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Last week, I wrote in this newsletter about attacks, mostly perpetrated by law enforcement, on journalists covering the protests that followed the recent immigration raids in Los Angeles, and how they echoed the summer of 2020, when police assaulted journalists covering the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd: an Australian TV reporter was hit while talking to camera, which also happened in 2020; ditto the on-air detention of a CNN correspondent; as of last Monday, the US Press Freedom Tracker was working to document at least twenty-six anti-press incidents in LA—short of the hundreds that cascaded nationwide in 2020, but, perhaps, an ominous starting point. As last week progressed, the echoes continued: the confirmed number of injured Australian journalists alone jumped to three; an LA police officer was caught on camera shoving and screaming at an ABC journalist; as of Friday, the Press Freedom Tracker was working to document at least fifty anti-press incidents. On Thursday, shocking footage spread showing Alex Padilla, the senator from California, being manhandled and cuffed after trying to ask a question of Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, at a federal building in LA. This wasn’t a press-freedom violation. (Padilla isn’t a journalist.) But the vile scene did play out at a press conference.
The Padilla footage perhaps felt less like an echo than a frightening new low in America’s slide into authoritarianism; it recalled a sequence from Andor, the superb recent Star Wars spin-off that may be science fiction, but offers a chillingly real depiction of the mechanics of incipient fascism. (This was how it looked to me, at any rate—some other journalists expertly bothsidesed the incident.) And, as I wrote last week, Trump’s grotesquely disproportionate response to the LA protests—mobilizing the National Guard over the head of California governor Gavin Newsom, then calling up seven hundred Marines for good measure—was a clear escalation compared with 2020, when Trump himself explicitly ruled out such a course of action. As far as the media is concerned, while the echoes of how the police often treated journalists in 2020 are ringing loud and clear, that turbulent summer brought many other challenges for the industry. Those are echoing now, too—albeit, sometimes, in warped and distorted ways. Examining how can help us understand what sort of moment this is.
One other clear echo of 2020, as I noted in passing last week, has been criticism of how major media outlets have covered the LA protests. Various observers have argued that coverage of the racial-justice protests in the aftermath of Floyd’s death too often failed to reflect their reality—by, for example, focusing excessively on related violence and destruction (when the protests were mostly peaceful) or using passive language that softened descriptions of police-perpetrated abuses—and in so doing got stuck in what scholars have dubbed a typical “protest paradigm.” This time around, there have been similar critiques: writing in The Objective, Beatrice Foreman wrote that “predictably, some national and large local media outlets fell right into the trap of the protest paradigm”; the media critic Dan Froomkin, meanwhile, accused such outlets of “aiding and abetting” Trump’s “quest to cast the small-scale rioting in Los Angeles as an existential threat to the country,” and of overreliance on arrests as a key lens through which to evaluate the protests. Writing last week, Froomkin suggested that a wave of anti-Trump demonstrations scheduled for Saturday, under the banner “No Kings,” would be a chance for the media to do better. The coverage I saw did indeed seem better—though this was, perhaps, because of a shortage of violent imagery to draw on. (Indeed, headlines casting the protests as “peaceful”—or “largely” so—drew some criticism for understating the extent to which this was true, and could be seen as premised on the idea that the peacefulness was a departure from some priced-in baseline of violence.)
Conservative media, in particular, have amped up the false idea that LA has spiraled into degeneracy, and this, too, is an echo of 2020: on Friday, The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote that “the cinematic universe of right-wing media” is treating the LA protests as “a sequel of sorts,” and “insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle,” even though the pockets of violence in LA have not been anywhere near as significant as the rioting that sometimes—but, again, by no means always—marred the 2020 demonstrations and their long tail. One right-winger who made such a claim: Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that, if anything, the LA “riots are worse.” Cotton’s op-ed was itself a very direct echo: back in 2020, he wrote one for the New York Times, headlined “Send in the Troops,” in which he called for Trump to deploy the military to respond to unrest; the headline on his Journal article read “Send In the Troops, for Real.” I found this latter headline confusing, since it seemed to imply that Cotton wasn’t entirely serious last time. (Doubly so since the Journal op-ed reads as less keen on Trump invoking the Insurrection Act than the Times one did.) Still, Reason’s Matt Welch noted the parallels, writing that “We are almost, if not quite, living in a Tom Cotton universe.”
