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    To protect US democracy from tyrants, we must protect the truly free press | Robert Reich

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    Reliable and independent sources of news are now threatened by growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians.The mainstream media doesn’t use the term “oligarchy” to describe the billionaires who are using their wealth to enlarge their political power around the world, but that is what is happening.This is why I write for and read the Guardian, and why I’m urgently appealing to you to support it.During the US presidential campaign, legacy mainstream media – who mostly answer to corporate or billionaire ownership – refrained from reporting how incoherent and bizarre Donald Trump was becoming, normalizing and “sanewashing” his increasingly wild utterances even as it reported every minor slip by Joe Biden.The New York Times headlined its report on the September 2024 presidential debate between the president-elect and Kamala Harris – in which Trump issued conspiracy theories about stolen elections, crowd sizes, and Haitian immigrants eating pet cats and dogs – as: Harris and Trump bet on their own sharply contrasting views of America.Trump also used virulent rhetoric towards journalists. He has called the free press “scum” and the “enemy within”. During his campaign, he called for revoking the licenses of television networks and jailing journalists who won’t reveal their anonymous sources.Come 20 January, Trump and his toadies – including billionaires such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy – will have total control over the executive branch of the United States government. Trump’s Maga Republicans will be in charge of both chambers of Congress as well.Most members of the US supreme court, some of whom have been beneficiaries of billionaire gifts, have already signaled their willingness to consolidate even more power in Trump’s hands, immunize him from criminal liability for anything he does, and further open the floodgates of big money into US politics.All of this is sending a message from the United States that liberalism’s core tenets, including the rule of law and freedom of the press, are up for grabs.Elsewhere around the world, alliances of economic elites and authoritarians similarly threaten public access to the truth, without which democracy cannot thrive.It’s a vicious cycle: citizens have grown cynical about democracy because decision-making has become dominated by economic elites, and that cynicism has ushered in authoritarians who are even more solicitous of such elites.Trump and his lapdogs have lionized Victor Orbán and Hungary’s Fidesz party, which transformed a once-vibrant democracy into a one-party state, muzzling the media and rewarding the wealthy.Trump’s success will likely encourage other authoritarians, such as Marine Le Pen and her National Rally party in France; Alternative in Germany, or AfD; Italy’s far-right Giorgia Meloni; and radical rightwing parties in the Netherlands and Austria.Trump’s triumph will embolden Russia’s Vladimir Putin – the world’s most dangerous authoritarian oligarch – not only in Ukraine and potentially eastern Europe but also in his worldwide campaign of disinformation seeking to undermine democracies.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEvidence is mounting that Russia and other foreign agents used Musk’s X platform to disrupt the US presidential campaign in favor of Trump. Musk did little to stop them.During the campaign, Musk himself reposted to his 200 million followers a faked version of Harris’s first campaign video with an altered voice track sounding like the vice-president and saying she “does not know the first thing about running the country” and is the “ultimate diversity hire”. Musk tagged the video “amazing”. It received hundreds of millions of views.According to a report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Musk posted at least 50 false election claims on X, which garnered a total of at least 1.2bn views. None had a “community note” from X’s supposed fact-checking system.Rupert Murdoch, another oligarch who champions authoritarianism, has turned his Fox News, Wall Street Journal, and New York Post into outlets of rightwing propaganda, which have amplified Trump’s lies.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, prohibited the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Evidently, he didn’t want to raise Trump’s ire because Bezos’s other businesses depend on government contracts and his largest – Amazon – is already the target of a federal antitrust suit.Bezos’s decision demonstrated that even the possibility of a Trump presidency could force what had been one of the most courageous newspapers in the US to censor itself. Marty Baron, former editor of the Post, called the move “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”.Citizens concerned about democracy must monitor those in power, act as watchdogs against abuses of power, challenge those abuses, organize and litigate, and sound the alarm about wrongdoing and wrongful policies.But not even the most responsible of citizens can do these things without reliable sources of information. The public doesn’t know what stories have been censored, muted, judged out of bounds, or preemptively not covered by journalists who’d rather not take the risk.In the final weeks before the election, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Harris, prompting the head of the paper’s editorial board to resign. Mariel Garza said she was “not OK with us being silent”, adding: “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”Honest people standing up is precisely what resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy require. Americans and the citizens of other countries must have access to the truth if we have any hope of standing up to tyranny.The Guardian remains a reliable and trustworthy source of news because it is truly independent. That’s why I’m writing this, and why you’re reading it.Unlike other US media organizations, the Guardian cannot be co-opted by the growing alliances of oligarchs and authoritarians. It does not depend for its existence on billionaires or the good graces of a demagogue; it depends on us.Please support the Guardian today. More

