‘A terrible precedent’
Nearly a week after the revelations about President Trump’s secret plane switch that treated the White House press pool like a decoy, there’s been no press briefing; no serious acknowledgment of the deception; no commitment to handle it differently if there’s a next time.
The White House Correspondents’ Association asked the White House to “work with us on a protocol for handling extraordinary security circumstances in the future.” Is there any chance of one actually being formulated? Well, WHCA president Jacqui Heinrich says “we’re still continuing to work through that,” in this new interview with New York mag’s Michael Calderone.
This is ultimately all about credibility — the president’s and the press corps’ too.
“It is always a matter of concern when a media outlet discovers it has been misled and the record not corrected right away,” AFP regional director for North America Marc Lavine told The Washington Post. “This is especially true when the matter potentially concerns the safety of its reporters, which is paramount to AFP.”
Over the weekend, The Post’s Scott Nover and Dan Lamothe published a follow-up story featuring accounts from four journalists who were on board the July 8 flight, all of whom “spoke on the condition of anonymity because their employers did not authorize them to speak.”
The journalists “say they feel disappointed that the White House wasn’t forthright about the operation and didn’t brief them during the flight or once it concluded, with some reporters saying they feel deceived by the government,” Nover and Lamothe wrote.
Reporters recognize, as New York Times Washington bureau chief Richard W. Stevenson said in this Times Insider Q&A, that “there has to be a balance between security and transparency. You can argue about precisely what that balance should be at any given moment, but clearly in this case, transparency was thrown entirely out the window, replaced by outright deception. That’s a terrible precedent.”
As for the fallout from the July 8 ruse, NYT chief White House correspondent Peter Baker said, “This has been a good reminder that as we travel with the president we should report only what we know and not take even basic things on faith.”
“In the pool reports that journalists traveling with the president typically file, we sometimes write phrases like ‘your pooler did not actually see the president get onto the plane’ or ‘get into the limousine’ or what have you. We generally assume that he did, but are careful not to let assumptions become reported facts,” Baker said. “Now, as a result of this episode, we have to be even more aware that we may be being deceived.”
While on the topic of official deception, I loved this NYT story by Anton Troianovski about how Trump’s recent ruse “pales in comparison to the secrecy surrounding President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, whose activity is shrouded in so much mystery that journalists have tried to track it by assessing the wilting of his office plants.”
“In Russia,” he continued, “official falsehoods about the president’s whereabouts ‘are just a regular Tuesday,’ said Farida Rustamova, a Russian journalist who covers the Kremlin from exile.”
Last week, after excellent reporting from Natalie Oliverio at the Military Times, concerns about Navy sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln reached a boiling point.
Family members of sailors have been speaking out — and the Trump administration has responded by basically calling them liars.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the reporting has “completely misrepresented” what’s going on aboard the ship. Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell called the reporting “shameful.” And the president, when asked whether military families are worried about the conditions, said, No, they’re not,” even though family members are on the record expressing their worries.
The wife of a service member aboard the Lincoln told Jake Tapper on Friday, “It’s infuriating” that they’re “saying, essentially, that families are lying and service members are lying… they’re not taking accountability…”
“Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s 817-year history, is dead. But the intense public debate over his life and work, and what it means for a society grappling with multiculturalism, is continuing — perhaps even more furiously,” Rupert Neate writes for CNN.
Some are blaming the media’s intense scrutiny of Arday’s plagiarism and other ethical lapses for driving him to suicide. Alan Rusbridger dubbed it “death by a thousand headlines.” Ibram X. Kendi went further, likening it to a “lynching” and saying “the media will bury its culpability while we bury Jason.”
Some in Britain are calling for a formal inquiry. But UnHerd’s Mary Harrington pointed out that “editors didn’t make the former professor into a hot viral topic by commissioning articles about him; they commissioned the articles because he was a hot viral topic.”
Here’s Tyler Austin Harper writing for The Atlantic: “The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.”
New York magazine has cut ties with columnist Ross Barkan “after an independent editorial review found 67 of his columns failed to meet the publication’s standards for proper attribution,” TheWrap’s A.J. Katz reports. The publication also apologized to the writers who were ripped off.
