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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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      Jim Klobuchar Dies at 93; Minnesota Newspaperman and Amy’s Father

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      He rose to folk hero status with his derring-do as a journalist and came to national attention when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, spoke openly about his struggles with alcoholism.Jim Klobuchar was a renowned sportswriter and general interest columnist in Minnesota for decades.Straight out of central casting, he was celebrated for his derring-do: He once held a piece of chalk between his lips while a sharpshooter took aim at it. He was a finalist for NASA’s initiative to send a journalist into space, until the Challenger explosion in 1986 ended the program. He scaled the Matterhorn eight times and Kilimanjaro five.And he could make readers weep, as when he wrote about a 5-year-old girl with a brain tumor who loved to ride the rails: “She was cradled in her mother’s lap on the observation car of the Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha, a tidy young lady. A dying little girl, taking her last train ride.”But he did not come to national attention until 2018, when his daughter, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, mentioned him during the contentious televised hearings on Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.During her questioning of the nominee, Ms. Klobuchar noted that her father, then 90, was a recovering alcoholic who still attended meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. She asked Judge Kavanaugh whether he had ever drunk so much that he could not recollect events. He turned the question back on her, a breach of decorum for which he later apologized. She accepted the apology, adding, “When you have a parent that’s an alcoholic, you’re pretty careful about drinking.”By then her father had been sober for more than 25 years. When she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Senator Klobuchar spoke often of his successful treatment and proposed spending billions of dollars to treat substance abuse.Mr. Klobuchar in 1974 at his desk at The Minneapolis Star, where we wrote a long-running column about whatever he wanted.Star Tribune, via Getty ImagesMr. Klobuchar died on Wednesday at a care facility in Burnsville, a suburb of the Twin Cities. He was 93. Senator Klobuchar, who announced his death on Twitter, did not specify a cause but said he had had Alzheimer’s disease. He survived a bout with Covid-19 last year.Mr. Klobuchar was long popular in Minnesota, even a folk hero. In addition to his newspaper columns — 8,400 of them by the time he retired from The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1995 — he wrote 23 books, held a football clinic for women, hosted talk shows and for almost four decades led annual “Jaunt with Jim” bicycling trips around the state, stopping at pay phones along the road to call in and dictate his column. After he and his first wife, Rose (Heuberger) Klobuchar, divorced in 1976, he and Amy began taking long-distance biking trips to bond with each other.As a young journalist for The Associated Press, he experienced an especially heady moment the day after the 1960 presidential election, when John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon were still neck and neck, with three states yet to report results. Mr. Klobuchar wrote the nationwide bulletin announcing that Mr. Kennedy had won Minnesota, giving him enough electoral votes to clinch the presidency. The scoop appeared in papers across the country.James John Klobuchar was born on April 9, 1928, in Ely, a small city on the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, where he grew up. His father, Michael Klobuchar, worked in the iron ore mines. His mother, Mary (Pucel) Klobuchar, was a homemaker.From an early age, Jim read The Duluth Herald, and his mother encouraged him to pursue a career in journalism, Senator Klobuchar wrote in her 2015 memoir, “The Senator Next Door.”He graduated from Ely Junior College (now Vermilion Community College) in 1948, then enrolled at the University of Minnesota, graduating with a degree in journalism in 1950.He landed a job as wire editor at The Bismarck Daily Tribune. But six months later he was drafted into the Army and assigned to a new psychological warfare unit in Stuttgart, Germany, where he wrote anti-communist material.He returned briefly to the Bismarck paper, then was recruited by The Associated Press in Minneapolis, where he scored his election scoop. He joined The Minneapolis Tribune in 1961 as a sports reporter, focusing on the Minnesota Vikings.He left The Tribune in 1965 for the competing St. Paul Pioneer Press, but it wasn’t long before The Minneapolis Star lured him away by giving him a column to write about whatever he wanted.Mr. Klobuchar in 2015. He came to national attention when Senator Klobuchar spoke publicly of his overcoming alcohol addiction.Aaron Lavinsky/Star Tribune, via Associated PressThis was the heyday of print journalism, when newspapers sent their star writers all over the world. During the height of the Cold War, Mr. Klobuchar reported from Moscow. He covered the murder and funeral of Aldo Moro, Italy’s former prime minister, in 1978. He challenged the pool hustler Minnesota Fats to a game. He wrote about an air service that employed topless flight attendants. He played a reporter in the 1974 movie “The Wrestler,” with Ed Asner.But it was not all smooth sailing. He was suspended twice, once for writing a speech for a politician, and once for making up a quote in a story that he thought was an obvious satire.He also took his drinking too far, his daughter said in her book. For a time, heavy drinking was part of his colorful public persona. When he was charged with a couple of alcohol-related driving offenses in the mid-1970s, nothing much happened.But the public’s attitude toward drinking and driving underwent a sea change, and when he was arrested in 1993 for driving under the influence, he lost his license and was threatened with jail. He wrote a front-page apology to his readers. And in an accompanying note, the paper’s editor, Tim McGuire, said that Mr. Klobuchar had “endangered lives” and that the paper was insisting that he seek treatment.He complied. He entered an inpatient rehabilitation center, attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and found God. Ms. Klobuchar wrote that his readers forgave him.“It was his very flaws that made my dad so appealing to them,” she said. “His rough-and-tumble life growing up and his personal struggles had a huge influence on his writing. That’s why he was at his best when he wrote about what he called ‘the heroes among us’ — ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”In addition to Senator Klobuchar, he is survived by another daughter, Meagan; his wife, Susan Wilkes; his brother, Dick; and a granddaughter.When he decided to retire from The Star Tribune in 1995, Mr. Klobuchar told his office mates that he wanted no fuss, just to leave quietly. After he had packed up his things and was headed for the door, an editor got on the public-address system and announced: “This is Jim Klobuchar’s last day. That’s 43 years of journalism going out the door.”Everyone stood and applauded. More

