Project Veritas, the right-wing website that often publishes surreptitiously recorded and selectively edited videos to embarrass liberals and mainstream media outlets, continued a battle against the New York Times this weekend by posting edited video of two depositions from a lawsuit the Times is engaged in against Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and candidate for vice president in 2008. 

Palin alleges that the Times libeled her in a 2017 editorial that inaccurately linked her to the 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona, that wounded US representative Gabby Giffords and killed six people. In the videos posted by Project Veritas two former members of the Times editorial board answered questions about the editorial process. The videos were “sliced and diced,” a lawyer for the Times in the Palin trial said. The Times’ legal team argued that the evidence, which was not admitted at trial, could interfere with jury deliberations.

Separately, last week, a New York State appeals court stayed an order that had kept the Times from publishing certain material about Project Veritas. First Amendment advocates and a group of sixty-three media organizations that joined a legal brief on behalf of the Times had decried the unusual order as an unconstitutional example of prior restraint, a form of censorship before the fact.

“Prohibiting a news organization from publishing information of public interest is clearly unconstitutional,” said Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which filed the amicus brief. “It was unconstitutional on day one, and it’s unconstitutional on day eighty-five, and we’re glad to see it lifted.”

Justice Charles Wood, a Westchester County trial court judge, had signed the order against the Times on November 18. It blocked the paper from publishing attorney-client privileged materials from Project Veritas—something the paper would normally be within its right to do, so long as it hadn’t actively stolen them.

In their arguments against the order, lawyers for the Times warned that it could set a dangerous precedent. In the future, they wrote in a filing, “any individual or organization wanting to limit unfavorable news coverage could simply file a libel suit over an earlier story and then use discovery orders to censor or prevent future reporting.” 

A four-judge panel agreed to the stay last Wednesday, February 9, until a formal appeal is heard on or before March 11. But the appellate court did not agree to vacate the order permanently, noted Libby Locke, an attorney for Project Veritas, who said she was confident that the court would ultimately side with her client.

A spokesperson for the Times, Danielle Rhoades-Ha, said she was pleased with the decision. “The use of prior restraint to prohibit newsgathering and block the publication of newsworthy journalism is unconstitutional,” said Rhoades-Ha. “No libel plaintiffs should be permitted to use their litigation as a tool to silence press coverage about them.”

The background to the case is here. 

Among the many browser tabs I toggled between yesterday in nervous anticipation of a verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial were two video livestreams. One showed a static, unfocused close-up of the Minnesota state seal, at the courthouse. The image was quiet, still, neutral-looking, as if the world were waiting in silence for the judge to appear and make a definitive pronouncement of the truth. This video was from the New York Times. The other frame couldn’t have been more different: it was crowded, busy, and filled with noise from protest chants, speeches, and conversation in George Floyd Square, a memorial to Floyd at the site of his death. This video came from Unicorn Riot, a decentralized media collective. The camera, moving from the rally’s speakers to a mural on the wall of Cup Foods to chalk drawings and flowers, never showed a reporter; the camera’s operator spoke only to give bare exposition and interview people at the scene. 

Screenshot from Derek Chauvin Trial Day 28, Jury Verdict, on Unicorn Riot’s YouTube channel

Like most major news outlets, Unicorn Riot had streamed from inside the courthouse for the duration of the trial. But alongside that footage it had also provided extensive live coverage of demonstrations. In doing so, it provided an alternative to the picture viewers saw on cable news. In the past year, professional journalists have become more aware of their complicity in police narratives—especially the practice of basing stories on official statements and shrouding police violence in obfuscating language like “officer-involved shooting.” But even as copy style and headlines have changed, the imagery widely shown upon the announcement of Chauvin’s verdict revolved, still, around the activities of the state—the courthouse, the legal actors—and the opinions of media pundits. By contrast, Unicorn Riot’s ongoing presentation of resistance, documented without commentary or narrative shaping, put protest on equal footing with the trial itself. It is of course meaningful that Chauvin was convicted of murder (now, some journalists observed wryly, we can finally use the word “murder” and drop the “alleged”), but it is just as important to show the emotion unleashed within Floyd’s community—relief, grief, celebration, “revolutionary joy.” This is what it looks like to treat coverage of the “official” story as just one story among many.

This article has been updated to correct a description of Unicorn Riot.