For the mainstream media, Cotton’s Times piece was of great import, landing, as it did, in the middle of a broader “reckoning” over representation, “objectivity,” and depictions of race and violence across the industry; Times staffers reacted furiously to its publication, including by tweeting en masse that the paper had put Black colleagues in danger; the paper’s opinion section appended a note to the top of the piece acknowledging that it “fell short of our standards and should not have been published”; soon, the head of the section, James Bennet, was out of a job. Since then, the piece has been subjected to more revisionism than perhaps any other op-ed in history, not only from Bennet himself—he told Semafor in 2022 that he regretted the editor’s note and said that the Times’ publisher “set me on fire and threw me in the garbage”—but from anti-woke supposed apostates and other commentators who concluded that the episode was a totemic and alarming case of snowflake journalists forming a mob against a core principle of free speech and ideological diversity. (Cotton himself didn’t indulge this idea as much as I expected him to in his Journal op-ed, but did flick at the controversy in a line about liberals and “fainting couches.”)
It’s not inherently unreasonable to reevaluate the Times’ disowning of the initial Cotton op-ed and conclude that the paper erred; questions of who gets to say what, where, are inevitably contentious, and that was a heated time. But the revisionism often overlooks very real problems with the op-ed—it was reported that Bennet hadn’t read it prior to publication, and it did contain some tendentious statements, to put it mildly—and it’s a shame that it appears to have gone down in media history as a caricature of a top outlet abandoning its standards. The idea that Cotton was censored remains laughable—as a United States senator, he has any number of potential platforms for his speech, and the idea that freedom of expression required granting him any one private platform in particular is a fallacy. Opinion sections—even those that commit to hosting a wide array of views—have always, in practice, drawn the line somewhere, and done so in accordance with their values, stated or not. (I have no idea whether the Times would have run Cotton’s retread op-ed now, but it’s telling to me that it landed in the pages of the Journal, where, perhaps, it belonged all along.) It’s healthy to debate where the line might be drawn. But it’s wrong to conclude that the call to “send in the troops” is merely an academic argument with no consequences.
We are, in fact, seeing those consequences now, in the febrile atmosphere that Trump’s National Guard mobilization stoked in LA through to his explicit call, last night, for immigration authorities to ramp up raids in cities he sees as constituting a “Democrat Power Center” and the very real prospect that troops could soon be sent to those, too. There’s been some very sharp media coverage of all this. And yet the reformist energies that informed the internal media-industry debate in 2020 feel to me to be in retreat now—having fallen victim, perhaps, to the impression that it’s Trump who now holds the master key to the zeitgeist. This is arguably most visible in the much-needed push to make newsrooms more representative, which, at the very least, has now lost its rhetorical force, with some media companies among those that have publicly distanced themselves from the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as the new administration has waged all-out war on the concept. Not that this is necessarily the case across the board. The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan recently reported that Anna Wintour—the Vogue and Condé Nast titan whose record on questions of race was sharply challenged in 2020—has become an “unlikely activist” for continued progress on DEI, even if Condé’s diversity stats have “ticked up and down” since then. “It’s a challenging time,” Wintour told Givhan. “I feel we need to be courageous.”
