A win for free press and supporters of the U.S. Constitution

A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Pentagon’s restrictions on news outlets violate the First Amendment and issued an order tossing parts of the Defense Department’s policy, handing a victory to The New York Times, which filed suit in December over the restrictions.

Judge Paul Friedman, of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, also ordered the Pentagon to restore the press passes of seven journalists for The Times. They had surrendered those passes in October instead of signing the policy, which empowered the Pentagon to declare journalists “security risks” and revoke their press passes if they engaged in any conduct that the Pentagon believed threatened national security.

In his 40-page ruling, Judge Friedman wrote that the Pentagon’s policy rewarded reporters who were “willing to publish only stories that are favorable to or spoon-fed by department leadership.”

Siding with an argument advanced by The Times, Judge Friedman added that the Pentagon had given itself too much power to enforce its new rules. The policy also violates journalists’ due process rights under the Fifth Amendment, he said, writing that it “provides no way for journalists to know how they may do their jobs without losing their credentials.”

The ruling was a defeat for the Trump administration, which has been engaged in a multifaceted pressure campaign against the news media. ABC News and CBS News’s parent company agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements to resolve suits that President Trump brought against the networks. The ABC late-night star Jimmy Kimmel was temporarily pulled off the air last year after Mr. Trump’s top communications regulator assailed his program and suggested that he might take regulatory action against the broadcaster.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former host on Fox News, has continued Mr. Trump’s adversarial stance toward the news media. He proposed denying access to Pentagon to a reporter from NBC News, then removed several news organizations from their on-site workstations. Months later, he curtailed the unescorted roaming privileges of journalists within the complex.

Friday’s ruling against the Pentagon followed a similarly stark decision this month from a federal judge to restore the operations of Voice of America, a government-funded news organization that Mr. Trump had ordered shuttered a year ago in an executive order.

A spokesman for The Times said Judge Friedman’s ruling “reaffirms the right of The Times and other independent media to continue to ask questions on the public’s behalf,” adding that “Americans deserve visibility into how their government is being run, and the actions the military is taking in their name and with their tax dollars.”

Sean Parnell, the chief spokesman at the Pentagon, said in an X post, “We disagree with the decision and are pursuing an immediate appeal.”

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FBI’s search of Washington Post reporter’s home raises questions

The Washington Post's Hannah Natanson’s home was search, and as a result, many in the media and elsewhere have worried about a chilling effect on reporters and potential whistleblowers, reported Lawfare. Advocates have also invoked the First Amendment: The search, critics have insisted, was an unconstitutional encroachment on press freedom. Commentators have even agonized over the possibility that the search represented only the beginning of a more aggressive posture toward journalists—in which not only are leakers to the media prosecuted under the Espionage Act, but the media is prosecuted, too.

An Early Morning Search

Jan. 14 was not a quiet day for Natanson. Early in the morning, the FBI conducted a search of the Washington Post reporter’s home as part of an investigation into Aurelio Perez-Lugones for allegedly leaking the documents he mishandled, presumably to Natanson. According to reports, Natanson had her cellphone, a recording device, a Garmin watch, and two laptops seized, but was told that she was not the focus of the investigation. The same morning, the government also issued the Washington Post a subpoena requesting information related to Perez-Lugones. 

Natanson is well-known for her coverage of the Trump administration, including efforts to fire federal workers. She published a story last week—which cited government documents obtained by the Post—that covered the U.S.’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

But the impetus for the search warrant in the case centered on Perez-Lugones, not Natanson. The affidavit alleges that Perez-Lugones took notes on information from a classified system on a notepad, which he then brought home. He is also accused of taking a screenshot of a classified report about an unidentified foreign country, speculated to be Venezuela. Investigators reportedly recovered these materials during a search of his residence.

The criminal complaint in the case does not charge Perez-Lugones with disclosing that information, although a separate filing mentioned the possibility of his disseminating it if not detained pretrial—which prompted the judge in the case to issue a review of his pretrial release.

Such obscurity is not, in and of itself, atypical; arrests in classified documents cases often proceed on the basis of allegations of mishandling of material and are later superseded with updated charging documents if and when further evidence is uncovered.

But in the immediate aftermath of the search, Trump administration officials were quick to suggest classified information had indeed been leaked. Attorney General Pam Bondi commented on X:

This past week, at the request of the Department of War, the Department of Justice and FBI executed a search warrant at the home of a Washington Post journalist who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor. The leaker is currently behind bars. I am proud to work alongside Secretary Hegseth on this effort. The Trump Administration will not tolerate illegal leaks of classified information that, when reported, pose a grave risk to our Nation’s national security and the brave men and women who are serving our country.

In a tweet a few hours after the search, FBI Director Kash Patel similarly implied a leak had occurred. He also claimed that the “leaker” had been arrested that week—as opposed to on Jan. 9, the date the affidavit in Perez-Lugones’s case was filed:

This morning the @FBI and partners executed a search warrant of an individual at the Washington Post who was found to allegedly be obtaining and reporting classified, sensitive military information from a government contractor—endangering our warfighters and compromising America’s national security. The alleged leaker was arrested this week and is in custody. As this is an ongoing investigation, we will have no further comment. 

The search of Natanson’s home quickly drew backlash from the public and the media, particularly with regard to its implications for freedom of the press. Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray said that the search was “deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern[s] around the constitutional protections for our work.”

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home,” the New York Times noted.