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      Wall Street Journal warns Republicans: ‘Trump won’t win another election’

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      In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s second acquittal in an impeachment trial, his supporters celebrated confirmed dominance of the Republican party. But as they did so an influential voice warned: “Mr Trump may run again, but he won’t win another national election.”The Wall Street Journal also said moves by Trump other than a run for the presidential nomination in 2024, including a “revenge campaign tour” or third-party run, would only “divide the centre-right and elect Democrats”.No one so much as Democrats wishes for that analysis to be true: that if Trump insists on remaining a loud voice in US politics, he will succeed only in electing more Democrats.But the fantasy of Trump’s summary departure from the national political stage is to be guarded against, many warn – and the notion that he cannot win the White House again in 2024 has been rejected on both the left and the right.“Trump could win again because it is always a choice between two” candidates, tweeted the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, in reply to the Journal editorial.Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, by 306-232 in the electoral college and by more than 7m votes nationwide. But Biden is the oldest president ever inaugurated and though he has said he may seek a second term, on election day 2024 he will be 81. Trump could yet face Vice-President Kamala Harris or another relatively untested Democrat.About half of Republicans want Trump to stay head of their party. That said, half of American voters want him banished from politics altogether, according to a CNBC poll this month that echoed other surveys. There are a lot more Americans than there are Republicans. Furthermore, tens of thousands have left the party since the Capitol Hill attack on 6 January.On Saturday, seven Senate Republicans joined Democrats in voting to convict Trump on a charge of insurrection arising from the Capitol riot. The defections were significant, the most against a president of their own party in any impeachment, but the vote still fell 10 short of the two-thirds majority needed.Many Republicans, most notably minority leader Mitch McConnell, excoriated Trump’s behaviour but said they voted to acquit because the trial was unconstitutional. Scholars dispute that, and the Senate voted twice to proceed.Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, as the 2012 Republican presidential nominee and a former governor of Massachusetts one of the most known quantities in politics, was among the Republicans to vote to convict. For that decision, he was attacked by Utah Republicans with a petition to censure him including the line, “Whereas, Senator Williard [sic] Mitt Romney appears to be an agent for the Establishment Deep State.” The petition, which misspelled Romney’s first name, “Willard”, was reported by The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins. The “deep state” conspiracy theory holds that a permanent government of bureaucrats and intelligence agents thwarted Trump’s agenda. Steve Bannon, a key propagator and former Trump strategist, has said it is “for nut cases”.Right now, for Trump 2024, the political math looks bad. But the factors on his side, including fundraising muscle and a rabidly devoted base, are plain to see. Trump raised more than $250m after the election on the back of his lie that it was stolen – and he has promised to stick around.“We have so much work ahead of us,” he said following his acquittal on Saturday, “and soon we will emerge with a vision for a bright, radiant, and limitless American future.”State Republican parties back him. At least four senators who voted to convict were on the receiving end of sharp rebukes. Such skirmishes could be further signs of how Trump threatens to pull the party apart.“It’s hard to imagine Republicans winning national elections without Trump supporters anytime soon,” the GOP strategist Alex Conant told Reuters. “The party is facing a real catch-22: it can’t win with Trump but it’s obvious it can’t win without him either.”Even more troubling for those concerned for the strength of US democracy, the continuation of Trumpian politics by a younger conservative – Senator Josh Hawley or Fox News host Tucker Carlson, perhaps – could render moot the question of whether Trump himself is onstage. In this thinking, a candidate as indifferent to democracy but better at organizing his party could succeed in a power grab where Trump failed.Monday’s editorial casting doubt on Trump’s prospects came from a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, a dominant voice on the right. It echoed moves by the New York Post, the Journal and Fox News last November, after an election Trump still refuses to concede.On its news pages on Monday, under the headline Pro-Trump Candidates Launch Early Senate, Governor Bids, the Journal looked at early moves in key states including Ohio, Virginia and Arkansas, ahead of the 2022 midterms.But on the opinion page, under the headline Trump’s Non-Vindication, the Journal’s editors added their voice to warnings from senior Republicans that Trump’s hold on the rank-and-file may not translate to another successful White House run – even though Democrats in Congress could not bar him from future office.“For four years,” the editorial board claimed, “Mr Trump’s conduct stayed largely within constitutional bounds … but Mr Trump’s dishonest challenge to the 2020 election, even after multiple defeats in court, clearly broke those bounds and culminated in the 6 January riot. “Mr Trump may run again, but he won’t win another national election. He lost re-election before the events of 6 January, and as president his job approval never rose above 50%.“He may go on a revenge campaign tour, or run as a third-party candidate, but all he will accomplish is to divide the centre-right and elect Democrats. The GOP’s defeats in the two 5 January Georgia Senate races proved that.“The country is moving past the Trump Presidency, and the GOP will remain in the wilderness until it does too.” More