If not everyone is heeding this call, nor is it true that everyone has forgotten the lessons of 2020. This can certainly be said of the numerous journalists who braved tear gas and police projectiles to bring us the story back then, and who are doing so again now. And the echoes in the news cycle seem sure to continue: sometimes fainter, sometimes clearer. Yesterday, in its coverage of a widely criticized military parade in Washington that happened to coincide with Trump’s birthday, Politico’s insidery Playbook newsletter made space to bring context to the scene near Lafayette Square, outside the White House, as onlookers gawked at a fireworks display. This was the spot “where, five years ago this month, the U.S. Park Police used tear gas against nonviolent protesters and National Guard military police helped clear the area so that the president could walk to St. John’s Church and pose for a photo,” the writer, Zack Stanton, noted. The words “Black Lives Matter,” he added, were emblazoned on the ground—until a few months ago, when they were literally erased.
The epicenter of that summer’s unrest was the Minneapolis area, where a police officer murdered Floyd. Over the weekend, that area found itself once again tethered to a sickening act of violence with national ramifications when a man pretending to be a police officer assassinated Melissa Hortman, a Democratic lawmaker and former Speaker in the statehouse, and her husband, and shot and wounded a state senator and his wife (who, mercifully, appear to be recovering). Various obituaries over the weekend noted, albeit rarely all that prominently, that Hortman had been a driving force behind a package of police reforms in Minnesota following Floyd’s murder. Recently, less than a month before she was killed, Hortman had put out a statement marking the fifth anniversary of the tragedy. “George Floyd’s life mattered, and he should still be alive today,” she wrote. “We will keep doing everything in our power to prevent the senseless loss of life we witnessed.”
Other notable stories:
- ICYMI, on Thursday, the House of Representatives voted, by a two-vote margin, in favor of a rescissions package that, among other things, would claw back previously authorized funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funnels federal cash to NPR, PBS, and public media stations around the country; initially, it looked as though six Republicans were set to oppose the package, which would have tanked it, only for two of them—Reps. Don Bacon and Nick LaLota—to flip. The Senate will now have to weigh in on the package within the next month or so if its cuts are to take effect. According to Politico, Senate Republicans are discussing possibly amending the package (though it’s not clear they can), while it remains possible that some of the cuts could be offset via future spending bills.
- Yesterday, the BBC reported that Bassam al-Hassan—a top former adviser to the fallen Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who served as chief of staff to a group that the BBC recently established held Austin Tice, an American journalist, after he was abducted in the country, in 2012—has told the FBI and the CIA that Assad ordered Tice executed in 2013. Sources told the BBC that US officials are working to determine the credibility of Hassan’s claims—and intend to search sites where he said Tice’s body might be—though some observers are skeptical that Assad would have given such an instruction directly. Debra Tice, Austin’s mother, said she believes that Hassan told the FBI what it wanted to hear, and that her son is alive.
- Also yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a cyberattack had compromised email accounts belonging to a number of journalists at the Washington Post, some of whom write about China, and that a foreign state may be behind the hack. The attack recalls a similar intrusion—at the Journal—a few years ago, during which hackers who “appeared to be interested in a range of issues of importance to Beijing” accessed a range of documents including drafts of articles, though the Post attack is thought to be narrower, and staffers said they rarely send sensitive information by email. (Matt Murray, the top editor of the Journal during the hack there, now leads the Post.)
- Alistair Kitchen, an Australian national who studied creative writing at Columbia University before returning to his home country last year, has said that he was detained for twelve hours and interrogated by border officials upon trying to reenter the US last week, and that the officials explicitly told him that he had been stopped over blog posts that he wrote about pro-Palestinian protests on Columbia’s campus last year. According to The Guardian, Kitchen was eventually deported back to Australia, and only regained possession of his phone when he landed.
- And The Atlantic reports that the Trump administration has tapped Ariel Abergel, a youthful former producer at Fox News, to oversee America’s forthcoming 250th-birthday celebrations, and that Abergel has brought others over from Fox to help out. Some critics have suggested that Abergel’s role violates the supposed “nonpolitical, nonpartisan” spirit of the event, among other concerns. “He’s not necessarily doing anything bad, and he’s a super-nice guy and wants to do a good job,” one source told The Atlantic. “But the idea he’d be put in charge of this is kind of insane.”
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