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      Trump’s wild threats put press freedom in the crosshairs in second term

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      Donald Trump could have an easier time limiting press freedom in his second term in the White House after a campaign marked by virulent rhetoric towards journalists and calls for punishing television networks and prosecuting journalists and their sources, legal scholars and journalism advocacy groups warn.Aside from worries about Trump’s demonization of the press inciting violence against journalists, free press advocates appear to be most alarmed by Trump’s call for the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to revoke TV networks’ broadcast licenses and talk of jailing journalists who refuse to reveal anonymous sources.Still, despite a conservative majority on the supreme court and likely Republican control of the House and Senate, those same people also say that America’s robust first amendment protections and a legislative proposal and technology to protect sources mean that a diminished press under Trump is not a certainty.“My big-picture concern is that Trump is going to do exactly what he has been telling us that he wants to do, which is that he is going to punish his critics,” said Heidi Kitrosser, a Northwestern University law professor.Kitrosser added: “He is going to punish people who dissent from his approach to things, people who criticize him and also, perhaps more importantly, investigative journalists and their sources who are not offering opinions but are exposing facts that he finds embarrassing or inconvenient.”Trump has long said journalists deliver “fake news” and are the “enemy of the people”, but since leaving office in 2021 he has used more violent language. At a 2022 rally in Texas, Trump suggested that the threat of rape in prison could compel a journalist to reveal their sources.“When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,’” Trump said.At a recent campaign rally, Trump also said that given where the press was located at the event, if someone were to try to assassinate him, the person “would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much”.Kash Patel, who could be appointed as acting attorney general or head of the CIA, frequently talks of the “deep state” and told the far-right Trump ally Steve Bannon in a podcast interview: “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media … We’re going to come after you.”Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was “entirely possible that [Trump] is just bloviating”.In his earlier campaigns and first term in office, Trump “was on the campaign trail calling them names and riling up crowds, but he was not actively saying, ‘I want to throw them in jail,’” Timm said.Trump also posted on Twitter during his first term about revoking broadcasters’ licenses when they put out “fake news”.After the tweets, Ajit Pai, then the FCC chair appointed by Trump, said: “I believe in the first amendment.”View image in fullscreen“Under the law, the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on a particular newscast,” Pai explained.But Trump and his supporters talked more about revoking the licenses during his second run for the White House. CNN reported in October that Trump had over the last two years said at least 15 times that the government should take such actions.After a 60 Minutes interview in October that contained an answer from Kamala Harris about the war in Gaza that differed from her response in a trailer for the interview, Trump called CBS a “threat to democracy” and said its license should be revoked.An FCC commissioner appointed by Trump recently also said that NBC could lose its license for having Harris appear on Saturday Night Live before the election and not giving equal time to Trump.Another Trump-appointed FCC commissioner said it “would not be inappropriate for the commission” to investigate the complaint about the 60 Minutes interview.“That is even more disturbing, because it means that it’s not just Trump wildly spewing off the cuff. It means that two of the five current FCC chairs might be amenable to this argument,” Timm said.Still, it is unlikely that the FCC would be able to revoke a broadcaster’s license before the end of Trump’s term, according to Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe commission only revokes a license when a broadcaster goes off the air, Schwartzman said. The government agency could then take back the spectrum licensed to the station in case someone else would like to use it.The commission could deny a license renewal, but none are up for renewal until June 2028, and the commission would not be able to even decide to hold a hearing on a renewal before the end of Trump’s second term in office, Schwartzman said.As to cracking down on whistleblowers and journalists, Trump could use the Espionage Act, which allows the government to pursue people who share information with journalists related to national security, Kitrosser said.Barack Obama was also aggressive in his use of the law to prosecute whistleblowers during his presidency.Kitrosser said she was “very, very disturbed” by Obama’s crackdown on media sources.But the difference between the Obama administration’s effort and Trump’s call for prosecuting journalists and sources who leak information is that Trump has repeatedly said: “He does not think that criticism of him, criticism of judges that he appoints, criticism of his policies … should be protected,” Kitrosser said. “Not to protect national security, but to protect himself, and I think that is really the fundamental difference between Obama and Trump.”The Trump administration will probably have an easier time pursuing sources than journalists.“I think courts will be more receptive to the argument that the first amendment bars media prosecutions of journalists under the Espionage Act than they have been receptive to those claims by media sources,” Kitrosser said.To protect sources, journalists could also start to rely more on encryption communication tools like Signal in a second Trump term. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has urged journalists to start using such technology.The organization is also lobbying for the passage of the Press Act, which would prohibit the federal government from compelling journalists to disclose certain protected information, except in limited circumstances such as to prevent terrorism or imminent violence, and from spying on journalists through their technology providers.The House passed the bill unanimously. Three Republican senators have also sponsored the legislation, but it has stalled in committee because of a small group of Republicans, including Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who argued the bill would “open a floodgate of leaks damaging to law enforcement and our nation’s security”.“Too many journalists are little more than leftwing activists who are, at best, ambivalent about America and who are cavalier about our security and the truth,” Cotton wrote in a statement explaining his opposition.Timm, of the Press Foundation, said he was unsure whether the Senate would pass the legislation before Joe Biden leaves office.“The Democrats in the lame duck session are really going to have to prioritize it because when the Senate changes hands and the White House changes hands, there is probably little to no chance that this bill would pass,” Timm said. “It’s now or never for protecting journalists’ rights.” More

