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    D.C.’s Planned Removal of Black Lives Matter Mural Reflects Mayor’s Delicate Position

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    Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decision comes amid calls by the president and other Republicans for more federal control of the city.On Wednesday morning in downtown Washington, D.C., Keyonna Jones stood on her artwork and remembered the time when she and six other artists were summoned by the mayor’s office to paint a mural in the middle of the night.“BLACK LIVES MATTER,” the mural read in bright yellow letters on a street running two city blocks, blaring the message at the White House sitting just across Lafayette Square. In June 2020, when Ms. Jones helped paint the mural, demonstrations were breaking out in cities nationwide in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza was a statement of defiance from D.C.’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, who had clashed with President Trump, then in his first term, over the presence of federal troops in the streets of her city.But on Tuesday evening, the mayor announced the mural was going away.Ms. Jones said the news upset her. But, she added of the mayor in an interview, “I get where she is coming from.”The city of Washington is in an extraordinarily vulnerable place these days. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would end D.C.’s already limited power to govern itself, stripping residents of the ability to elect a mayor and city council. Mr. Trump himself has said that he supports a federal takeover of Washington, insisting to reporters that the federal government would “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.” In recent days, the administration has been considering executive orders in pursuit of his vision for the city.Potential laws and orders aside, the administration has already fired thousands of federal workers, leaving residents throughout the city without livelihoods and, according to the city’s official estimate, potentially costing Washington around $1 billion in lost revenue over the next three years.Given all this, Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, described her decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza as a pragmatic calculation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s First Cabinet Meeting Was a Display of Deference to Elon Musk

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      President Trump’s first cabinet meeting was a display of deference to Elon Musk.A couple of hours before President Trump convened his cabinet for the first time, he used his social media platform to declare that the group was “EXTREMELY HAPPY WITH ELON.”As the meeting began, it seemed to be the members’ job to prove it.The secretaries sat largely in silence behind their paper name cards, the sort of thing you need when, powerful though you may be, you are not a household name. And they listened politely as the richest man in the world loomed over them, scolding them about the size of the deficit, sheepishly admitting to temporarily canceling an effort to prevent ebola and insisting they were all crucial to his mission.“I’d like to thank everyone for your support,” Elon Musk said.In fact, Musk has not had the support of every cabinet secretary — at least not when he tried to order their employees to account for their time over email or resign. When a reporter asked about the obvious tension, Trump kicked the question to the secretaries themselves.“Is anybody unhappy with Elon?” Trump asked. “If you are, we’ll throw him out of here. Is anybody unhappy?”Nobody was unhappy. Nervous laughter rippled around the table as Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, grinned and led a slow clap, which Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, eventually joined before scratching her nose.Next to her, Kelly Loeffler, the small business administrator, applauded and attended to an itch on her ear. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered up a single clap and gazed over at Musk, a fixed smile on his face. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, shifted in his seat.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Washington Post Opinion Editor Exits as Bezos Steers Pages in New Direction

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      Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Post, said that the newspaper’s opinion section would focus on “personal liberties and free markets.”The Washington Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, is exiting as the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, steers the section in a libertarian direction.In an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday, Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Shipley was stepping down amid a narrowing of the opinion section’s focus to defend “personal liberties and free markets.”“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.“I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’ Mr. Bezos wrote.In a note to opinion staff members, Mr. Shipley said that he decided to step down “after reflection on how I can best move forward in the profession I love.”“I will always be thankful for the opportunity I was given to work alongside a team of opinion journalists whose commitment to strong, innovative, reported commentary inspired me every day,” Mr. Shipley wrote.This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More

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      Trump and Musk Attack Journalists by Name in Social Media Posts

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      Since his inauguration, the president has been quick to demonize what he calls “the fake news media.” On Friday, both men demanded that individuals be fired.President Trump has made clear his animus toward mainstream media organizations. Now he’s getting more personal.Mr. Trump and his key lieutenant, Elon Musk, who has been empowered to run what they call the Department of Government Efficiency as a “special government employee,” have attacked journalists by name in recent days on the social media platforms they own: Truth Social and X.On his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump called for The Washington Post to fire Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and labeled him “incompetent.” Mr. Trump frequently posts on the account to his millions of followers and regularly condemns perceived enemies.Mr. Robinson had written in an opinion column on Thursday that top Republican senators “should be ashamed of themselves” for not standing up to Mr. Trump during the confirmation process for some of his cabinet picks and for not protesting Mr. Musk’s taking an ax to government departments like the United States Agency for International Development, which administers foreign aid programs. Mr. Robinson also appeared on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Friday to discuss his column.“So sad to see him trying to justify the waste, fraud, and corruption at USAID with his pathetic Radical Left SPIN,” Mr. Trump wrote. “He should be fired immediately!!!”In an email, a spokeswoman for The Post said: “Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with a 45-year record of integrity, professionalism and scrupulous reporting and commentary. The Washington Post stands behind Gene — just as it stands behind all journalists and news organizations dedicated to independent coverage and a free press.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Matea Gold Named Washington Editor of The New York Times

