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LA Taco has been tracking law enforcement’s response to the protests against ICE raids in the city—and underlining room for improvement in media coverage of the situation. The six local journalists the outlet comprises report on shifting ICE tactics, offering practical advice: how to recognize unmarked vehicles, the time of day when abductions are most likely, locations to avoid. Recent posts on LA Taco’s social media include a guide on how restaurant workers can stay safe if their workplace is raided.
What’s more, LA Taco’s journalists are working to correct what has been a spotty record in press coverage of the unfolding events—and to keep it clean going forward. A recent letter from editor in chief Javier Cabral called out an error in local television station KTLA’s coverage of an early raid during which LA Taco saw an SUV with federal tags knock down a demonstrator; KTLA had claimed the demonstrator “tripped and fell.” And director Memo Torres offers crucial guidance to “influencers” covering the crisis, like how to differentiate between protesters, rogue factions, and undercover agents planted to inflame tensions, as well as how to identify banned weapons such as tear gas.
As for those “less lethal” rounds? A law enforcement euphemism. Torres urges independent journalists to understand that “less lethal” does not mean nonlethal, and as CalMatters’ Sergio Olmos has shown—the hard way—officers are violating guidelines meant to govern the use of these rounds anyway. Olmos was recording the demonstrations when the LAPD hit him in the chest with what he called “less-lethal munitions.”
Reflecting on the experience, Olmos said, “California law enforcement [officers] are trained not to shoot these less-lethal rounds at the head and neck area because they can cause severe injuries. And you’re not supposed to use them to disperse people. But the LAPD is using them to move crowds back, which goes against their training. The protests themselves are not necessarily all that different from other protests I’ve seen, but the federal response to them is way out of proportion. The idea that Marines are needed—that is a choice. But this is not a war zone. It’s a protest.” —Amanda Darrach
There’s been a flurry of media news out of Oregon. Recently, CJR examined the potential of the Oregon Journalism Protection Act—which, if passed, would be the first law of its kind in the United States, forcing Big Tech to compensate news organizations in the state for a portion of the value their coverage generates on major platforms. Then we heard from Oregon Public Broadcasting and Lewis & Clark Law School about a partnership, starting this fall, for what they’ve called the Public Records and Government Transparency Project. This initiative will provide free legal resources to journalists and media organizations across the state, helping them access public records and clear hurdles to investigative reporting on public agencies and elected officials. That seems especially helpful because, this week—and, sorry, here comes a dart—Oregon House Bill 3564, designed to change the law about asking a publisher to correct or retract a statement, passed a vote in the state senate.
As Shasta Kearns Moore, a reporter and the vice chair of the state’s Public Records Advisory Council, has come to learn, few journalists in Oregon have access to legal counsel—and that can have a chilling effect on coverage. A few years ago, when Moore investigated a teacher accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a student, she was threatened with “a barrage of legal threats” ahead of publication, as she testified to state senators. “Thankfully, I had the support of an in-house media lawyer who helped me navigate the intimidation and confirmed that we had solid legal footing,” she said. “We published. And the threats disappeared.”
The trouble with HB 3564—proposed by a Republican legislator named Darin Harbick, after Eugene Weekly reported, during Harbick’s campaign for office, that his son had been among the insurrectionists at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021—is that it would give subjects of press scrutiny more leeway in pushing back. As OPB put it, “The bill has drawn the ire of many Oregon news leaders who say it could chill accountability journalism, allowing powerful people more time to craft legal strategies to silence critical press coverage.” (Harbick’s son has said, for the record, that he was at the Capitol the day of the riots but didn’t participate in the attack or cross a police barricade. He now works for his dad, as a legislative assistant.) The crew from Lewis & Clark Law School will surely have some work cut out for them—and gratitude from Oregonian reporters. —Betsy Morais
Murder, murder, murder. True crime ought to be so much more. Why not open the category up to all the myriad schemes people come up with to rob, cheat, double-cross, and generally fuck one another over? That’s the animating principle behind Swindled, the funniest, most expansive, and certainly the most sui generis podcast to grace the genre. Or at least that’s what I’m deciding the animating principle is. I can’t ask the host of Swindled, who is anonymous—distinguishable only by his hypnotic monotone—and goes only by A Concerned Citizen.