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      Washington Post cancellations hit 250,000 – 10% of subscribers

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      Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers.The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.Bezos framed the decision as an effort to support journalists and journalism, noting that in “surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress”.But in this election year, he noted, the press had fallen below Congress, according to a Gallup poll.“We have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.A survey published by the New York Times over the weekend found that the mainstream media were trusted less than social media and 55% of poll respondents thought the media bad for democracy.The Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement follows a growing trend in the newspaper business, which has mostly been hemorrhaging revenue and readership.Gannett-owned USA Today, with the fifth-largest print and fourth-largest digital subscriber circulation, said on Tuesday that neither it nor more than 200 local papers under its umbrella would endorse a candidate.“Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally – one race at a time,” a USA Today spokesperson, Lark-Marie Antón, said in a statement to Politico. “Our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”The non-endorsing papers have said they still plan to make political recommendations at local and state levels.Bezos wrote in defense of the Post’s decision that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election … what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” More

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      Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement

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      The furore over the Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement continued on Monday, with writers for the newspaper pleading with subscribers not to cancel as it would only hurt journalists who did not make the call.The newspaper owned by the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos was thrown into a pre-election inferno on Friday when it announced that it would abandon a five-decade convention of making a formal presidential endorsement.Reaction was swift, with the famed Watergate investigative duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slamming the decision as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process” ahead of the 5 November election.But there are developing signs of a pushback to calls to cancel Washington Post subscriptions, with writers for the newspaper pointing out that doing so was ultimately counterproductive.Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said he could not endorse the calls to cancel. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77m on the Post in 2023, because the paper is just “pocket change” to the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.“But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.”But he added that if the non-endorsement was “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity … my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse”.Milbank pointed out that Bezos had typically not interfered with the Post before the newspaper’s brass refused to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. The non-endorsement policy was announced shortly before executives of Blue Origin met with Donald Trump as the Republican White House nominee campaigns for a second presidency.From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”By mid-Monday, reports indicated that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, according to NPR. The publication noted that the number was “about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well”.But some argue it would be better to cancel subscriptions to Bezos’s Amazon Prime service.The mood in the Washington Post was still “pretty furious”, an employee there told the Guardian on Monday. And there were moves toward greater union involvement.The employee confirmed that workers were worried that subscription cancellations could ultimately boomerang on them with further job losses.The Post’s non-endorsement decision was made public by Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer since January. He said that Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of the spiked Harris endorsement.“I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” Lewis – who previously rose through the ranks of British newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – wrote in a statement on Sunday. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”Nonetheless, under Lewis’s leadership, the Post has issued endorsements this election cycle, including in a US Senate seat race in Maryland.Within hours of the announcement on Friday, 11 Post opinion columnists co-signed a column condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive senator Bernie Sanders alluded to multibillion contracts Amazon holds with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, to explain the decision. Sanders said Bezos “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts” if the former president returns to power. “Pathetic,” Sanders said.On Monday, Michelle Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post, said she would resign, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.Norris follows Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, who left the paper after the non-endorsement announcement.David Hoffman, an editorial board member who recently accepted a Pulitzer for a series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, is also said to be resigning.Among those to cancel Post subscriptions since Friday is the former Republican congresswoman turned Trump critic Liz Cheney. She accused Bezos – who owns the paper through a for-profit subsidiary of an investment fund Nash Holdings LLC – of being “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump”.The Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford also posted that they had canceled.The Post’s controversy erupted days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Harris. The LA newspaper also faced a wave of subscription cancellations.But the LA outlet has sought to cast its non-endorsement decision as more straightforward, with its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framing the matter as an attempt at neutrality.On Saturday, his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza.“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she said in a statement. More

