“Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported on Monday that he had been added by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to an encrypted Signal group chat with the White House’s principals committee to discuss U.S. war plans in Yemen. Goldberg received the first message at 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, and around two hours later, the White House announced a new air campaign against Houthi forces. The National Security Council confirmed the group chat was real and claimed Goldberg was added by accident.”
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“The constitutional and policy merits of war are two separate questions, but they’re impossible to fully disentangle. The point of asking Congress for a declaration of war is to allow the people’s representatives to weigh the pros and cons in a deliberate, transparent way. War is the most serious decision a government can make. Citizens of a republic should not have to perform Kremlinology—or wait for an official to fat-finger his contact list—to figure out what their leaders are planning.”
“What would be better than FOIA?
An employee of a federal agency, who was sick of constantly having her email searched for records requests, once floated the idea to me of proactive disclosure: Just redact and release everyone’s emails on a rolling basis.”
“If you are a journalist, life in Moscow means constant fear of reprisal; pissing off the state means certain imprisonment. If you enjoy gay bars or other forms of LGBT-oriented nightlife, get ready for police raids. If you’re an evangelical protestant, you will not be permitted to live out your faith. (Over the last decade, more than 500 Jehovah’s Witnesses have been convicted of or charged with extremism, with many serving sentences.) And, if you’re Ukrainian, well, sorry about your family getting brutally slaughtered and your homeland getting desecrated; hope you enjoy the clean subway system nonetheless.”
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“One reason why we don’t have clean streets in New York the way they do in Singapore is because we don’t cane people for minor crimes. We don’t give people the death penalty for manufacturing drugs (200 grams of cannabis resin warrants execution, if you’re not careful), nor do we lock people in jail for a decade for the purported crime of getting high. We don’t crack down on jaywalking, spitting, or cigarette-smoking the way they do. We also don’t tend to use corporal punishment for our children.
Carlson’s point is fine that people care about quality of life issues, that Skid Row in Los Angeles and subway-station junkies in New York City are embarrassments, and that our city officials ought to be able to clean up the streets to improve the lives of taxpaying residents—not just when Xi Jinping comes to town. You might think existing public disorder needs to be curbed, but there are many possible ways of doing so that could still protect civil liberties and wouldn’t turn American cities into authoritarian hellholes. (In fact, we should probably turn to Russian out-migration numbers to see whether residents agree with Carlson’s assessment.)
I simply do not think we need to hand it to authoritarians under any circumstances or speak in flattering terms about Putin’s ability to govern. It’s not that compliments like these ought to be haram; it’s that Carlson is examining only one side of the ledger, and missing all the ways Russian laws rain down brutality on the innocent and undeserving. Just ask some of the tourists who’ve had their stays in Russia involuntarily prolonged, like Brittney Griner.”
“Even if you despise the media, you should be rooting for more government transparency. Some of the worst journalism happens when no one has hard evidence one way or another and the only sources are government press releases and anonymous officials. Take for example the months of speculation surrounding the death of U.S. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, all of which was enabled by erroneous government statements and the fact that Capitol Police records and autopsy reports were confidential. As I wrote then, “In a vacuum of primary sources, bullshit will prevail. If you want faster, more accurate reporting, demand better public record laws and more transparency from officials.”
The power-hungry demagogues and partisan pundits trying to tear this country apart dream of a perfectly fact-free environment where anything can be claimed and nothing can be confirmed. Strong public record laws are the antidote to the farces and tragedies they would inflict.”
“”The end of the long inquiry into whether Donald Trump was colluding with Russia came in July 2019, when Robert Mueller III, the special counsel, took seven, sometimes painful, hours to essentially say no,” former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth writes at the beginning of his detailed analysis. His old employer was at the center of the frenzy and its editors still defend their efforts, he adds. “But outside of the Times’ own bubble, the damage to the credibility of the Times and its peers persists, three years on, and is likely to take on new energy as the nation faces yet another election season animated by antagonism toward the press. At its root was an undeclared war between an entrenched media, and a new kind of disruptive presidency, with its own hyperbolic version of the truth.””