On Jan. 14—the same day that the FBI searched Natanson’s home—the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press filed a brief to unseal documents relating to the search of Natanson's home and the seizure of her devices. The brief requested that the court unseal the warrant in the case because “[t]he public is…left with no means to understand the government’s basis for seeking (and a federal court’s basis for approving) a search with dramatic implications for a free press and the constitutional rights of journalists.” On Jan. 21, the FBI released the search warrant for Natanson’s home, although the application for that warrant remains undisclosed to the public.

That same day, The Washington Post filed a brief requesting that federal law enforcement return Natanson’s seized belongings, arguing that “almost none” of the materials were relevant to the warrant and that the search “flouts the First Amendment and ignores federal statutory safeguards for journalists.” A magistrate judge ordered the government to preserve but not review materials seized from Natanson (including materials seized pursuant to two separate search warrants for her car and her person) until further briefing and scheduled a hearing on the matter for Feb. 6.

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F.B.I. flouts Privacy Protection Act and searches reporter's home

F.B.I. agents searched the home of a Washington Post reporter as part of a leak investigation, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s tactics in seeking information from the news media, reported Slate.

It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law called the Privacy Protection Act generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.

The Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, had spent the past year covering the Trump administration’s effort to fire federal workers and redirect much of the work force toward enforcing his agenda. Many of those employees shared with her their anger, frustration and fear with the administration’s changes.

A spokesperson for The Washington Post said on Wednesday that the publication was reviewing and monitoring the situation. The law enforcement agents seized laptops, a phone and a smartwatch during their search.

In a message to staff, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Post, said neither Ms. Natanson nor the paper was a focus of the investigation.

“Nonetheless, this extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” he wrote.

Court documents indicate that law enforcement officials were investigating Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a system administrator in Maryland who has a top-secret security clearance and has been accused of gaining access to and taking home classified intelligence reports that were found in his lunchbox and basement.

It is unclear whether the F.B.I. sought other means of obtaining the information it was seeking from The Post.

According to the F.B.I. affidavit, Mr. Perez-Lugones’s job meant he had access to sensitive information. It said he had printed confidential documents that he was not authorized to search for and took notes this year on a classified report related to government activity.

The court papers show investigators suspected Mr. Perez-Lugones in recent months of illegally mishandling classified information about an unidentified country.

In a statement on social media, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the search was executed at the request of the Pentagon to look for evidence at the home of a journalist “who was obtaining and reporting classified and illegally leaked information from a Pentagon contractor.”

Free speech experts condemned the move as an aggressive escalation that could undercut press freedom.

Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, pointed to the chilling effect it could have “on legitimate journalistic activity.”

Bruce D. Brown, the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the search one of the most invasive steps law enforcement could take. He said federal laws and policies limited searches to the most extreme cases, lest such a step chill the public interest in a free flow of information to the news media beyond the case in question.

“While we won’t know the government’s arguments about overcoming these very steep hurdles until the affidavit is made public,” Mr. Brown said, “this is a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”

In a first-person account of her experience talking to federal employees, Ms. Natanson quoted some of the messages she would receive.

“I understand the risks,” one Defense Department worker told her. “But getting the truth and facts out is so much more important.”

Another message, by a Justice Department staff member, read, “I’d never thought I’d be leaking info like this.”

The Justice Department’s use of a search warrant to obtain a reporter’s material was treated across party lines as a scandal in 2013. It was revealed that investigators in a leak case had portrayed a Fox News reporter as a criminal in applying for a court order to obtain the contents of the reporter’s email account.

Because Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had recently testified to Congress that he knew of no effort to prosecute reporters in leak investigations, Republicans accused him of perjury. In response, the Justice Department explained that it never intended to charge the Fox reporter and had portrayed the reporter as a criminal to get around the 1980 law.

In the aftermath, Mr. Holder issued a policy forbidding the Justice Department from portraying reporters as criminals to get search warrants for their notes and work materials unless it truly intended to prosecute them.

In 2021, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland bolstered that policy after it came to light that late in President Trump’s first term, the Justice Department sought the phone and email records of reporters at The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN as part of leak investigations. He flatly barred the use of search warrants and subpoenas to seize reporting materials or to require reporters to testify about their sources.

Last year, however, Ms. Bondi rolled back the Garland policy, restoring the ability of investigators to use search warrants and subpoenas to obtain reporters’ information. She largely restored the Holder-era policy, including a requirement to exhaust other means of obtaining evidence first before targeting reporters’ information.

But Ms. Bondi made a crucial change: She dropped the constraint Mr. Holder added that barred circumventing the 1980 law by portraying a reporter as a criminal suspect in bad faith.

While Mr. Holder insisted that he would never allow the Justice Department to prosecute a reporter for doing his or her job, however, it is not clear whether the Justice Department under Ms. Bondi has the same view.

A World War I law called the Espionage Act says it is a crime to disseminate sensitive information about the national defense without authorization, and on its face it would seem to apply to journalists who write about matters the government has deemed classified. But it has been widely considered to be a violation of the First Amendment to try to apply that law to journalists, and for generations, the Justice Department did not attempt to do so.

During the first Trump administration, however, the department breached that barrier by bringing Espionage Act charges against Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, for publishing classified documents leaked to the organization by Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst.

While Mr. Assange is not a traditional journalist, the charges treated journalistic-style activities — receiving and disseminating classified information — as something that could be treated as a crime. In 2024, the Biden administration reached a plea deal with Mr. Assange on that charge to resolve his case, so its constitutionality was never tested on appeal.