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      The Washington Post and LA Times refused to endorse a candidate. Why? | Margaret Sullivan

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      The choice for president has seldom been starker.On one side is Donald Trump, a felonious and twice-impeached conman, raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy. On the other is Kamala Harris, a capable and experienced leader who stands for traditional democratic principles.Nevertheless – and shockingly – the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to sit this one out. Both major news organizations, each owned by a billionaire, announced this week that their editorial boards would not make a presidential endorsement, despite their decades-long traditions of doing so.There’s no other way to see this other than as an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty.At the Los Angeles Times, the decision rests clearly with Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the ailing paper in 2018, raising great hopes of a resurgence there.At the Post (where I was the media columnist from 2016 to 2022), the editorial page editor David Shipley said he owned the decision, but it clearly came from above – specifically from the publisher, Will Lewis, the veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, hand-picked last year by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Was Bezos himself the author of this abhorrent decision? Maybe not, but it could not have come as a surprise.All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.“Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage,” the wrote former Washington Post editor Marty Baron on Friday on X, blasting the Post’s decision. He predicted that Trump would see this as an invitation to try further to intimidate Bezos, a dynamic detailed in Baron’s 2023 book Collision of Power.The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, resigned this week over the owner’s decision to kill off the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Harris.“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told Columbia Journalism Review’s editor, Sewell Chan. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”Others, including a Pulitzer prize-winning editorial writer at the California paper, followed her principled lead. The Washington Post editor at large Robert Kagan resigned in protest, too. They do so at considerable personal cost, since there are so few similar positions in today’s financially troubled media industry.Some news organizations upheld their duty and remained true to their mission.The New York Times endorsed Harris last month, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”, and writing that Trump “has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest”.The Guardian, too, strongly endorsed Harris, saying she would “unlock democracy’s potential, not give in to its flaws”, and calling Trump a “transactional and corrupting politician”.Meanwhile, the Murdoch-controlled New York Post has endorsed Trump. Although that decision lacks a moral core, it’s far from surprising.But the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post decisions are, in their way, far worse.They constitute “an abdication”, said Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (I run an ethics center and teach there.)The refusal to endorse, he told me, “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not”.As for the message this refusal sends to the public? It’s ugly.Readers will reasonably conclude that the newspapers were intimidated. And people will fairly question, Cobb said, when else they “have chosen expediency over courage”.This is no moment to stand at the sidelines – shrugging, speechless and self-interested.With the most consequential election of the modern era only days away, the silence is deafening.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      ‘Day of great joy’: Wall Street Journal’s crusade to free Gershkovich succeeds