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“It’s really hard to get to any sort of truth if you bypass accuracy.
“My main conclusion is that journalism’s primary missions, informing the public and holding powerful interests accountable, have been undermined by the erosion of journalistic norms and the media’s own lack of transparency about its work,” Gerth writes in the afterword to his Russiagate post mortem. “One traditional journalistic standard that wasn’t always followed in the Trump-Russia coverage is the need to report facts that run counter to the prevailing narrative.””
“The editors and publishers of The New York Times and several major European media outlets have released an open letter condemning America’s prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Assange faces 19 federal charges of espionage and hacking for his alleged role in helping Chelsea Manning get access to classified military reports from the Iraq and Afghan wars. Those charges were filed in 2019, but a superseding indictment from the Justice Department filed in June 2020 added more details and accusations (but not new charges), claiming Assange recruited hackers and directed them to targets. The Department of Justice’s position is that Assange is a hacker, not a journalist.”
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“Leaders at The New York Times and The Washington Post have long opposed Assange’s indictment for the potential chilling effect. If Assange can be imprisoned for publishing classified documents, then couldn’t the editors of the Times or the Post or any other media outlet who also published these documents face the same fate?
In order to get around these First Amendment concerns, the justification for Assange’s prosecution is that he doesn’t qualify as a journalist. He is not a “legitimate” journalist. The problem with that argument is that it gives the government the authority to define who does and does not qualify as a journalist, which itself would seem like a violation of the First Amendment’s protections. There is no “legitimacy” distinction in the First Amendment. Journalism is an activity, not just a career. Many, many people have engaged in various forms of journalistic activities without being credentialed reporters for media outlets.”
“At the core of Villarreal’s misfortune is a Texas law that allows the state to prosecute someone who obtains nonpublic information from a government official if he or she does so “with intent to obtain a benefit.” Villarreal operates her popular news-sharing operation on Facebook, where her page, Lagordiloca News, has amassed 200,000 followers as of this writing.
So to jail Villarreal, police alleged that she ran afoul of that law when she retrieved information from Laredo Police Department Officer Barbara Goodman and proceeded to publish those two aforementioned stories, because she potentially benefited by gaining more Facebook followers. Missing from that analysis is that every journalist, reporter, or media pundit has an “intent to benefit” when she or he publishes a story, whether it is to attract viewers, readers, or subscribers. Soliciting information from government officials—who, as Villarreal’s case exemplifies, sometimes feed reporters information—is called a “scoop,” and it’s not new.
Yet it was an argument that, in some sense, resonated with Judge Priscilla Richman, the chief jurist on the 5th Circuit, who almost certainly voted in favor of reconsidering the court’s ruling. “In fact, Villareal’s [sic] Complaint says that she ‘sometimes enjoys a free meal from appreciative readers, . . . occasionally receives fees for promoting a local business [and] has used her Facebook page [where all of her reporting is published] to ask for donations for new equipment necessary to continue her citizen journalism efforts,” she wrote in August, rebuking Ho’s conclusion. “With great respect, the majority opinion is off base in holding that no reasonably competent officer could objectively have thought that Villareal [sic] obtained information from her back-door source within the Laredo Police Department with an ‘intent to benefit.'”
Such an interpretation would render the media industry an illegal operation, and everyone who participates—whether they be conservative, liberal, far-left, far-right, or anything in-between—criminals. “Other journalists are paid full salaries by their media outlets,” writes Ho. Can confirm. Is that somehow less consequential than receiving free lunch or getting a new spike of followers on a social media platform (which is something that many journalists employed full time also set out to do)? “In sum, it is a crime to be a journalist in Texas, thanks to the dissent’s reading of § 39.06(c),” Ho adds.”