Mr. Trump himself was charged under the Espionage Act in 2023 and accused of keeping classified documents without authorization after he left office and obstructing government efforts to get them back. Prosecutors had to abandon that case, along with a separate indictment for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, after he was re-elected president in 2024.

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'Quiet, piggy' an insult too far

 Rachel Leingang of the Guardian writes:

It’s one outrage in days full of outrageous material.

“Quiet, piggy,” Donald Trump told a female reporter in a press gaggle, pointing his finger at her angrily.

It wasn’t the first time – not even the hundredth time – the US president has attacked the media. And it’s hard for any storyline to break through the administration’s “flood the zone” strategy, much less one like this. Nothing seems to stick. But the “quiet, piggy” clip has taken off, several days after the admonishment occurred on Air Force One last Friday, and without much help from the media itself.

“I don’t know why the ‘Piggy’ thing is bothering me so much,” wrote Hank Green, a YouTuber and author. “It’s one more unforgivable thing in a list of 20,000 unforgivable things, but I’ve been mad about it for like 12 straight hours.”

Trump is going through a string of losses: Democrats dominating in off-year elections, having to reverse course on the Epstein files, Republicans refusing to get rid of the filibuster to end the shutdown, a faltering economy. There’s a possibility that he’s losing his air of impenetrability, and his grip on the right could maybe, just maybe, be loosening.

The anger he displayed in the clip could be a sign of someone on the back foot, overreacting to a question Bloomberg correspondent Catherine Lucey was asking about why Trump was fighting against releasing the Epstein files “if there’s nothing incriminating in the files”. The files related to the child sexual abuser released so far by Congress show that Epstein communicated regularly, and derogatorily, about women with a host of prominent friends.

Lashing out at a female reporter with a derogatory insult amid a news cycle dominated by politicians splitting hairs over a man who ran a sex-trafficking outfit – it was pretty on the nose.

But the clip also pinged around the internet in the same news cycle as Trump telling another female reporter it was rude to ask Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist whom the CIA determined was killed at the direction of the crown prince.

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said of Khashoggi, responding to a question from ABC News’s Mary Bruce. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him, or didn’t like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”

The combined force of two outbursts at female journalists in a single news cycle – for asking about a child sexual abuser and a murdered colleague – went beyond the standard-fare Trumpian attacks on the media.

Part of the collective ire could be that no one in the press gaggle jumped to Lucey’s defense in the video, underlining that those attacked by Trump often stand alone while others fear becoming next on his list; the media backbone that stiffened in his first term has wilted, under exhaustion and at the hands of Trump-friendly owners, in his second. The condemnations of Trump and accolades for both journalists came after the fact.

“These incidents are not isolated; they are part of an unmistakable pattern of hostility – often directed at women – that undermines the essential role of a free and independent press,” the Society of Professional Journalists said in a statement Wednesday.

The White House, meanwhile, has doubled down on the comment, saying Lucey had “behaved in an inappropriate and unprofessional way towards her colleagues on the plane”, providing no details on what that meant. “If you’re going to give it, you have to be able to take,” they said.

Beyond the clip’s power to outrage, though, is a sign that the leftwing media ecosystem and its creators are starting to command attention and elevate stories that media outlets aren’t jumping on. As Democratic digital strategist Parker Butler pointed out on X, the “quiet, piggy” clip grabbed millions of views on online accounts four days after it happened, saying: “It got almost NO coverage when he said it … A viral post can shape an entire news cycle.”

And some Democrats who’ve taken the strategy of being Trump back to Trump, including California governor Gavin Newsom’s press office, are using the clip to bully the president back, Photoshopping Trump’s face onto pigs and repeatedly tweeting “quiet, piggy”.

In Trump 2.0, you never know which affronts to decency will stick in people’s minds. This one, though, has a symbolism that seems to be resonating.

“Portland has reclaimed the frog as a symbol of its resistance to Trump’s efforts to militarize the city,” former US attorney and commentator Joyce Alene wrote on X. “Perhaps women should claim the glamorous, sassy Muppet Miss Piggy, a known diva with a fierce karate chop, as their own symbol.”

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CREATORS: The Tragic Abduction and Murder of Etan Patz is Back in the News

Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
August 5, 2025

In 1979, a 6-year-old boy disappeared on his way to his Manhattan school bus stop. Etan Patz's disappearance changed the way people parent, launching the missing and exploited children's movement. Patz was never found.

Thirty-three years later, Pedro Hernandez was arrested and charged by the Manhattan district attorney's office with second-degree murder and first-degree kidnapping.

According to The New York Times, "Hernandez was living in New Jersey when a relative told authorities that he suspected him of killing Etan. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hernandez had a history of sexually abusing a family member, drug use and domestic violence."

This arrest was high-profile. As one of the nation's most infamous child abductions, with an arrest decades after the crime, one would think the police would want to make sure everything was done by the book. Not in New York City.

The police elicited a confession from Hernandez after seven hours of questioning. That isn't particularly unusual, but the confession came before he was administered his Miranda warnings. After he confessed, he was mirandized by the police who had Hernandez repeat his confession on tape, according to court filings.

The New York Times reported, Hernandez's first trial in 2015 ended with a hung jury after 18 days of deliberation. The lone holdout said that his primary reason had been Hernandez's initial confession, which to the juror seemed "coerced."