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      The reporter Evan Gershkovich’s release from a Russian prison on Thursday was celebrated across US and global media but perhaps most happily by journalists at his own paper, the Wall Street Journal in New York.In an email to staff after news of Gershkovich’s release as part of a large-scale prisoner swap, Emma Tucker, the Journal editor-in-chief, said: “A few moments ago, Evan walked free from a Russian plane. He will shortly be on a flight back to the US.“I cannot even begin to describe the immense happiness and relief that this news brings and I know all of you will feel the same. This is a day of great joy for Evan and his family, and a historic day for the Wall Street Journal.“The strength, determination and resilience that Evan, his parents and his sister maintained throughout this long ordeal have been incredible. They have been an inspiration to all of us in the newsroom, to colleagues across the company and to supporters who have campaigned so hard for his release.”Tucker’s assistant editor, Paul Beckett, told the Guardian that this week, editors had detected “an inkling that something was coming”.From “seven o’clock this morning”, he said, he and other senior editors were in Tucker’s office, “trying to find out whatever information we could. We started to see some reports dribble out that things were in the offing, [and] we made the call to wait until we knew that our reporter was on the ground, out of Russian custody, free on the tarmac at Ankara, and then we’d publish.“We were sitting here and really trying to figure out what was happening and it was so complicated – we had flight tracking, we had people in the ground in Ankara, we had people at the White House, we had people at the national security council. We were essentially reporting on our own story, in a way.”Asked how staff reacted when Gershkovich’s freedom was confirmed, Beckett said: “It was great to see the newsroom gather around the office. There was applause. We had champagne, there were smiles, joy, there were tears of relief.“It’s a historic day for the Journal, it’s a historic day in geopolitics, in many ways. But there is just huge thankfulness after 16 months, it’s over.”View image in fullscreenIt has been a long 16 months. But after Gershkovich was arrested and accused of espionage, in late March 2023, the Journal mounted a high-profile campaign to stress his innocence, ensure he was not forgotten and press for his release.Speaking to the New York Times earlier this year, Tucker said: “After an initial flurry of attention in the weeks following Evan’s arrest, keeping the spotlight on his ordeal became a huge challenge for the newsroom amid jam-packed news cycles.“We used every grim milestone as a moment to organise publicity and get Evan back into the headlines: 100 days, his birthday in October, 250 days, every one of his court appearances.”The Journal’s story about Gershkovich’s release and the prisoner swap deal described some effects of the campaign: “Well-wishers raised banners at Major League Baseball games and Premier League soccer matches, calling for his release. Journalists and celebrity news presenters from [Tucker] Carlson to CNN anchor Jake Tapper spoke out on his behalf.“Supporters received upbeat and joke-filled letters from Gershkovich, written in his nine-by-12-ft cell at Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison, where Soviet interrogators once tortured and murdered alleged ‘class enemies’.”Beckett said: “We made a decision early on. Someone in the US government told me, really within 24 hours of Evan being taken, that there were times to be loud and there were times to be quiet. And that moment was the time to be loud, and we stayed loud.“Really the effort was to create a landscape in which there could be successful negotiation. We were never going to conduct those negotiations ourselves. But we also firmly believed that there’s so much going on in the world that if Evan ever fell out of the spotlight, it would make it that much more difficult for those negotiations to have been successful.“But this was not the Journal alone. The reaction from our colleagues in media globally, other governments, institutions supporting the free press and just people, well-wishers everywhere, that was the collective voice that spoke for Evan when he was silenced. That made the difference. We’re very grateful [for such] huge support, and we’re incredibly grateful for the happy outcome.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs Journal staffers celebrated, it was only 13 days since Gershkovich was sentenced, in a Moscow courtroom, to 16 years in a high-security penal colony. Then, Tucker and Almar Latour, chief executive of Dow Jones and publisher of the Journal, lamented a “disgraceful, sham conviction … after Evan has spent 478 days in prison, wrongfully detained, away from his family and friends, prevented from reporting, all for doing his job as a journalist.”On Thursday, as the good news spread but before the Journal had confirmed its reporter was free, a dedicated page on the Journal website still hosted a counter showing time elapsed since Gershkovich was arrested. It stood at 491 days, minutes ticking forward towards 492.At the top of the front page, headings read: “Evan Gershkovich, Wrongfully Convicted, Sentenced to 16 Years, A Stolen Year, His Family Reflects, A Timeline, His Reporting, How You Can Help, Write a Message, Latest News and Get Email Updates.”But the paper was ready. After it launched its report on the release deal – and as Annie Linskey, a reporter, described “applause in WSJ’s DC office” – the Journal also rolled out a detailed account of how “secret negotiations to free … Gershkovich unfolded on three continents, involving spy agencies, billionaires, political power players and his fiercest advocate – his mom”.Beckett said: “A lot has happened out of our sight, and appropriately so. Both sides said that was important. The US government obviously was in touch with Evan’s parents and our legal team, but we were still on tenterhooks until two hours ago.”In her email to staff, reported by the Times, Tucker said the paper would now “ensure Evan is well looked after. We want him to take as much time as he needs to recuperate privately and are doing everything we can to support him and his family. I will be travelling later today to meet him when he lands in Texas.”Tucker also said the Journal was “happy too for the other Americans released today who will soon be reunited with their families”. But the paper’s story about Gershkovich’s release and the prisoner swap deal also noted a prisoner not set free.“Marc Fogel, a history teacher at the high school where US Moscow embassy staff sent their children … is serving 14 years in a penal colony. He was arrested in 2021 for carrying less than an ounce of medical marijuana. He said he had intended to use the drug for medical purposes to treat chronic pain.“The US has sought to free him on ‘humanitarian grounds’.”“Obviously, we feel for” prisoners not yet freed, Beckett said. “That is very tough, and I hope that the US government can work its magic again and get these folks home.” More

