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Last week, counter to what his name might suggest, Don Craven stood up for his principles, and those of journalists, by resigning as chief executive of the Illinois Press Association. Under his authority as the group’s CEO and legal counsel, Craven had added the IPA to a lawsuit brought by press groups against the Trump administration over its arrests and aggressive physical tactics against reporters covering protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and troop deployments in the Chicago area. Not so fast, the IPA’s board responded. It ordered Craven to remove the association’s name from the list of plaintiffs, according to an email he wrote to colleagues. Craven complied—and promptly quit in protest. In his email, Craven wrote that the lawsuit’s aim was “to preserve and protect the First Amendment rights of journalists.” Surely that’s a concept a press association can get behind.
Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children since its invasion in early 2022 has been one of the great subsidiary tragedies and outrages of its long and brutal campaign. Thousands of children—the estimated number varies wildly—have been stolen from their families and guardians by Russian authorities and trafficked across the border. Some have been put up for sham adoptions; others have been forced into military training. The nonpartisan Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale, which pegs the number of stolen children at thirty-five thousand, has called it the largest mass child kidnapping since the Nazi atrocities of World War II. Ukraine’s government has called it an act of genocide. And yet last week, when Melania Trump noted raising the subject with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, the news coverage was strangely shallow and muted.
Only a few stories noted the breathtaking vastness of Russia’s systematic abuse, or bothered to call it what the International Criminal Court in The Hague did in indicting Putin in 2023: a war crime. Euphemisms flourished: the Washington Post repeatedly described the Ukrainian children as “separated” from their families, as if they’d gotten lost on a busy street. Reuters wrote, passively, that the children had been “caught up” in the war. Politico called the children “war-displaced”—a technically accurate but wholly misleading framing. The New York Times said the children were “missing” and had been “taken into” Russian territory. It didn’t mention who had done this “taking.”
Melania’s speech, all of six minutes, was light on details, though she arguably deserves credit for raising concern. The mainstream press earns no plaudits. Reporting on a monstrous crime and tragedy of this scale deserves and demands context, accuracy, and detail, if not some heart and passion.
Sometimes it isn’t just about the money. Robert Decherd, the former chairman and controlling shareholder of DallasNews Corp. (né A.H. Belo Corp.), spent his summer at the center of a bidding war for the company’s legacy asset, the Dallas Morning News. Last month, Decherd finally agreed to sell to Hearst. In so doing, Decherd became a rarity: an investor-owner willing to accept less than he could have gotten. Hearst’s $16.50 per share offer was 17 percent less than MediaNews Group’s final bid, $20 per share. But Decherd, the great-grandson of the paper’s founder, weighed another consideration: MediaNews Group is controlled by Alden Global Capital, the investment fund known for acquiring newspapers, cutting costs, stripping any remaining value, and then reselling for scrap. Despite the lower price, Decherd contended that Hearst was a better steward for the family jewel.
As CJR’s Ivan L. Nagy wrote, the Pentagon’s draconian restrictions on press access were met with a nearly unanimous wall of resistance from news organizations this week. Nearly. The only domestic outfits that agreed to abide by Secretary of Defense I Mean War Peter Hegseth’s odious source-approval requirements were The Federalist, the Epoch Times, and One America News, the cable network. Given the overtly MAGA-friendly orientation of all three outlets, maybe it’s just as well that their news reports out of the Pentagon should now be viewed with enhanced cynicism. But at a moment when reporters from across the ideological spectrum found Hegseth’s dictates so onerous that they handed in their press badges in protest, it’s striking that all three effectively acknowledged that they don’t subscribe to the same principles.
Rural America has been ground zero for the news-desert phenomenon of the past two decades; professional news sources have entirely disappeared in more than two hundred counties. Then there are the gritty, fighting-the-good-fight outfits, such as the Hooker County Tribune in Mullen, Nebraska. Located in a sparsely populated corner of the state, the paper is largely the work of one energetic individual. Owner Gerri Peterson not only reports the news and sells the ads, but keeps the paper going by taking third-party printing jobs (she also sells art and office supplies on the side). Something seems to be working, despite the odds. The Tribune has a larger press run (757 copies) than there are people in Hooker County (population 698), a market penetration the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University calls “astounding.”
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