In 2017, a second jury convicted Hernandez on the ninth day of deliberations. The jury foreman later remarked that "deliberations were difficult."

Last month, a federal court granted Hernandez a new trial.

A quarter-century after Patz disappeared, Americans were presented with a list of six crimes that could happen in their local communities. A CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found that Americans expressed the greatest concern for their children being abducted and sexually molested.

Child abductions by strangers have consistently remained a concern for parents. Despite the more than 30,000 juveniles who are reported missing every year to the National Crime Information Center, it is rare for children to be abducted by strangers. Roughly 182 children were kidnapped by people outside their families in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, according to a study published in 2022 by the Department of Justice.

A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found nearly one-in-three U.S. parents with children younger than 18 say they are extremely or very worried about their children being abducted.

Etan's disappearance, the murders of Adam Walsh, Polly Klaas and JonBenet Ramsey ushered in, and fueled, an era of hyper-vigilance for parents. Parents' irrational fear of stranger danger changed the way parents care for their children, and the way children interact with adults and their peers for that matter. Politicians jumped on the stranger danger bandwagon. Starting with former President Ronald Reagan proclaiming the day Etan Patz disappeared, May 25, as National Missing Children's Day, politicians have enacted more and more draconian laws to deal with the sexual abuse and exploitation of children.

Hernandez's arrest and conviction for killing Etan should have provided some closure for a case that had extraordinary implications. His new trial will open wounds festering for 46 years. The upheaval could have been avoided.

Hernandez was arrested and tried in a cold case based on flimsy evidence devoid of any forensic evidence. Then investigators interviewed Hernandez without advising him of his rights. The police then read him his rights and interviewed him a second time, getting a second taped confession. This tactic flew in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2004.

The Court, in a 5-4 decision, found the second confession inadmissible, particularly when the police strategy was to intentionally undermine the effectiveness of the Miranda warnings. That decision is the key to Hernandez's successful appeal and Etan Patz being back in the news.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino

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Trump's case against Wall Street Journal faces hurdles

 Donald Trump's legal case against the Wall Street Journal over a story about the U.S. president and Jeffrey Epstein could face hurdles, one of which is that it does not appear to comply with Florida state rules over the timing of defamation lawsuits, legal experts told Reuters.

If the case proceeds, Trump would need to clear a demanding "actual malice" standard that must be met by public figures to win in U.S. defamation cases. The standard means Trump must prove the paper knew the article was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth.

The Wall Street Journal lawsuit is the latest in a series of cases Trump has filed against news outlets, and experts said his demonstrated willingness to sue could have a chilling effect on coverage of his administration even if the suit was ultimately unsuccessful.

Trump sued the Journal and its owners including Rupert Murdoch in Miami federal court on Friday, seeking at least $10 billion on each of two defamation counts. He said the newspaper defamed him in a July 17 report that said Trump's name was on a 2003 birthday greeting for Epstein that included a sexually suggestive drawing and a reference to secrets they shared.

A spokesperson for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent, said on Friday the company was confident in the accuracy of its reporting and would vigorously defend itself against the lawsuit.

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He had pleaded not guilty and the case was dismissed after his death.

Backers of conspiracy theories about Epstein have urged Trump to release investigative files related to the disgraced financier and sex offender.

Two lawyers with experience in defamation law said Trump did not appear to have complied with a Florida law requiring anyone bringing a defamation case against "a newspaper, periodical, or other medium" to notify the defendant at least five days before filing suit.

That means the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles, would have no option but to dismiss the case if the Journal asked him to do so, though Trump may be able to re-file it, the experts said.

The Journal published its story on Thursday. In his lawsuit on Friday, Trump's lawyers said the Journal informed Trump about the forthcoming article last Tuesday, and they sent the paper an email that same day asserting that the article would be false and defamatory.

That timeline does not appear to comply with Florida's five-day notice law, said Marc Randazza, who said he had been practicing defamation law in Florida for more than 20 years.

"I don't even need to look at the merits of the case. The game is over," said Randazza of law firm Randazza Legal Group in Las Vegas. Randazza said Trump's case was "at least colorable" on the merits.

The White House deferred comment to Trump's lawyer in the case, who did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Dow Jones declined to comment.

TRUMP MUST CLEAR HIGH BAR

In addition to the five-day notice hurdle, Trump would likely struggle to prove that the Journal acted with "actual malice," said Andrew Fleischman of law firm Sessions & Fleischman in Atlanta.

To back Trump's claim that the Journal knew the story was inaccurate, his complaint says the president informed the Journal before publication that the reporting was false.

Fleischman said a disagreement about the truth of an assertion is not enough to prove actual malice. Instead, Trump would need to demonstrate that the paper was deliberately lying.

The billions in monetary damages Trump was seeking is a "PR figure" designed to attract attention, said Fleischman, who frequently defends clients against defamation claims.

The figure would far exceed the largest defamation judgments and settlements in recent history, including a $1.3 billion judgment against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and Fox News' settlement with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million.

Trump, a Republican who has pledged to "straighten out the press," has a mixed record in the numerous lawsuits he has filed against media outlets.

Judges have dismissed cases he brought against CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. More recently, television network ABC and CBS parent company Paramount (PARA.O), opens new tab have opted to settle cases brought by Trump.

Walt Disney (DIS.N), opens new tab-owned ABC News in December paid $15 million and publicly apologized for comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos, who inaccurately said Trump had been found liable for rape. Trump had been found liable of sexually abusing, but not raping, the magazine writer E. Jean Carroll.