As the Trump administration ends, and the Biden administration begins, major news networks and outlets are shaking up their White House reporting staff.

At the New York Times, Maggie Haberman will be stepping down from her role as White House correspondent to write a book about the Trump presidency. She will continue covering politics. The Washington Post announced yesterday that Ashley Parker, who covered the Trump administration closely, will become the paper’s new White House bureau chief, replacing Philip Rucker. And at CNN, Kaitlan Collins will be replacing Jim Acosta as chief White House correspondent. Acosta will become the network’s chief domestic correspondent. ABC, CBS, NPR, and others have also shuffled their staffs.  

At PBS’s NewsHour, White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor, producer Meredith Lee, and anchor and managing editor Judy Woodruff will remain in position for the Biden administration. “It would be great to be able to take a vacation and go out, but we’re living in the middle of a pandemic,” says Alcindor.

Reflecting on the past four years, Alcindor said she felt particularly proud of a November 2018 exchange in which she asked Trump whether he was emboldening white supremacists. Trump called the question racist. “It was a question that revealed where the president stood,” she says. 

“I think the Trump presidency really revealed that journalism is a core part of our society and a critically important part of our democracy,” Alcindor said. “If we don’t embrace journalism in a way that’s fearless, and in a way that is blunt, and in a way that pushes this country to really look at itself fully, then we’re not doing it right.”

She hopes that covering the Biden administration will provide the opportunity to focus less on the president’s behavior and more on policy. “We were all kind of drinking out of a firehose, trying to process all of the different things that were happening,” Alcindor says of the past four years. The challenge, she says, is to address “the different aspects of our society that we just haven’t spent time delving into, because we were instead focused on sort of reality TV, and rhetoric, and rallies.”

As a mob swarmed the Capitol building on Wednesday, images and videos of the event spread across social media in close to real time, many going viral on Twitter and Facebook before cable news networks covering the events could verify or report them. One video showed a group of rioters surrounding a pile of Associated Press equipment, trying to burn or damage it. “We are the news now,” they shouted. Many in the circle were capturing the moment with cellphones.

“It’s a term or a phrase we’ve heard from QAnon supporters for a while now,” said Sharon Kann, research director at Media Matters for America, referring to the adherents of a sprawling conspiracy theory that has come to believe Donald Trump is waging a war against the forces of darkness, or Satan himself. And it means, she said, that they mistrust expertise and particularly reporting. 

What we saw on Wednesday is that they have created their own media: unfiltered, unedited, and by, for, and to each other in the form of posts, images, videos, and, most notably, livestreams. What much of the mob was actually doing in the Capitol, if you looked closely, was capturing images of itself for other members of the mob. And for a brief moment, the images on their screens were being reflected throughout the world.

One of the first images of the destruction of Associated Press gear to spread on Twitter was captured in a livestream hosted on a platform called DLive, initially a competitor to the video game streaming service Twitch, that has become a hub for white supremacist influencers. A major draw of the platform is the ease with which streamers can collect donations from their viewers, through a virtual currency called “lemons,” with each worth a fraction of a cent in real terms. 

Megan Squire, a computer science professor and researcher at Elon University and a fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, has been following the alt-right on DLive since last April. The Southern Poverty Law Center published several articles based on Squire’s research, which found that at least five of the site’s streamers were broadcasting live from the riots. 

Sure enough, journalists spotted a number of influencers from this alternative media ecosystem on Wednesday. Many built their followings on mainstream platforms like YouTube and Facebook before being removed and forced to find more obscure alternatives. (Even so, many of their followers still gather on Facebook pages and groups. Facebook was one of several platforms used to plan and rally people ahead of the riot.) 

One such user, Tim Gionet, who streams under the moniker Baked Alaska, earned at least $222 while streaming at the Capitol riots, not including profits from some videos that were removed. The total did not include donations solicited through other platforms. Gionet was among the rioters whom images show in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and was heard in the stream telling viewers, “Trust the plan,” a common QAnon slogan.

