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You know something is up when a major scoop pops onto your screen in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. That’s what happened last weekend, when MSNBC’s Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian broke the story that Tom Homan had allegedly accepted fifty thousand dollars in cash amid an FBI investigation, several months before he became the White House “border czar” and the face of President Trump’s immigration enforcement actions. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy attorney general Todd Blanche told MSNBC that they dropped the case after they “found no credible evidence of any criminal wrongdoing.” At no point in the story, though, does anyone from the administration deny that Homan accepted the cash, which, as the New York Times would report in a five-byline follow a few hours later, was delivered to Homan inside a bag from Cava, the Mediterranean-theme food chain.
There’s the laurel. Now for the dart. The leading byline on MSNBC’s story might look both familiar and strange. Leonnig worked for more than two decades at the Washington Post, where she won or helped win four Pulitzer Prizes, including one for her unsparing examination of Secret Service failings. So why did this scoop appear at a rival news organization? Last month, Leonnig announced that she was leaving the Post via X. That post appeared just a few weeks after CEO Will Lewis sent an email to staff proclaiming that his team was embarking on a “strategic reinvention journey” and that “those who do not feel aligned with the company’s plan” should consider a buyout. On August 4, Leonnig announced that she was off to MSNBC.
Lewis and his boss, Jeff Bezos, have been trying to reverse the Post’s slide in circulation and revenue; according to one report, the company lost around a hundred million dollars last year. As any turnaround executive knows, you often need new people to make the changes your company requires. But the Post’s recent moves have fluctuated between ham-fisted and catastrophic. Bezos’s eleventh-hour decision to yank a Kamala Harris endorsement led to three hundred thousand cancellations by subscribers; reading the once vibrant opinion section under its new editor, Adam O’Neal, feels like choking down a spoonful of congealed Cream of Wheat. And even though many excellent reporters remain, some of the paper’s most talented journalists are taking their scoops elsewhere.
The Post’s self-inflicted exodus of talent is as much a business-side as an editorial disaster. For many decades, the Post, like most news organizations, relied largely on advertising to support its news operations. That model depended on amassing the maximum number of users and viewers, most of whom were paying nothing, or very little, to access their journalism. But now that ad revenue has collapsed, the Post must rely on subscriptions. And prospective readers need good reasons to subscribe, given the many options out there. By opening the exit ramp for stars like Leonnig, Bezos and Lewis have given people far fewer reasons to pay for whatever the Post is serving up.
Last year, Christina Jedra at Honolulu Civil Beat started digging into the government practice of putting workers on paid leave for long periods while investigations into their conduct slowly play out. Her July 2024 story found that such payments to various employees had cost taxpayers more than nine million dollars over three years. One worker, not identified at the time, was accused of fudging his mileage reimbursements by about twelve thousand dollars; during the still-unfinished government probe, he had been paid almost twenty times that amount and didn’t have to come to work.
More than a year after Jedra’s story was published, that case finally came to a conclusion: as she reported, the worker—an investigator in the Honolulu prosecutor’s office—was finally fired, nearly five years after the probe into his phony reimbursements had begun. The cost to taxpayers for his paid leave was more than three hundred thousand dollars; he even got a couple of union-mandated raises during that period.
And this case wasn’t tough to crack. The employee claimed he’d driven two thousand miles in one day, which is tough to do—especially on O‘ahu, an island with two hundred and twenty-seven miles of shoreline.
It is, or should be, possible to craft a two-week journalism education program around Florida’s theme parks, given their impact on the state’s economy, environment, and politics.
But an online brochure from the University of Georgia’s journalism program doesn’t generate a lot of confidence that its May course will give students much more than a totally awesome time. This “Introduction to Travel Journalism” class, the school promises, “will challenge you to look at theme park tourism and food writing through a journalistic lens.” To do that, these budding journalists will spend nine nights at Disney World and six at Universal Orlando—with the school promising access to seven theme parks, “resort amenities, including pools,” and, perhaps most important, “beverage coolers.”
Moms and dads will be reassured to know that the $3,000-ish fee for the class also includes not just the parks but also “hotels and shopping/dining/entertainment districts which will serve as our classroom,” and that “this course will combine academic rigor with experiential and hands-on learning.” For their toil, these undergrad and grad students will earn three credit hours.
There is often a temptation, when you have an investigative scoop in the works, to go for it. That is, to stretch your prose as far as you can, so readers fully appreciate the enormity of the misdeeds you’ve uncovered (along with the brilliance of your reporting, of course).
If you’re lucky, sane minds will prevail, and the Wall Street Journal’s careful handling of its Donald Trump/Jeffrey Epstein birthday-card story is an example of why. The July piece revealed that Trump sent a card as part of an effort overseen by Epstein aide Ghislaine Maxwell to honor the sex offender’s fiftieth birthday, in 2003. The crucial fifth graf of the story is carefully worded:
“The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
When the Journal asked Trump for comment, he denied authorship of the letter or the drawing. He sued the Journal’s parent company a day later, alleging that reporters Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo had “falsely claimed that he [Trump] authored, drew, and signed” the card. The reporters, he claimed, “falsely represent[ed] as fact that President Trump drew the naked woman’s breasts and signed his name ‘Donald’ below her waist, ‘mimicking pubic hair.’” He also states that the reporters “falsely pass off as fact” that Trump “wrote, drew, and signed this letter.” (Formatting preserved from the original.)
But none of this is true. The reporters did not do this. They stated that it was a letter “bearing Trump’s name.” They said “a pair of small arcs denotes” the breasts and “the future president’s signature is…below her waist.” The Journal reporters didn’t just hint at the ambiguous provenance of the letter. They embraced it, stating that “it isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared.”
There are plenty of other problems with the hastily written lawsuit: Trump called his card a “nonexistent letter” even though we would see proof later that it does, very much, exist. He said it defamed him, though it is unclear how this story might further besmirch the reputation of the “grab ’em by the pussy” braggart. Even if the Journal hadn’t been this careful, Trump’s lawsuit had little chance for success. Barring a biased judge or jury, it now stands none.
Finally, Trump’s suit concluded with the claim that he was seeking damages of no less than “$10 billion dollars [sic].” That, to every copy editor in America, may be the biggest affront of all.
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