Paramount's $16 million settlement came as the company seeks approval from U.S. regulators for its merger with Skydance Media. Trump had initially sought $10 billion in his lawsuit, which alleged CBS deceptively edited an interview with Democratic former Vice President Kamala Harris to favor her rival presidential bid.

Even if the Journal prevails, Trump's willingness to file claims against news organizations could have a chilling effect on journalists given the costs of defending against them, experts said.

BONGINO CASE DISMISSED

Trump would not be the first member of his administration to run up against Florida's five-day notice provision.

In 2019, podcaster Dan Bongino - who is now the deputy director of the FBI - sued online news outlet the Daily Beast for defamation over a story about his departure from the National Rifle Association's online video channel.

The case was dismissed the next year. U.S. District Judge Jose Martinez in Miami sided with the Daily Beast in finding that Bongino did not comply with the provision, but said the basis of his decision was that Bongino's case lacked merit.

Neither the FBI nor Bongino's personal lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.

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Autocracy 101: Crush the free press

Joanne Lipman on Catie Couric Media:

Last fall, I created a scorecard for the journalism class I teach at Yale. It listed five strategies that authoritarian-leaning leaders have used to crush the free press in their countries. I flashed the scorecard on a screen. “Take a picture,” I suggested to the students, “and keep track of which of those strategies might migrate to the United States.”

I had culled the five strategies from a Washington Post essay, “How the quiet war against press freedom could come to America,” by New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger. His piece focused on leaders in democracies like Hungary and India who have weaponized existing laws and norms to cripple the news media, deploying an arsenal that includes normalizing harassment of journalists, abusing regulatory authority, and exploiting the courts with frivolous lawsuits.

Sulzberger’s piece was intended to be a warning. The Trump administration apparently read it as a playbook.

Like my students, I’ve been keeping score too. I’ve been around for a while — my first Trump-adjacent article was about the “new” USFL (Google it!) — so I’m not surprised by much. But honestly, it is astonishing how quickly the scorecard has filled out. And it’s growing longer by the day.

By my latest count – and it is likely incomplete– there have been more than 100 actions that threaten American press freedom, most taken since the November election or shortly before. And that doesn’t count yesterday’s headlines about Trump allegedly seeking more than $25 million from Paramount to settle a lawsuit over routine editing of a CBS “60 Minutes” interview. The case is so widely considered frivolous – my pal Katie Couric yesterday called it “bullshit” – that some company execs fear settling it may lead to criminal charges of bribery.

All of these measures have been reported individually. But the visual list is a gut punch — and a wake-up call.

Here’s the original scorecard:

Go HERE to see Trump Administration scorecard.

Mainstream media, for the most part, has remained steadfast in the face of the onslaught. Reporting from major outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and ProPublica, remains robust, as does that from smaller news organizations and independent journalists, like those writing on Substack.

And to be clear, there are valid criticisms of the news media. Trust in the press has been declining for about half a century, long before the current moment, for a variety of reasons, including some that were self-inflicted.

But what’s happening now is an order of magnitude greater than anything we have seen before. And it’s taking a toll — from threatening journalists’ safety to prompting self-censorship among news organizations for fear of reprisals for factual reporting. Already, executives at news organizations from CBS and WNET to The New York Post have allegedly pressured newsrooms to tone down or even kill some coverage of the Trump administration.

I’m a firm believer in the notion, which I realize some colleagues think is outdated, that the role of the news media isn’t to be the resistance. It is to hold power to account and to seek the truth, regardless of who is in power.

If this scorecard shows us anything, it illustrates that the watchdog role is more important than ever, and how crucial it is for journalists, and all of us, to hold the line.

As Sulzberger rightly pointed out in a recently updated speech on the topic, “Fear is contagious. But courage is also contagious.”

Voice of America journalists under fire for criticizing the President

 Voice of America, the federally funded broadcaster to the world, has long prided itself on serving as an accurate and fair source of news and on being independent of whichever president and party are in power in the United States, reported The New York Times.

Since the election of President Trump, that independence is increasingly being tested.

In recent months, Voice of America’s parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has opened human-resources investigations into Voice of America journalists for reporting on criticism of Mr. Trump or for making comments that were perceived as critical of him, according to several employees. Some journalists raised concerns about the investigations in a meeting this week with the broadcaster’s director.

At least a couple of articles that included criticism of Mr. Trump and his administration were not published or were watered down after publication in recent months, said three Voice of America employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

The Agency for Global Media informed one of Voice of America’s highest-profile journalists, Steven Herman, that he was being placed on an extended “excused absence” pending a human resources investigation, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Herman confirmed receiving the letter, which said the investigation was into whether his “social media activity has undermined V.O.A.’s audiences’ perceptions of the objectivity and/or credibility of V.O.A. and its news operations.”

Weeks earlier, Mr. Herman came under fire from the Trump administration when he cited a quote on social media from an anticorruption watchdog group criticizing cutbacks at the United States Agency for International Development.

Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s envoy for “special missions,” wrote on X that Mr. Herman’s comments were “treasonous.”

“You don’t get to work against the official U.S. government policies while being paid by US taxpayers,” Mr. Grenell continued. “You should be immediately fired.”