DLive streamers who weren’t in the Capitol also jumped in on the action. One simply broadcast a split screen of other live feeds from this alternative media, side by side with traditional news broadcasts. It was like a watch party, while viewers filled their comments sections with calls for war and murder. There was a palpable sense of excitement and awe at the visual similarity between their own streams and the news broadcasts. The channel earned $530 over twelve hours online. The user had made similar videos broadcasting news footage and livestreams during Kyle Rittenhouse’s January court hearings and in the immediate aftermath of the Nashville bombing in December. One of DLive’s most profitable streamers, Nicholas Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and Trump adherent, made over $43,000 on the platform in the last two months of 2020 alone. He has admitted he attended the riot but has denied reports he entered the Capitol building. 

“A lot of these guys are online and they’re watching streams almost twenty-four hours a day,” Squire said of the viewers. She remembers logging on to DLive at eight-thirty in the morning on December 22 to find Fuentes streaming himself playing video games. He began after his weeknight broadcast and had apparently stayed up the whole night. “His followers watched him the whole time and then went to another stream as soon as he was done,” Squire said. “This is their world, just to watch content, in this video format, all the time.” 

After coming under scrutiny following the streams from Washington on Wednesday, DLive released a statement saying that it had “zero tolerance towards any forms of violence and illegal activities.” The statement also said that “we have suspended 3 accounts, forced offline 5 channels, banned 2 accounts from live streaming and permanently removed over 100 past broadcasts from our platform.” Gionet’s videos from DC remain available, as does one from Fuentes yesterday telling people who were in the Capitol to “keep that to yourself” to avoid legal trouble.

If DLive takes more drastic measures, there are always other options. Many, including the YouTube alternative BitChute, allow for some form of monetization. “The fragmentation of not just media platforms but information ecosystems is something that’s extremely challenging to deal with,” Kann says.

After Wednesday’s events, a since-deleted video taken by Derrick Evans, a West Virginia lawmaker and participant in the storming of the Capitol, spread across social media. “I was simply there as an independent member of the media to film history,” Evans said in a statement posted to his Facebook account. 

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to accurately reflect Megan Squire’s university affiliation.

Watching MSNBC in the hours since Wednesday’s mob attack on the Capitol has been dizzying.

The enormity of this history-rattling event was impossible to spin, downplay, or trivialize, even for cable news. And so the network’s coverage summarily imploded, splintering in real time, losing the glossy veneer of corporate imperturbability as its hosts veered wildly between prim expressions of astonishment, ostrich-like attempts at “business as usual,” and passionate demands for Trump’s immediate ouster.

Calls for “accountability” have come from nearly every talking head: congressmen, academics, retired generals, and the hosts themselves. In MSNBC parlance, “accountability” is a dignified-sounding word with no exact meaning. But IRL the word means facing consequences for your decisions and actions.

Real accountability, for MSNBC, means a clear and distinct demand for each of its hosts to come clean about his or her own complicity in building and enabling the increasingly violent and extremist Republican Party that led, inexorably, to the ruinous Trump administration. Joe Scarborough, for example, who on Thursday called for the president to be arrested, was not so long ago a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago, and a staunch ally of Trump the candidate in 2016, as CNN reported at the time:

Scarborough has spoken about Trump in increasingly glowing terms, praising him as “a masterful politician” and defending him against his political opponents and media critics. The Washington Post has noted that Trump has received “a tremendous degree of warmth from the [Scarborough] show,” and [said] that his appearances on the show, in person and over the phone, often feel like “a cozy social club.”

What would “accountability” look like for Scarborough and his cohost, Mika Brzezinski? What would it look like for Nicolle Wallace, whose work on behalf of George W. Bush in the Florida recount—a key moment in the degradation of the Republican Party—led to a high-profile job in Washington?

True to form, Chuck Todd brought the most openly cynical and dim-witted take to the party. On Meet the Press Thursday, he spoke with Andrea Mitchell and Katy Tur about the possible motivations of Elaine Chao, Trump’s transportation secretary, who had announced her resignation. “I’m sort of torn on the effectiveness,” he began.

But let’s put yourself… I’m going to try to put myself in her shoes. And maybe you don’t have enough people to do the Twenty-fifth Amendment.… And you want to stand up, and do something, and say something.… But at the end of the day, is it still better symbolically to publicly rebuke him, even if it’s in the last thirteen days, even if it does look like you’re trying to launder yourself a bit, so that maybe you’ll be invited to a better law firm or a better cocktail party, but the rebuke may be still necessary anyway?

I have nothing whatsoever to add to that.