Barkan tried to put the 67 number in context this way: “In the course of nearly 250 pieces, there were times I should have been more careful with citation. I’m sorry about these errors and will work to do better, more careful work in the future. I am, at a more considered pace, writing a new column for The Nation.”
In other words, Barkan “will get a very public second chance,” the aforementioned Tyler Austin Harper wrote, contrasting the cases of Barkan and Arday…
Josh D’Amaro delivered his “first address to the Disney faithful as chief executive” at the D23 super-fan event over the weekend.
The CEO also sat down for an interview with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin, who asked about the FCC’s action against ABC’s station licenses, and D’Amaro said, “Well, I think you saw in our FCC filings our position on this is clear. We’re very principled on this.” He cited “journalistic integrity” and said, “We’re not going to be told how to run that side of our business.”
D’Amaro added, “I like what we do. We tell incredible stories. I think we do it well. We do it around the world. And we’re going to stay committed to that.”
In the latest edition of the Semafor Media newsletter, Max Tani points out that Jon Stewart’s deal to host “The Daily Show” once a week is up at the end of the year.
“While there is strong interest from Paramount in renewing the liberal media icon’s deal heading into a general election season, the two sides have yet to ink an extension,” Tani writes.
>> The BBC is seeking to subpoena Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in connection with the president’s defamation suit against the broadcaster. The BBC’s lawyers say the family members have “relevant knowledge about the president’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021.” (POLITICO)
>> “Matt Gutman, CBS News’ chief correspondent, has been accused of harassment in a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed against ABC by a former co-worker of his at ABC News,” Todd Spangler writes. Gutman and CBS News reps declined to comment to Variety, and ABC did not respond to a request for comment. (Variety)
>> Mike Rothman, most recently the president of The Dispatch, is joining the Daily Mail as general manager in the US. (Semafor)
>> The Atlantic is launching a new daily trivia game, “Rabbithole,” “created by Jeopardy! champion and Atlantic senior editor Drew Goins.” (The Atlantic)
>> The FT published a column by Harvard professor Ricardo Hausmann that had the whiff of AI-generated text. Amid social media scrutiny, the publication followed up with an editor’s note saying that “AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement.” (Poynter)
>> Cloudflare “says bot blocking is fuelling publisher AI deals,” Charlotte Tobitt writes. (Press Gazette)
>> “AI slop is swamping a House office that drafts US laws,” Owen Dahlkamp writes. (Politico)
Even after Instagram promised to “remove ‘harassing’ pickup line videos filmed with Meta glasses,” Katie Notopoulos says she keeps finding them.
“There definitely is some enforcement happening — some accounts removed, some videos taken down,” she says. But it is “messy and inconsistent. Trouble with content moderation isn’t new; what interests me is how this is a problem of Meta’s own making with the glasses.” Here’s her report for Business Insider…
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” on Sunday “surpassed $2 billion in global ticket sales, eclipsing the rare benchmark after just three weekends of release,” Variety’s Rebecca Rubin reports.
>> “This weekend, Disney opened up advance tickets for ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ a whopping four months in advance,” TheWrap’s Jeremy Fuster writes. After “just two days of presales, sources say ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ is approximately 65% ahead of the pace set by the first two days of presales for ‘Brand New Day.’”
Saving the most important tribute for last: One of CNN’s best, Alec Miran, died last week at age 69. Journalists across the organization are sharing memories of the man and his legacy.
“Up until his retirement in 2021, Alec produced virtually every major news moment for CNN: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf Wars, South Africa’s historic elections, the handover of Hong Kong, September 11, Katrina, Haiti, shuttle disasters, papal transitions, funerals, elections, inaugurations, royal weddings, CNN Heroes and so much more,” CNN CEO Mark Thompson wrote in a memo this morning. “Across four decades of breaking news and special events, Alec was there and CNN was better for it.” May his memory be a blessing.
This edition of Reliable Sources was edited by Andrew Kirell and produced with Liam Reilly. Email us your feedback and tips here.