Also on Friday, Voice of America officials informed Patsy Widakuswara, the broadcaster’s longtime White House bureau chief, that she was being involuntarily reassigned to another beat, employees said. Some Voice of America journalists suspected the move was part of an effort to reduce friction with the Trump administration, although an official at the broadcaster, who wasn’t authorized to talk to the media, denied that.

The Agency for Global Media declined to comment.

The upheaval at Voice of America comes amid a series of broadsides against the media by the Trump administration. The White House has started selecting which news outlets are part of the press pool that covers the president, and it has barred The Associated Press from events because it won’t reclassify the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The Federal Communications Commission has opened investigations into whether broadcasters are acting in the public interest. And Mr. Trump has filed or threatened lawsuits against news outlets whose coverage he objected to.

Journalists at Voice of America have been fretting about their future ever since Mr. Trump said he would appoint Kari Lake, a former television news anchor and failed Republican Senate candidate who has frequently spread lies and conspiracy theories, to lead the broadcaster.

Ms. Lake has rebuffed calls from Elon Musk and Mr. Grenell to abolish Voice of America altogether. But she has said the broadcaster’s coverage will be free from what she described as “Trump derangement syndrome,” or T.D.S.

“It won’t become Trump TV,” Ms. Lake said during a speech this month at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an influential gathering of conservatives. “But it sure as hell will not be T.D.S.”

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ABC News capitulates to Donald Trump

ABC News is set to pay $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Donald J. Trump, reported The New York Times.

The agreement was a significant concession by a major news organization and a rare victory for a media-bashing politician whose previous litigation efforts against news outlets have often ended in defeat.

Under the terms of a settlement revealed on Saturday, ABC News will donate the $15 million to Mr. Trump’s future presidential foundation and museum. The network and its star anchor, George Stephanopoulos, also published a statement saying they “regret” remarks made about Mr. Trump during a televised interview in March.

ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, will pay Mr. Trump an additional $1 million for his legal fees.

The outcome is an unusual win for Mr. Trump, who has frequently sued news organizations for defamation and frequently lost, including in litigation against CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Several experts in media law said they believed that ABC News could have continued to fight, given the high threshold required by the courts for a public figure like Mr. Trump to prove defamation. A plaintiff must not only show that a news outlet published false information, but that it did so knowing that the information was false or with substantial doubts about its accuracy.

“Major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a professor of law at the University of Utah.

“What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift,” she added. “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.”

ABC News did not elaborate on Saturday about its precise reasons for settling. “We are pleased that the parties have reached an agreement to dismiss the lawsuit on the terms in the court filing,” a network spokeswoman said. A lawyer for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the agreement.

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Chapter one in the autocratic playbook--'Criminalizing dissent'

An expert who studies authoritarianism and fascism said Donald Trump’s rhetoric about criminalizing dissent is familiar, and could carry serious implications for the country if he’s elected president, reported NBC News.

“This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power, or exposes their corruption, or releases information that’s harmful to them in any way becomes illegal,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University who wrote the 2020 book “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.”

“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orban does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said, referring to the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia, respectively. “Just as there’s a divide now because of this brainwashing about who is a patriot and who is a criminal about Jan. 6, right? In the same way, telling the truth in any area — journalists, scientists, even people like me, anybody who is engaged in objective inquiry, prosecutors, of course — they become criminal elements and they need to be shut down.”

Some Harris voters say Trump is channeling dictators.

“He reminds me of Hitler and the rise to power,” said Dan Geiger, a retired Pittsburgh resident. “The more he lies the more it’s accepted by his faithful followers.”

Trump has suggested investigations involving his conduct are illegitimate under the law and vowed revenge against the prosecutors who oversee them. He has also claimed, with no evidence, that President Joe Biden directed those prosecutions, even the state indictments he has no authority over.

Upon early revelations of his New York indictment, Trump said the prosecutor “ILLEGALLY LEAKED” it. And the probe into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia? “They illegally spied on my campaign.”

Trump voters have mixed views on revenge

Trump rallied a raucous crowd Wednesday in Scranton, Pennsylvania, launching personal attacks on Harris and drawing jeers and boos from a sea of red MAGA-hatted supporters as he spoke of the “enemy from within” — government officials with whom he’s clashed. He mentioned as one example Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., which sparked a “lock him up!” shout from one supporter.

But some of Trump’s own voters told NBC News they disapprove of the revenge-based themes in his campaign while still planning to support him because of their concerns about the economy and immigration.

Walter Buckman, a Scranton native, said he’s supporting Trump because of his views on immigration and the economy. But the self-described Catholic is “absolutely not” on board with his rhetoric about exacting revenge and getting even.

“The way to get even with anybody is to change the economy. Getting even should not be in the playbook,” he said. “Is revenge a good thing? It’s not a good thing.”

Debbie Hendrix, a Pennsylvanian who attended the Trump rally donning a “MAGA” hat, said she’s excited to vote for Trump a third time. But even she is put off by his talk of retribution.

“I don’t agree with that. I think people like ‘Drain the swamp,’” she said, but in her view that doesn’t mean personally going after his critics. “I don’t think he should sink to their level.”

Sometimes, Trump launches the claim of illegality plausibly. In October 2023, he said advocates in Colorado are trying to “illegally remove my name from the ballot” over his role in Jan. 6, a case he fought and won at the U.S. Supreme Court. More recently, he has said people who get caught cheating in the election will be prosecuted, essentially restating existing law.

Fetterman: ‘A menu of dumb s---’

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who is campaigning in conservative rural areas for Harris, said Trump is no stranger to “bizarre ramblings,” but warned that it doesn’t demotivate his voters.