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      Ms. Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post, is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the paper.Matea Gold, a managing editor at The Washington Post who until recently was a contender for the newspaper’s top editing role, is joining The New York Times as a senior editor in its Washington bureau.Ms. Gold will be Washington editor for The Times, reporting to its newly appointed Washington bureau chief, Dick Stevenson, the company said on Monday. She starts in January.Since May 2023, Ms. Gold, 50, has been a managing editor overseeing The Post’s political, local and investigative coverage. She was previously the newspaper’s national editor, leading a staff of 150 journalists. Ms. Gold joined The Post more than a decade ago from The Los Angeles Times and has served in a variety of roles, covering politics as a reporter and shepherding ambitious political investigations.Under Ms. Gold’s supervision, The Post’s national staff contributed to Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Post’s national staff also won a Pulitzer for a feature article on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the constitutionally protected right to abortion.Her departure is the latest in a series of high-profile exits from The Post news and opinion departments in recent months.The newsroom has been in turmoil since Will Lewis, the company’s chief executive, abruptly forced out the paper’s top editor, Sally Buzbee, in June. Matt Murray, the former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, has led the newsroom on an interim basis since then. Several journalists from the opinion section stepped down from their positions after Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, decided shortly before the U.S. presidential election that the paper would not endorse a candidate for president.The Post is searching for a permanent top editor for its news department. Ms. Gold had been considered a candidate for executive editor of The Post, according to two people familiar with the search process. Other candidates include Clifford Levy, a former deputy managing editor of The Times and now the deputy publisher of Wirecutter, The Times’s product recommendation site, and The Athletic, its sports site, the people said. Mr. Murray is also a candidate, the people said.One of the final hurdles is an interview with Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, who weighs in on hiring decisions for top positions.Ms. Gold joins The Times amid changes in the top ranks of its Washington bureau. The Times announced in November that Elisabeth Bumiller, who had led the bureau since 2015, would be stepping down from that role and returning to reporting. Mr. Stevenson, who has worked at The Times in various reporting and editing jobs for nearly 40 years, will be taking over for her in January. More

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      Why Jeff Bezos Likes ‘Messy’ Meetings

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      The billionaire founder of Amazon spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit.Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post, defended his decision to end presidential endorsements at The Post and expressed optimism about a second Trump administration at the DealBook Summit on Wednesday. But he also delved into his personal philosophy in his discussion with Andrew, including how he approaches entrepreneurship and leadership.Why to run a ‘messy’ meetingIn a discussion about how Bezos views his influence, Bezos said he considers himself a wanderer. He added that he applies this mind-set to meetings, and that he is on time only to his first meeting of the day because “I won’t finish a meeting until it’s really finished.” Of this approach, he said:I try to teach, like, really wander in the meetings. There are certain kinds of meetings that are like a weekly business review or something where it’s a set pattern and you’re going through it — that can have an agenda and it can be very crisp. That’s a different kind of meeting. But for most of the meetings that are useful, we do these six-page memos, we do a half-hour study hall, we read them. And then we have a messy discussion. So I like the memos to be like angels singing from on high, so clear and beautiful. And then the meeting can be messy.About the value of running meetings this way, he said:You don’t want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented to you. You want to be part of the sausage-making. Like, show me the ugly bits. And I always ask, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? You know what? I want to try and get to the controversy.How to take a leap of faith as an entrepreneurAndrew asked Bezos where he gets the confidence to create a business that requires as much scale as Amazon or Blue Origin, where at the beginning it can be difficult to see how the full vision could materialize. Bezos said:I think it’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so I think entrepreneurs in general, you know, would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature: The risks are probably not as big as you perceive, and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive.And so you say it’s confidence, but maybe it’s just trying to compensate for that — accepting that that’s a human bias, and trying to compensate against it. The second thing I would point out is that thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘An existential battle’: how Trump’s win is shifting the US media landscape