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      Rupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Capitol Riot FalloutVisual TimelineInside the SiegeNotable ArrestsCapitol Police in CrisisThe Global Far RightAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRupert Murdoch, Accepting Award, Condemns ‘Awful Woke Orthodoxy’Mr. Murdoch of News Corp, who spoke in a video, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He called conformity on social media “a straitjacket on sensibility.” Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corp, said his long career “is still in motion.”Credit…Mike Segar/ReutersJan. 25, 2021Updated 3:06 p.m. ETThe media mogul Rupert Murdoch denounced an “awful woke orthodoxy” and declared, “I’m far from done,” while accepting a lifetime achievement award this weekend.Mr. Murdoch, 89, made the remarks in a prerecorded video shown on Saturday during a virtual event for the United Kingdom nonprofit that honored him, the Australia Day Foundation. The video was shared on the website of The Herald Sun, a newspaper in Melbourne owned by Mr. Murdoch.The video is noteworthy because Mr. Murdoch, despite exerting enormous influence over the global media landscape as the executive chairman of News Corp, has been relatively quiet publicly in recent years. He has been weathering the pandemic in his home in the Cotswolds in England, and received a Covid-19 vaccination in December.In the video, Mr. Murdoch, standing next to a bottle of Australian red wine and wearing a medal, thanked the foundation for the award in the video but said his career “that began in a smoke-filled Adelaide newsroom is still in motion.”He also took the opportunity to condemn “cancel culture.”“For those of us in media,” he said, “there’s a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks to silence conversation, to stifle debate, to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.”He continued: “This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility. Too many people have fought too hard in too many places for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy.”It seems Mr. Murdoch’s beliefs have been noted by the editors of his publications. On Monday, The New York Post published an op-ed by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, on the front page of the paper with the headline “Time to take a stand against the muzzling of America.”Mr. Hawley, who has been widely condemned for his role in trying to overturn the result of the presidential election even after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, echoed Mr. Murdoch in denouncing “woke orthodoxy.”Credit…New York PostMr. Hawley also used his front-page column in one of the most widely circulated newspapers in the country to bemoan the revoking of his book deal and the canceling of events he had scheduled. Mr. Hawley’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, dropped his book after the Jan. 6 siege, though it was quickly picked up by the conservative publishing house Regnery Publishing.The New York Post declined to comment.Mr. Murdoch’s media empire, which includes The Post and Fox News, is trying to navigate a tense political moment. It is attempting to maintain conservative viewers who, unhappy with some of the straight news reporting on Fox, tuned in to Newsmax and One America News, which embraced former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims about election fraud. Fox News executives this month fired the politics editor Chris Stirewalt, who was an on-screen face of the network’s election night projections, and introduced more right-wing opinion programming.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      New York Times fires editor targeted by rightwing critics over Biden tweet