“That’s just a menu of dumb shit that he always says,” Fetterman said. “I don’t even pay attention to those kinds of things. Most people don’t really take it at face value or whatever.”

It’s important for everyone who’s troubled by it to turn out and vote for Harris, he said, criticizing the “uncommitted” movement, supporters of perennial Green Party nominee Jill Stein, and others who abhor Trump but could waste their vote.

“If you are not 100% voting for Harris, then you are either directly or indirectly helping Trump,” Fetterman said. “Go ahead and try that again. That’s what happened in 2016 when people threw their votes away on that dope Jill Stein.”

Trump has responded to criticisms of his authoritarian rhetoric by repeatedly claiming Democrats are the real fascists and accusing them of “weaponizing” the government against him. His campaign didn't return messages seeking comment for this article.

If he’s elected, could Trump actually succeed at centralizing power for himself, in a system built on checks and balances that was often successful at restraining him during his first term.

“That’s the big question,” Ben-Ghiat said, adding that it depends partly on his ability to impose party fealty, intimidate critics and install competent bureaucrats who are effective at using levers of power to advance his personal aims.

“It is about criminalizing dissent,” she said. “There is a method to his madness in that he has taken people on a journey of indoctrination.”

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Accused Idaho killer of four college students gets change of venue

The judge overseeing the trial of Bryan Kohberger charged in the fatal stabbings of four University of Idaho students has agreed to move it out of the small city where the shocking crimes occurred, citing concerns about finding impartial jurors and whether the courthouse could accommodate the proceedings, reported The Associated Press.

In a recent order, Idaho Second District Judge John C. Judge said extensive media coverage of the case, the spreading of misinformation on social media and statements by public officials suggesting  Kohberger’s guilt made it doubtful he could receive a fair trial in Moscow, a university town of about 26,000 in northern Idaho.

He did not specify where the trial would be moved. Instead, the Idaho Supreme Court will assign the venue — and possibly a new judge as well.

The trial is set for June 2025 and is expected to last three months. Kohberger faces four counts of murder in the deaths of Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle, Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, and prosecutors have said they intend to seek the death penalty if he is in convicted.

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DOJ pursues websites linked to Russian disinformation

The US Department of Justice announced the seizure of 32 internet domains linked to an alleged Russian government-backed disinformation campaign aimed at influencing US and global audiences, reported Jurist.

According to the DOJ, the operation, known as “Doppelganger,” sought to sway public opinion in favor of Russian interests and interfere in the 2024 US presidential election. The campaign was allegedly orchestrated by several Russian organizations under the supervision of Sergei Kiriyenko, a senior official in the Russian Presidential Administration. These organizations utilized the domains to distribute pro-Russian propaganda and undermine international support for Ukraine.

Announcing the seizures, US Attorney General Merrick Garland said:

An internal planning document created by the Kremlin states that a goal of the campaign is to secure Russia’s preferred outcome in the election. The sites we are seizing today were filled with Russian government propaganda that had been created by the Kremlin to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies and interests, and influence voters in the United States and other countries. Our actions today make clear that the Justice Department will be aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by the Russian government, or any other malign actor, to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.

In conjunction with the DOJ seizures, the US Treasury Department announced it had imposed new sanctions against 10 individuals and two organizations linked to Doppelganger. The individuals designated for sanctions included Margarita Simonyan, chief editor of Russian state news broadcaster RT.

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'If it bleeds it leads' media ignores dramatic decline in violence

 According to The New Republic, in the first half of 2023, Boston had 18 homicides. In the first half of 2024, it had four—a 77 percent drop. Mesa, Arizona, saw a drop of more than 70 percent, from 21 to six. Homicides in New Orleans fell by almost 40 percent. In Baltimore City, Cleveland, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, homicides declined by around 30 percent. 

These dramatic numbers come from a midyear crime report published by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which takes data from 69 police and sheriffs’ departments. In aggregate, the study documented a 17 percent drop in homicides. If the trend persists in the latter half of the year and holds true for the whole country, the total number of homicides will end up where it was in 2015, at around 15,500, and will represent the largest single-year decline in at least 65 years, exceeding the previous record decline—of 12 percent, set just last year—by almost a third. Meaning: The entire Covid-19 homicide spike will have vanished.

It may seem risky to extrapolate the midyear data from just 69 departments to the year-end results from 18,000 local departments, but historically, midyear data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association and national year-end data track each other surprisingly well. (For those who want to dig into the weeds, I dive deep here.) Barring some sort of shocking shift, 2024 seems on pace for historic or near-historic declines.

The plunge is unambiguously good news. It is also unexpected good news. Rising homicide rates create the very real risk of vicious cycles that do not end simply because we’ve started a new statistical year. Homicide trends tend to be quite long. From 1963 to 1980, homicides rose every year except one. After a brief decline in the early 1980s, they rose again most years between 1985 and 1994, at which point all violent crime began a steady, decade-long drop.

There are clear reasons for the cyclical nature of the phenomenon. One study in Chicago found evidence that each shooting led to an average of three more retaliatory and counter-retaliatory shootings; some led to dozens more; at least one led to over 100 more. Slowing and then reversing these cycles of revenge can be challenging, yet it happened over the past few years, not long after the chaos and violence of 2020–21, and with surprising rapidity.

