.“I realized how much change needed to happen at the Times and how essential that change was for the institution to continue to thrive,” he said. Suddenly, it felt like his “highest purpose was trying to make that change happen”.His father agreed: “I think that was his sort of eye-opening moment.”One secret to the Sulzbergers’ success is that each time power has been given to a new generation, predecessors have not become second-guessers. This is what has made it possible for the paper to change with the times.In the case of Arthur Sulzberger Jr, the first and biggest beneficiaries of that tradition were the Times’ lesbian and gay employees. During the regime of his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Abe Rosenthal, the top editor from the late 60s to the mid-80s, made it clear that the career of any gay employee would end as soon as they came out of the closet.When Arthur Sulzberger Jr became an assistant metropolitan editor, in the early 80s, he figured out who every gay employee was. Then he took each of them out to lunch, told them he knew they were gay, and promised this would have no effect on their career once Rosenthal had departed.“Until you said so,” David W Dunlap, then a metropolitan reporter, wrote years later, “I couldn’t have imagined how to reconcile my soul with my professional calling. Now suddenly there was a Sulzberger … cheerfully reassuring me I had nothing to worry about.”Indeed, as soon as Rosenthal was succeeded by Max Frankel as executive editor, the Times was transformed from the most homophobic to the most gay-friendly major institution in America.Articles of faithA big reason there was so much skepticism that the latest Sulzberger handoff would ever take place was the fate of almost every other major American publishing family of the last 40 years. The Binghams got rid of the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1986. The Taylors unloaded the Boston Globe in 1993 – to the Sulzbergers. The Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times sold their presses in 2000. The Grahams of the Washington Post hung on longer, but even they took $250m from Jeff Bezos in 2013.Sulzberger Jr insists he “just refused to to consider that kind of stuff”. Instead, as the internet ate away at the print advertising that had fuelled the business for so long, he unloaded hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.In 2007, nine TV stations went for $575m. In 2011, it was $143m for 16 regional newspapers – there had once been 35. The WQXR radio station went in two stages, AM and FM. In between came the toughest decision of all for the family, which drew much of its income from shares. In 2009, the Times suspended all dividend payments to shareholders.The Sulzbergers never flinched. But even all of that wasn’t enough. In 2009, Sulzberger Jr had to borrow $250m from Slim – at 14% interest.Four years before that, the paper had made its first effort to make subscription money off of its online edition, by putting some of its columnists behind a paywall in a program called Times Select. But after two years the company decided the loss of online revenue was more important than the gain in subscriptions, and the paywall was abandoned.That made the decision to resume a paywall in 2011 all the more difficult – and it only happened after a fierce internal debate. In the end, Sulzberger Jr sided with the then chief executive, Janet Robinson. It turned out to be his most prescient announcement.“A few years ago it was almost an article of faith that people would not pay for the content they accessed via the web,” he said. But he predicted the paywall would allow the company “to develop new sources of revenue to support the continuation of our journalistic mission and digital innovation … This system is our latest, and best, demonstration of where we believe the future of valued content – be it news, music, games or more – is going.”He turned out to be right.Last month, the company said it had 6 million paying online readers, and for the first time more revenue from digital than print subscribers. The Times had $800m on hand, with $250m available through a revolving credit line. It no longer has any debt, and last year it paid off a loan that allowed it to buy back its Manhattan headquarters. ‘It got really tough’Sulzberger Jr’s close friend Steven Rattner, a former Times reporter turned investment banker, explained his success this way: “If you want just one quality, it would have to be determination. No matter how tough it got – and it got really tough – Arthur never gave up. He was among the first (if not the first) traditional newspaper guy to grasp the importance of the internet, focus on it and never get distracted from it.”Paul Goldberger, a longtime Times architecture critic and one of the paper’s wisest observers, said the most relevant description of Sulzberger Jr’s philosophy could be found in an Italian novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”I repeated that to the departing Times chairman.“Yes,” he said. “Adapt or die.” More

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      in Elections

      'Putin could only dream of it': how Trump became the biggest source of disinformation in 2020