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      Say More review: Jen Psaki on Biden, Trump and how to make your point

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      Jen Psaki left the Biden White House after 16 months as press secretary. Saturday Night Live never savaged her, though Kate McKinnon played her. By that and other measures, Psaki compares favorably to Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders, her predecessors from the years of Trump. A veteran of the Obama West Wing, before that a competitive collegiate swimmer, Psaki had the president’s ear and spoke with knowing authority.Her press briefings were not cauldrons of rancor. Her tussles with Peter Doocey, the Fox News White House correspondent, never neared the boiling point. They played nice.Unlike Karine Jean-Pierre, her successor, Psaki didn’t have to share the White House podium with John Kirby, spokesperson for the national security council and a retired rear admiral. Psaki was a force in her own right.Now a host at MSNBC, Psaki is out with her first book. It mixes political vignettes with tips on navigating life’s competing demands, including how to dodge – and throw – sharp elbows. As a political memoir, it does its share of score-settling. But, true to its subtitle, Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World, Psaki’s book is not a tell-all, terribly newsy or an audition for a slot in a second Biden administration, if there is one.To be expected, Psaki is critical of Donald Trump and his minions, but injects subtlety too. She wields a scalpel, lacerating Spicer and his former boss. She frames criticisms as career advice, not frontal assault.“Shouldn’t [Spicer] have rejected the job offer, if he were truly credible?” she asks of the Republican official who had first go at speaking for Trump, perhaps the most thankless task yet invented in politics.Great question. We all know the answer. As the anti-Trump operative Rick Wilson put it, everything Trump touches dies. Only Ivanka is safe and even then … who knows.“While Sean may not have been acting entirely on his own behalf when he was giving his press briefings,” Psaki writes, “he was the one who suffered as a result.”True. If Melissa McCarthy plays you in an SNL cold open, as she did Spicer, lampooning your loud parroting of your boss’s absurd lies … you’re screwed.Then again, Spicer was kind of lucky. Banished from the Trumpian kingdom early on, he never suffered a January 6-related indictment. Eventually, he expressed regret for beclowning himself over the inauguration in 2017.Back on Psaki’s own side of the aisle, Say More is no hagiography of Joe Biden. Psaki is aware of the president’s capacity for empathy but also mindful of his tendency to bring the story back to his own losses, most recently including that of Beau Biden, his late son who served in Iraq.In summer 2021, amid the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a suicide bomb at Kabul airport left 13 US soldiers and 170 Afghans dead. Three days later, American bodies arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended. Things did not work out as planned.Psaki conveys how Biden was stunned into silence when told that family members of dead Americans were complaining he had spent too much time talking about Beau, alleging he was insufficiently focused on the deaths of their own children.“I paused for the president to respond,” Psaki writes. “The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.”Biden finally responded, but did so “in a softer voice than usual”.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Again he paused: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPsaki also tweaks Chuck Schumer, now Senate majority leader, and John Kerry, Barack Obama’s second secretary of state and until March a member of Biden’s administration as his climate envoy.Once upon a time, the Affordable Care Act was unpopular, viewed by many as another welfare scheme. Against the backdrop of the Great Recession, a stock market crash and the mortgage crisis, Obamacare cost the Democrats both chambers of Congress.“There were those … who suggested that we shouldn’t do anything other than the economy,” Obama later acknowledged to Jonathan Cohn of the Huffington Post.One of those “outsiders” was Schumer. The New Yorker grasped the political consequences of going all in on healthcare amid a meltdown in jobs and housing. Political prescience, however, isn’t always welcomed, let alone rewarded. Recalling how the White House rejected Schumer’s suggestion that Obama’s final State of the Union address contain a pitch for student loan relief, Psaki seems to delight in the outcome.“I was telling [Obama] he needed to decide whether he wanted this to be his State of the Union speech, or Senator Schumer’s,” she recalls. “I delivered my thoughts calmly. My argument tapped into my knowledge of how the media would cover the speech. The president eventually agreed. Sorry, Senator Schumer.”Psaki also recalls a gaffe made by Kerry in 2014. Responding to a question, he intimated that if conflict broke out between Japan and China, the US would use military force – a stance at odds with the stated American position.“That was a huge mistake,’” chided David Wade, a longtime Kerry aide. Kerry didn’t yell back. Instead, he gave Psaki and Wade the green light to contact the White House and distance itself from his comments. In that moment, Psaki learned that being effective in her job meant delivering quick feedback, at times.“Advising someone is not the same as appeasing them,” she writes.The Biden administration has been relatively leak-free. Nothing approaching Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury or Team of Vipers by Cliff Sims, an early memoir by a Trump administration official, has appeared. Whether this matters come election day remains, of course, to be seen.
      Say More is published in the US by Simon & Schuster More

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      Biden was silenced by criticism from families of troops killed in Kabul, book says. ‘Sir, are you still there?’