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      A row has broken out over accusations that a New York Times journalist was fired after being targeted by rightwing critics for tweeting she had “chills” at seeing Joe Biden’s plane land at Joint Base Andrews.Lauren Wolfe, who had been working as an editor at the Times, posted the message on 19 January, as Biden arrived ahead of his inauguration as president the next day.Two days later, Wolfe was let go by the Times, after her tweet was picked up by rightwing social media users and news outlets, who used Wolfe’s tweet to allege claims of media bias.Wolfe, a seasoned journalist who has written for the Guardian, said she has since been subjected to a torrent of abuse in the wake of the incident, including being followed by a photographer as she walked her dog.The New York Times responded to criticism on Sunday, after many members of the media rallied to Wolfe’s defense.“There’s a lot of inaccurate information circulating on Twitter,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokeswoman for the Times, told the Washington Post.“For privacy reasons we don’t get into the details of personnel matters, but we can say that we didn’t end someone’s employment over a single tweet. Out of respect for the individuals involved, we don’t plan to comment further.”The Times added that Wolfe was not a full-time employee but was instead working on a contract basis. On Sunday, The Times workers’ union, however, said it was “investigating the situation”.“We believe all our members deserve due process and just cause protections, the very rights that are fundamental to independent, objective journalism,” the TimesGuild said.CNN host Jake Tapper was among those to share details of Wolfe’s situation, while journalists Kirsten Powers and Jeremy Scahill also criticized the Times.Late to this–I can’t believe the @nyt FIRED @Wolfe321 for a few tweets! This is not a proportionate response. There’s a middle ground that doesn’t involve revoking someone’s employment. To all those who worked to get her fired: don’t ever complain about ‘cancel culture’ again.— Kirsten Powers (@KirstenPowers) January 24, 2021
      I think it’s absurd and wrong that the NYT fired Lauren Wolfe. Also, does anyone remember how MSNBC’s Chris Matthews literally cried over an Obama speech, compared him to Jesus and said he “felt this thrill going up my leg” when Obama spoke? https://t.co/ZA6iZ6892t— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) January 24, 2021
      The attention from the right did not stop once it emerged Wolfe was no longer working at the Times. Wolfe shared some of the abusive messages she had been sent, one of which called for her to develop cancer, while the conservative New York Post ran a series of paparazzi-style photos of Wolfe walking her dog in New York City,The Daily Mail, a rightwing British newspaper with a popular website, extrapolated from Wolfe’s tweet that there had been a “huge amount of gushing” towards Biden in the media, something the Mail said will “do nothing to restore any kind of trust in the media”.Many of Wolfe’s defenders noted that the Times did not fire reporter Glenn Thrush after multiple women accused him of sexually inappropriate behavior in 2017. The Times suspended Thrush for two months, and executive editor Dean Baquet said the journalist had “behaved in ways that we do not condone”, but Thrush kept his job. More

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      Three Banner Headlines

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Biden AdministrationliveLatest UpdatesBiden Takes OfficePandemic Response17 Executive Orders SignedAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTimes InsiderLetters Close Enough to TouchThree historic banner headlines on New York Times front pages contained an unusual typographic feature: a set of joined letters known as a ligature.Jan. 21, 2021Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.I-M-P-E-A-C-H-E-D.The banner headline on the Jan. 14 front page summed up President Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment in just nine letters.Or was it eight?Credit…The New York TimesSome readers may have spied an unusual letterform in the historic headline: an “E” and “A” joined at the baseline and combined into a single character, known as a ligature.Ligatures are used to improve the appearance and letterspacing of characters that would otherwise awkwardly pair. But the advantages of joined letters are not purely cosmetic. More evenly spaced letters can improve the readability of text, especially in a single word printed large.The “EA” ligature dates back to December 2019, when the House was preparing to vote on the first impeachment of Mr. Trump. The Times, too, was drawing up its own coverage, including a big, bold headline for the top of Page One: “TRUMP IMPEACHED.”But there was a modest typographical speed bump. Tom Bodkin, the chief creative officer of The Times, who is responsible for the design of the front page, and Wayne Kamidoi, an art director, were wrestling with an awkward gap in the middle of “IMPEACHED.”“The first three characters and the last three characters set up naturally pretty tightly. The middle three characters, just by the nature of their forms, set up loosely,” Mr. Bodkin said.Credit…The New York TimesEven as the stem of the “A” slopes away from the “E,” the long bar of the “E” prevents the two characters from coming closer. This leaves a noticeable gap between the letters, even as the rest of the word is tightly spaced.“It looks like two words because of the space between the ‘E’ and the ‘A.’ That’s not good for legibility, and it’s not attractive,” Mr. Bodkin said. “We needed to overlap those two characters in some form.”So Mr. Bodkin turned to Jason Fujikuni, an art director on the brand identity team, to draw the new combined character. “I just thought it would live that one day, but it was fun to see it for a couple other big pages,” Mr. Fujikuni said.Indeed, the ligature had a life beyond Mr. Trump’s first impeachment. It appeared in a November banner headline, “BIDEN BEATS TRUMP,” to announce the results of the presidential election. And, of course, it ran once more when Mr. Trump was impeached for the second time.Credit…The New York TimesAndrew Sondern is an art director for print.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More