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      [embedded content]
      It seemed like the nightmare of 2016 all over again.
      On 21 October, less than two weeks before election day, US intelligence and law enforcement officials convened a last-minute press conference to warn that foreign adversaries were once again interfering in American democracy. Iran was spreading false tales about “allegedly fraudulent ballots” and sending spoofed emails purporting to contain threats from the Proud Boys, “designed to intimidate voters, incite social unrest and damage President Trump”, said John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence. Meanwhile, both Russia and Iran had obtained access to voter information that could be used to “cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy”, he warned.
      It was everything that Democrats and disinformation experts have been warning about for the last four years, except, well, not quite.
      The email operation had been relatively small and immediately debunked, while voter roll information is either public or easy to obtain. Senior intelligence officials quickly raised doubts about Ratcliffe’s emphasis on the threat from Iran over Russia and questioned whether his motives for the public announcement were political, the New York Times reported.
      “It was very difficult to see those men in suits talking about interference in the election when the White House is the one interfering with the election,” said Claire Wardle, the executive director of First Draft, a group that researches and combats disinformation.
      After all, when it comes to intimidating voters or inciting social unrest, nothing has had more impact than the constant drumbeat of lies and disinformation from Donald Trump. Years of preparation by the press, social media platforms, and civil society groups for a foreign interference campaign against the US electoral process have been upended by the bizarre reality that the biggest threat to American democracy right now is almost certainly the commander-in-chief, and that his primary mode of attack is a concerted disinformation campaign.
      Because how much impact can a few thousand faked emails telling voters in Florida and Alaska to “vote for Trump or else” have on voters compared with Trump directly ordering the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist street gang, to “stand back and stand by” before a television audience of 73 million people? And what kind of false tale of voter fraud could Iran possibly seed that could undermine Americans’ faith in the electoral process more than the disinformation about voter fraud and mail-in ballots coming straight from the White House and Trump’s campaign?
      “‘Don’t trust the electoral system, don’t trust the CDC, don’t trust your neighbor because they’re probably antifa, don’t trust the left,’” Wardle said of Trump’s re-election message. “It’s not about persuading people one way or the other, it’s about making them scared and causing confusion and chaos,” she added.
      “The media’s been obsessed with Russians under the bed, but to have the president of the United States telling people in the US that they can’t trust the results of the election – Putin could only dream of that kind of thing.”
      Social media tactics
      Russia’s disinformation campaign in the 2016 presidential election had two main vectors: a social media campaign to sow division and distrust among voters, and a “hack and leak” operation that resulted in the theft and publication of emails and documents stolen from Democrats and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. That hack and leak operation was incredibly successful, with caches of stolen material proving irresistible both for the mainstream press and for conservative activists and conspiracy theorists.
      The 2020 iteration of the hack and leak tactic – Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani pushing dubious emails and text messages supposedly obtained from a hard drive linked to Joe Biden’s son Hunter – has been something of a damp squib, however. “You don’t see the same kind of credulous, knee-jerk out-of-control amplification that you saw in 2016,” said Whitney Phillips, a professor at Syracuse University and author of The Oxygen of Amplification, a report examining how the press served the purposes of media manipulators, trolls and hate groups in 2016. The top newspapers have debunked and deflated Giuliani’s claims, and the idea of the pilfered hard drive has failed to capture the public’s interest in the same way that troves of stolen emails did.
      But while the Trump re-election campaign may have failed to recapture the magic of 2016 when it comes to hacked emails, the president has taken Russia’s 2016 social media playbook and supercharged it with the power of the White House.
      “I’m sure that there is some foreign influence stuff happening and we might know more about it later,” said Phillips. “But so much of the pollution is trickling down from the White House itself, and people have been absolutely overwhelmed with falsehoods and confusion over Covid and ballots … When people get overwhelmed, they either fight or flee. [Trump] is making it almost impossible for people not to get totally burned out and disgusted.” More