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      Joe Biden was stunned into silence when he was told families of US service members killed in Kabul in August 2021 said that when the bodies were returned and the president met grieving relatives, he spent too much time talking about the death of his own son, Beau.“I paused for the president to respond,” Jen Psaki, then White House press secretary, writes in a new book.“The silence that followed was a bit too long. I worried for a moment that our connection had been lost.“‘Sir, are you still there?’ I asked.”Psaki left the White House in 2022, joining MSNBC. Her book, Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House and the World, will be published in the US next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.Biden ordered the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, after nearly 20 years of war, in April 2021. On 26 August, amid chaos in Kabul, 13 US service members and 170 Afghans were killed when a suicide bomber attacked an airport gate.On 29 August, the bodies of the Americans arrived at Dover air force base in Delaware, Biden’s home state. The president and the first lady, Jill Biden, attended.“Of all the president’s duties,” Psaki writes, “this is high on the list of most heartbreaking. For President Biden in particular, it stirred feelings of his own despair about the death of his son Joseph Biden III, aka Beau.”Beau Biden, a former attorney general of Delaware, went to Iraq with the national guard. He died of brain cancer in 2015, aged just 46.Biden has questioned whether “burn pits” at US bases in Iraq might have caused his son’s cancer, championing legislation to help affected veterans. In her book, Psaki cites World Health Organization research which says burn pit emissions contain substances “known to be carcinogenic to humans”.Psaki also notes how Biden endured the deaths in 1972 of his first wife, Neilia Biden, and their one-year-old daughter, Naomi, in a car crash in which Beau and his brother Hunter were critically injured. The president “often refers to these unique and disparate, but nevertheless unbearable, experiences of grief and loss as a way to connect with others”, Psaki writes.But Biden’s visit with the grieving families at Dover stirred up significant controversy, and political attacks.Psaki describes and dismisses as “misinformation” the claim, boosted by rightwing media, that Biden looked at his watch as the transfer of the bodies went on. Citing media fact checks, the former press secretary says footage shows Biden did so only after the remains had left the airport tarmac.Complaints that Biden spoke too much about his own son were tougher to deal with, Psaki writes, particularly when the New York Times “pounced” on the story.As it was part of her job to warn Biden about “unflattering” and “negative” stories, Psaki called him, though this instance was tougher than usual because “Beau was rarely, if ever, the focus of a negative story”.“It was one thing to tell the president the media was planning to criticise his Covid response,” Psaki writes, “and quite another to say the media was planning to criticise the way he speaks about his son, who passed away tragically young.”Still, she writes, Jill Biden had previously told her: “We’ve been through a lot. And we ask that you always be honest with us. Always tell us what’s coming.”Psaki called Biden and warned him about the Times story, which would say he “referenced Beau’s death repeatedly while meeting with families of the soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan last week” and “quote a number of family members making critical comments”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen the president finally answered her, Psaki says, he did so “in a softer voice than usual.“I thought I was helping them. Hearing about how other people went through loss always helps me,” Biden said.Psaki says Biden paused again, then said: “Thanks for telling me. Anything else?”The Times story duly appeared – as did others like it.One bereaved father, Mark Schmitz, told the Times he showed the president a picture of his son, L/Cpl Jared Schmitz, who was 20, and said: “Don’t forget his name.”“But Mr Schmitz was confused by what happened next,” the Times wrote. “The president turned the conversation to his oldest son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 … for Mr Schmitz, another father consumed by his grief, it was ‘too much’ to bear.”“I respect anybody that lost somebody,” Schmitz said, “but it wasn’t an appropriate time.”Psaki also describes how she herself dealt with the controversy.In the White House briefing room, she told reporters: “While [Biden’s] son did not lose his life directly in combat as [those killed in Kabul did] – or directly at the hands of a terrorist, as these families did … he knows firsthand there’s nothing you can say, nothing you can convey, to ease the pain and to ease what these families are going through.”Psaki also said Biden was “deeply impacted by these family members who he met … talk[ing] about them frequently in meetings and [the] incredible service and sacrifice of their sons and daughters. That is not going to change their suffering, but I wanted to convey that still.” More