The most recent episode is about the absurd, alternately spine-chilling and utterly puerile lengths to which corporate officers within eBay’s security division went in 2019 to target EcommerceBytes, a literal mom’n’pop newsletter run by Ida and David Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, that had the gall to be occasionally critical of a Fortune 500 company. Swindled reports that eBay security personnel, several of them ex–law enforcement or -military, launched a “war of terror against a middle-aged couple,” beginning with the grade-school prank of having unordered pizzas delivered at all hours, but quickly darkening: The pizzas become porno mags, sent not only to the Steiners but to their neighbors; the blue mags become bloody pig masks, then actual pig fetuses, then boxes of live spiders and cockroaches. People begin banging down the Steiners’ door at 3am, having been directed to an orgy there by a swingers’ post on Craigslist. And that’s before the eBay creeps decide to fly across the country to attempt to install a tracking device on David’s car, make plans to break into the couple’s garage, and discuss murdering their dog.
Swindled brings the receipts, from incriminating internal eBay emails to criminal proceedings and court documents, with the damning audio drop being A Concerned Citizen’s weapon of choice. If the coda to this sordid tale winds up cutting your sense of satisfaction with a shot of bitter reality—eBay’s CEO does step down, but with a $57 million severance package; the Steiners are fully traumatized; eBay as a corporate entity gets off with a $3 million slap on the wrist—well, that’s the world we live in, the very same one forcing our Concerned Citizen-journalist into the shadows. Every episode of Swindled ends with mention of a PO box for postcards, “but please, no packages. We do not trust you.” This time he appends: “And I have never felt more justified.” —Mike Laws
It’s always a good time to learn about queer history, and as World Pride 2025, the largest ever LGBTQ+ celebration, continues in Washington, DC, Kahlil Greene, the author of a Substack called History Can’t Hide, and Uncloseted Media have published a piece set in DC as the birthplace of drag, starring a figure Americans have largely forgotten. William Dorsey Swann, who threw clandestine drag balls in the 1880s, was identified back then in the Washington Post as “the queen.” Swann was born enslaved to a white woman in Maryland until he was freed by the DC Compensated Emancipation Act, passed in 1862. By the time of the drag balls, Swann was in the city, working as a janitor—and the crowing queen of resistance dance, as Greene writes, “to claim power and joy.” Newspapers covered the scene—and the arrests that took place. But it wasn’t until nearly a century later that the journalist Channing Gerard Joseph rediscovered Swann in the Post archives. The lesson, Greene writes, was one of erasure—not only because of the limits of historical documents, but “also because the LGBTQ+ movement often prioritized white, middle-class narratives deemed more ‘palatable’ to mainstream society, pushing intersectional identities to the margins.” —Betsy Morais
Last weekend, Terry Moran, a longtime correspondent at ABC News, became the most surprising person to attack Donald Trump on X since, well, Elon Musk a couple of days earlier. Trump is “a world-class hater,” Moran wrote. He reserved even harsher language for Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s immigration crackdown, writing that he is “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,” and that “you can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.” Predictably, senior members of the administration were quick to clutch their pearls. Equally predictably, Moran was quickly suspended. A few days later, ABC confirmed that he’s out.
Predictably (again), Moran’s punishment and subsequent ouster were condemned by liberal critics who argued that he was merely offering a truthful assessment of someone he covers. His post wasn’t just that: our Columbia colleague Margaret Sullivan pointed out in her newsletter that it was “well outside the bounds of what straight-news reporters do,” and, if pure objectivity is a myth and those bounds can be inconsistently policed, it still felt gratuitous, and unhelpful. It seems likely that he would have been punished whatever the political climate; his was the sort of post that gives corporate media overlords heartburn no matter who the president is. But in this climate—amid well-justified fears that corporate media overlords are caving to political pressure—even the appearance of compliance can be dangerous. Having already settled a defendable libel suit brought by Trump, ABC hasn’t bought itself much benefit of the doubt, and axing Moran altogether looks like a disproportionate punishment for an X post. This might be a rare dart thrown at both houses—and the Trump administration for good measure.