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      in US Politics

      Facebook leak reveals policies on restricting New York Post's Biden story

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      Facebook moderators had to manually intervene to suppress a controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, according to leaked moderation guidelines seen by the Guardian.The document, which lays out in detail Facebook’s policies for dealing with misinformation on Facebook and Instagram, sheds new light on the process that led to the company’s decision to reduce the distribution of the story.“This story is eligible to be factchecked by Facebook’s third-party factchecking partners,” Facebook’s policy communications director, Andy Stone, said at the time. “In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform. This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation. We temporarily reduce distribution pending factchecker review.”In fact, the documents show, the New York Post – like most major websites – was given special treatment as part of Facebook’s standard process. Stories can be “enqueued” for Facebook’s third-party factcheckers in one of two ways: either by being flagged by an AI, or by being manually added by one of the factcheckers themselves.Facebook’s AI looks for signals “including feedback from the community and disbelief comments” to automatically predict which posts might contain misinformation. “Predicted content is temporarily (for seven days) soft demoted in feed (at 50% strength) and enqueued to fact check product for review by [third-party factcheckers],” the document says.But some posts are not automatically demoted. Sites in the “Alexa 5K” list, “which includes content in the top 5,000 most popular internet sites”, are supposed to keep their distribution high, “under the assumption these are unlikely to be spreading misinformation”.Those guidelines can be manually overridden, however. “In some cases, we manually enqueue content … either with or without temporary demotion. We can do this on escalation and based on whether the content is eligible for fact-checking, related to an issue of importance, and has an external signal of falsity.” The US election is such an “issue of importance”.In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said: “As our CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified to Congress earlier this week, we have been on heightened alert because of FBI intelligence about the potential for hack and leak operations meant to spread misinformation. Based on that risk, and in line with our existing policies and procedures, we made the decision to temporarily limit the content’s distribution while our factcheckers had a chance to review it. When that didn’t happen, we lifted the demotion.”The guidelines also reveal Facebook had prepared a “break-glass measure” for the US election, allowing its moderators to apply a set of policies for “repeatedly factchecked hoaxes” (RFH) to political content. “For a claim to be included as RFH, it must meet eligibility criteria (including falsity, virality and severity) and have content policy leadership approval.”The policy, which to the Guardian’s knowledge has not yet been applied, would lead to Facebook blocking viral falsehoods about the election without waiting for them to be debunked each time a new version appeared. A similar policy about Covid-19 hoaxes is enforced by “hard demoting the content, applying a custom inform treatment, and rejecting ads”.Facebook acts only on a few types of misinformation without involving third-party factcheckers, the documents reveal. Misinformation aimed at voter or census interference is removed outright “because of the severity of the harm to democratic systems”. Manipulated media, or “deepfakes”, are removed “because of the difficulty of ‘unseeing’ content so sophisticatedly edited”. And misinformation that “contributes to imminent violence or physical harm” is removed because of the security of imminent physical harm.The latter policy is not normally applied by ground-level moderation staff, but a special exception has been made for misinformation about Covid-19, the document says. Similar exceptions have been made to misinformation about polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to misinformation about Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.Facebook also has a unique policy around vaccine hoaxes. “Where groups and pages spread these widely debunked hoaxes about vaccinations two or more times within 90 days, those groups and pages will be demoted in search results, all of their content will be demoted in news feed, they will be pulled from recommendation systems and type-ahead in search, and pages may have their access to fundraising tools revoked,” the document reads.“This policy is enforced by Facebook and not third-party factcheckers. Thus, our policy of not subjecting politician speech to factchecking does NOT apply here. If a politician shares hoaxes about vaccines we will enforce on that content.” More

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      in US Politics

      Glenn Greenwald resigns from the Intercept over 'editorial freedom'

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      The investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald has resigned abruptly from the Intercept, the news website he co-founded, and accused the organization of seeking to censor him over a planned article critical of the Democratic nominee, Joe Biden.
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      Greenwald, who was a vital part of the Guardian US team that broke the Edward Snowden whistleblower story in 2013, released a statement online that blasted the editors of the Intercept as being in hock to Biden and the Democratic party.
      “The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression,” he wrote in a lengthy resignation post.
      Greenwald is a vocal critic of the US media and American politics, with an abrasive style that has won him many admirers as well as a legion of critics. Recently, he has been especially critical of media coverage of the Russian attempt to interfere with the 2016 US election and has been criticized by some leftwing commentators for appearing on rightwing Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s show.
      He co-founded the Intercept in 2014 with investment from the tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar. The website rapidly established itself as a scrappy online news organization that could punch above its weight on some issues, especially cybersecurity, politics and tech and corruption in Brazil, where Greenwald lives.
      Greenwald said the site no longer carried out the mission that he had intended when it was founded, which was to amplify voices rarely heard in American journalism. In his resignation statement Greenwald said: “The current iteration of The Intercept is completely unrecognizable when compared to that original vision.”
      He also said he would post the article on Biden that he said had been censored online.
      In a sharply worded statement, the Intercept’s editor-in-chief, Betsy Reed, said that the charge that the Intercept was censoring its staff was “preposterous” and that Greenwald’s main problem had been a desire to have his work published unedited.
      “The narrative he presents about his departure is teeming with distortions and inaccuracies – all of them designed to make him look like a victim, not a grown person throwing a tantrum,” she added. More