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      When MSNBC’s morning hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski announced to their viewers last week that they had paid a visit to Donald Trump at his Florida resort of Mar-a-Lago they must have suspected there would be a reaction.The married co-hosts on the liberal news network made hay for years lambasting Trump, especially in the run-up to the presidential election. Now, in the wake of his victory, they told their viewers they were seeking to reset communications with the man they had warned only a few weeks ago was set to bring fascism to America.“Joe and I realized it’s time to do something different,’ Brzezinski told Morning Joe viewers on Monday. “That starts with not only talking about Donald Trump but also talking with him.”Their reward? An online barn-burning by their critics online and a fall in viewer numbers for a show – and a network – already struggling in a rapidly declining US cable news sector. The following morning, broadcast viewing figures for the network plummeted 38%, according to Nielsen Media Research.Yet Scarborough and Brzezinski’s about-face is just one data point in the US media landscape that shows that some core elements of the press in America may be recalibrating its approach to how it covers the second Trump administration and where the all-in oppositional attitude that defined much of the press in his first term is in retreat.Yet the moves come after an election campaign in which Trump frequently attacked the media and dubbed them “enemies of the people”. It comes as his allies have threatened to curb the press and attack their media critics. They have also already launched a wave of multibillion-dollar lawsuits against a host of media companies for their coverage that they often baselessly claim to be bias, such as Trump’s allegation that CBS misleadingly edited an interview with Kamala Harris.Certainly those threats seemed to be at play with MSNBC, which is now also facing an uncertain future as the network is being spun off by its corporate parent, Comcast. A subsequent sale would come under the purview of Trump-appointed regulators.According to Puck News, the couple’s visit to Trump’s tropical paradise was because Scarborough was said to be “petrified” that the president-elect’s Department of Justice would go after him. “That’s what this was about,” a source told the news site about the motive. “It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation.”“It was about access and power,” said Jeff Jarvis, a media writer. “But this visit didn’t do anything for access, and they didn’t come back with anything journalistic. They were willing to throw the reputation of the show, their reputations and the reputation of the network over for their own personal fears.”But MSNBC is not alone in facing tough choices. The US media are facing numerous issues: fears over what Trump might do, complex business decisions and interests faced by their corporate owners, and also an understanding that the president-elect won the popular vote, showing that their audiences exist beyond the safe havens of Trump criticism.But these are choppy waters. The Washington Post, famed for bringing down Richard Nixon, has been the focus of controversy under its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, and the British journalist, Will Lewis, he has tasked with running the once-storied brand.The Washington Post lost 250,000 subscribers after it declined to make a presidential endorsement. Bezos defended the decision, triggering suspicion that Amazon’s role as a defense industry data cloud contractor had played a part. But since Trump won, Lewis has not changed tack and a longstanding and widely respected political editor at the paper was reportedly removed from his job last week.The Post’s controversy has played at the same time as the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Kamala Harris, also triggering widespread dismay in the newsroom and a questioning of how critical of Trump the newspaper would continue to be.The Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framed the matter as an attempt at neutrality, though his activist daughter Nika Soon-Shiong also said the decision was informed by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza – which he later confirmed in an internal email.After years of anti-Trump coverage under Jeff Zucker, CNN is also effecting course-correction. Last week, the cable news giant’s Dana Bash said it was unclear whether a group of men carrying swastika flags marching in Columbus, Ohio, belonged to the far right or far left.“A group of neo-Nazis paraded through that city wearing, waving swastikas, covering their faces,” Bash said. “We don’t know what side of the aisle this comes from. I mean, typically neo-Nazis are from the far right.” The statement immediately attracted ridicule for its seemingly bizarre attempt at neutrality.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSome at the New York Times, too, are offering a more ameliorated tone than under the first Trump administration, even as the paper has continued to break stories on Trump’s preparations to return to power. The columnist David Brooks advocated soon after the election that Trump is a “sower of chaos, not fascism”, adding: “In chaos there’s opportunity for a new society and a new response to the Trumpian political, economic and psychological assault.”It is certainly a complex challenge. The media’s symbiotic relationship with Trump was both nurturing and self-destructive the first time around as readerships boomed, but a significant chunk of the population – the chunk that delivered Trump back into the White House – became even more hostile to the mainstream media and embraced the idea it was “fake news”.The news industry in the US, with a few exceptions, is on life support as audiences fracture and social media traffic referrals dry up. Social media is more trusted by the public, and the press is now facing a second hostile Trump administration with diminished resources.But would a more restrained approach work? Would it attract readers previously hostile to the media, and would it blunt any attacks from the Trump administration?Some are skeptical.“You’re trying to pursue readers you’ll never have and in the process pissing off the readers you do have,” Jarvis, the media writer, said of outlets playing it safe on Trump. “That’s the paradox – mass media still believes in the mass media. The challenge for journalism now is for people to feel heard and a separation from the power structures of politics and money.”The only network firmly in a good place appears to be rightwing Fox News, which dominated 24-hour news broadcasting through the election cycle and seems confident of its identity as America returns to life under a Trump presidency.Fox News finished the week of 11-17 November with its highest share of the cable news audience in the network’s 28-year history across multiple categories, while MSNBC saw its lowest-rated week in quarter of a century.For some observers, all this makes for worrying times ahead as America confronts a president with openly autocratic sympathies and a radical rightwing agenda.“The press is going to find itself in an existential battle for its own integrity if it does not decide to confront and challenge Trump top to bottom. There’s no way a truly free press can be neutral about lies and broken civic norms and survive,” said Jim Sleeper, author and retired lecturer in political science at Yale University.“If the populace has decided to trade in its freedom and rights for stability and security that authoritarians always promise, then the press has to make a choice and decide that honest journalists are dissidents.” More

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      Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Exchange Posts About Trump on X

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      The world’s two richest men are longtime business rivals, but now one of them has the ear of the next president of the United States.A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.But times have changed.“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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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