Whatever the rationale for Moran’s ouster, it wasn’t a firing, per se—in an almost unbelievable coincidence, his contract was reportedly up today, and it now won’t be renewed. It quickly looked likely to us that he might resurface on Substack, joining a growing recent contingent of recovering straight-news reporters who are now freer to speak their minds—and sure enough, he has already popped up there. “This is an amazing space, and I can’t wait to get at it,” he said in a video posted to the platform. It’s a time, he added, of “such trouble for our country.” —Jon Allsop
Two weeks ago, Kurier, a German-language newspaper based in Vienna, published an article that got people talking. It was billed as an exclusive interview with Clint Eastwood, the ninety-five-year-old actor and film director, in which he criticized the era of franchises and endless remakes. There was just one thing wrong: the “interview” never took place. Eastwood came out and said the exchange was “entirely phony.” The newspaper quickly cut ties with the freelancer, Elisabeth Sereda, who wrote the piece.
But what was interesting about the episode—and revealing about the mechanics of contemporary showbiz journalism—was that Sereda had not done anything out of the ordinary. The issue seemed to be the packaging of the article: that it had been framed, wrongly, as an “interview,” rather than the usual “birthday portrait.” Sereda compiled the piece from roundtable discussions she’d attended, often held at film festivals, in which a huddle of reporters fire questions at a celebrity promoting a movie. Some showbiz reporters make a career out of roundtable copy. But in a hungry global news ecosystem—and after Reuters picked it up—the Eastwood article made for easy chum for entertainment news sites, aggregators, and Hollywood publications: Deadline, Variety, Yahoo News UK, EntertainmentNow. Eastwood spoke out against the “phony” interview. Soon, a few pieces were taken down; others added content notes. Some remain unchanged. —Jem Bartholomew
Florida’s Department of Children and Families, whose top official was appointed by Ron DeSantis, the governor, sent a cease and desist letter to the Orlando Sentinel, which has been reporting on grants distributed by Hope Florida, a welfare nonprofit that is the signature initiative of Casey DeSantis, the governor’s wife. Roger Simmons, the executive editor of the Sentinel, described the letter to the AP as an “attempt to chill free speech and encroach on our First Amendment right to report on an important issue.” That’s bad—but the good news is, the Sentinel can proceed with its coverage. “DCF can send all the cease and desist letters it wants, but the Sentinel isn’t obligated to follow any of them,” Clay Calvert, a law professor emeritus at the University of Florida and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told the AP. “This is really trying to silence any negative coverage before it comes out.” —Betsy Morais
Purdue University has ended its relationship with The Exponent—the only student newspaper on campus, and the largest collegiate newspaper in Indiana—cutting off its distribution and seemingly disposing of an arrangement that had lasted fifty years. At the end of May, the Purdue Student Publishing Foundation board, the nonprofit group that oversees The Exponent, received an email from Purdue’s legal counsel saying its contract had been expired for more than ten years and that the school doesn’t intend to re-up, because of the administration’s policy on “institutional neutrality.” That means no more designated access to newspaper racks or parking spaces. In addition, The Exponent was told to remove the Purdue name from its masthead and Web address—even though the foundation has a trademark on “The Purdue Exponent” until 2029. “Purdue’s moves are unacceptable and represent not only a distortion of trademark law but a betrayal of the university’s First Amendment obligations to uphold free expression,” Dominic Coletti, a student press program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told The Exponent. “Breaking long-standing practice to hinder student journalism is not a sign of institutional neutrality; it is a sign of institutional cowardice.” —Betsy Morais
Bill Grueskin is off today. He will return next week. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here.
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