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      How the National Enquirer boosted Trump and smeared his opponents: ‘The only choice for president’

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      A New York court has heard evidence of how Donald Trump’s long and tumultuous journey to secure the Republican nomination – and later the presidency – was aided by a US tabloid known for printing gory pictures of murder scenes and questionable journalistic ethics.Testimony from David Pecker revealed how the former publisher of the National Enquirer had pledged to be Trump’s “eyes and ears” during his 2016 presidential campaign.Prosecutors say an alleged “catch-and-kill” scheme saw the National Enquirer catching a potentially damaging story by buying the rights to it and then killing it through agreements that prevent the paid person from telling the story to anyone else. Trump has maintained his innocence.In court on Tuesday, Pecker recounted how he promised Trump that he would help suppress harmful stories while smearing his political opponents at the same time.The process was solidified during an August 2015 meeting at Trump Tower involving Trump and Michael Cohen, his lawyer and personal fixer, in which Pecker said he would publish positive stories about Trump and negative stories about his opponents.Soon after, the fruits of that pledge became apparent in the pages of the National Enquirer.View image in fullscreenThroughout 2015 and 2016, a months-long fight to secure the Republican nomination saw more than 12 candidates, made up of political veterans and business titans, cast aside by the momentum of Trump’s campaign.However, in the days and weeks after Trump announced his candidacy, he was still seen as a long shot. Jeb Bush led across most polls in June 2015 and was attracting millions of dollars in donations.That month, the Enquirer printed unfounded claims about Bush, claiming he had a cocaine habit in the 1980s.In late August Trump penned an article for the National Enquirer outlining why he was “the ONLY choice for President” and by autumn, Bush was lagging far behind in the polls.By then, Trump’s closest challenger was another political outsider, Ben Carson, a soft-spoken retired paediatric neurosurgeon who also had no background in politics. In October, Carson was polling near neck and neck with Trump, and pulling in large amounts in fundraising.That month, the Enquirer published a front-page story: “Ben Carson butchered my brain!” The article claimed that Carson had left a sponge in a person’s brain during a procedure. Carson responded at the time by saying his opponents had found “five or six disgruntled people … and many of those cases never went anywhere”.View image in fullscreenBy March 2016, Carson was out and Trump’s closest rival became Ted Cruz, the Texas senator.The Enquirer began to print unsubstantiated stories about Cruz having multiple affairs, labelling the devout Christian a hypocrite on its front pages.In one example – redolent of how the publications would twist headlines until they had only a passing connection to the facts – an Enquirer headline read “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star”, above a picture of a woman wearing a bikini.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe actual story was about Cruz’s campaign having to pull an advertisement after learning one of the actors had worked in adult films.In May, with Cruz trailing Trump in the primaries and battling to keep his candidacy alive, the Enquirer printed a “World Exclusive Investigation”.Next to a grainy photo of the JFK assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, the magazine printed the headline “Ted Cruz father linked to JFK assassination!”. Trump picked up on the story, mentioning the claim in campaign speeches.Cruz labelled the unfounded claims “kooky” and tore into Trump, calling him an “amoral pathological liar”, and a “braggadocious, arrogant buffoon”. Within hours though, Cruz was out of the race and Trump’s path to the Republican nomination was clear.View image in fullscreenAs the Republican party broadly swung behind Trump’s candidacy, the Enquirer turned its attention to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.Headlines ranged from the simple (“Corrupt!”), to the ridiculous (Hillary’s hitman tells all!”). The magazine attacked Clinton’s health, said she was “going to jail” and continually labelled her corrupt. It alleged, without any reliable evidence, that she used racist language and that she “blackmailed and intimated” prosecutors, claims that are entirely unsubstantiated.By election day, Clinton had appeared on the Enquirer’s front page at least 15 times in a five-month period.In its first edition published after Trump’s shock victory, the Enquirer plastered the incoming president on its front page and outlined a supposed checklist of his most important policy priorities.Above the headline “My first 100 days!”, the magazine apparently couldn’t resist a final insult to anyone who doubted the incoming president: “We told you so!” More