This is the sort of news that should spawn dozens of media pieces digging into what, exactly, caused so quick a reversal. Yet that is not what we have seen. Excluding pieces in Axios and Bloomberg, the MCCA report has largely gone unnoticed (and neither of those articles dug into why the decline occurred). To the extent these declines have popped up elsewhere in the media, it is less as a newsworthy development in and of itself and more as a means to fact-check false claims from Donald Trump. (Take, for instance, Vox on August 12: “Trump says crime is out of control. The facts say otherwise.”) Contrast this reticence with how the media handled the Covid-era homicide spike, which was covered by major outlets like The New York Times and NPR in multiple extensive pieces.

That attention made sense: The 2020 surge was the largest increase in homicides in at least 55 years; no other year’s increase comes within half its size. It had huge human costs. But the present decline demands equal attention—and could be put to good political use by the Harris-Walz campaign, should it want to.

There are important stories here. One of the most compelling explanations for the homicide declines that started in 2023 is a story of defunding—but not of the police. Contrary to claims that “defund the police” decreased budgets, police employment and especially police budgets have remained fairly constant; it was local nonpolice employment that was decimated during the pandemic. John Roman, a researcher at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, has argued that the surge in homicides seems closely linked to the Covid-driven layoffs of civilian government employees, whose jobs are not framed as “law enforcement” but who regularly help reduce crime and victimization: teachers, social workers, drug counselors, people running after-school programs. Furthermore, the timing of the homicide decline lines up with local nonpolice government employment returning to its pre-pandemic levels.

Now, I’m not saying Roman’s theory is the only explanation (and I doubt he would either), but it merits careful consideration. Yet as far as I can tell, it has received almost none. The asymmetry here—deep explorations of rising homicides, passing references in political stories to sharp declines—has very real political costs. Crime is a powerful issue politically, but also one that is quite geographically concentrated. Most people go through their days with little direct exposure to it. Unlike other politically salient topics such as the economy and employment, most people’s understanding of crime is heavily shaped by how the media chooses to frame and discuss a phenomenon they do not personally experience. If the media highlights the increases and downplays the declines, it will help produce an electorate that is excessively pessimistic about crime and how to respond to it.

The politics of crime in New York in 2021 and 2022 highlights the role the media can play. In the wake of the Covid homicide spike, the state’s bail reform law faced intense opposition—and legislative rollbacks—from politicians and other defenders of the criminal legal system’s status quo. And it’s likely that appeals to people’s fears about crime helped propel Mayor Eric Adams to his razor-thin victory in 2021. They may have flipped just enough upstate House seats to give the GOP its increasingly narrow control of the House. As a 2022 Bloomberg piece pointed out, however, violent crime in New York City was far lower than in the 1980s and 1990s, and actually pretty stable during the Covid era. Media coverage does not correlate much, if at all, with actual crime trends. It does, however, seem tightly linked to politicians’ efforts to exploit crime as a political tool.

That the media is not covering a decline in violence as much as an increase is perhaps unsurprising: “If it bleeds it leads” has been an adage for a long time. 

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Creators: Susan Smith, Infamous Killer of Her Children, Is Where She Belongs

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators Syndicate
July 23, 2024

In the summer of 1994, O.J. Simpson engaged in his infamous low-speed chase with a parade of Los Angeles squad cars loaded with police officers who wanted to take him into custody for the alleged murder of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. Three months later, on the other side of the country, Susan Smith put her children in a vehicle, strapped them into their car seats and started them on a slow roll to the bottom of John D. Long Lake.

Although Smith's case started after and ended before O.J.'s case, it certainly didn't live in the shadow of the so-called trial of the century. When Smith let her car roll into a lake in Union County, South Carolina, she kicked off a media frenzy that has served as a harbinger of things to come. A throng of media descended on Union County and didn't leave until Smith was shipped down state to prison.

Smith was 22 years old when she told investigators that a Black man had carjacked her while the two boys were still inside the car. The man let her out and sped off with her children. The man who prosecuted Smith, Tommy Pope, is now a member of the South Carolina legislature. He recently told Angenette Levy of the Law and Crime Network that Smith's first assertion that "a Black man carjacked the vehicle with her sons inside" stirred international interest in the case.

She wept on national television, pleading for the children's safe return. "Your mama loves you so much," she said during one news conference, according to Fox News.

Smith was convicted of murdering her children. She has been behind bars for nearly three decades and now has a parole hearing scheduled for Nov. 4.

Her adjustment in prison has been anything but stellar. According to ABC News, Capt. Alfred R. Rowe Jr., a supervisor at the Women's Correctional Institution, was terminated and charged with having sex with Smith while she was incarcerated. A second guard, Lt. Houston Cagle, admitted to also having sex with Smith.

More recently, Smith has been hard at work courting her admirers — according to recorded phone calls from Leath Correctional Institution reviewed by the New York Post, Smith carried on romantic and sexual conversations with at least 12 men over the past three years.

"It's time for me to get out," Smith told one of her admirers over the phone earlier this year. "I've done my time. I'm ready to go."

How will her conduct impact her chances at parole?

Some state parole decision-makers use various assessments including risk, sex offending, mental health and drug and alcohol. Risk assessment tools coupled with parole criteria are thought to provide uniformity to a board's decision-making process.

The South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services has a list of criteria it considers when an individual is eligible for parole. Although the board has absolute discretion with regard to parole, there are 16 factors that the board may consider.

Three of those factors weigh heavily against Smith's parole. First, the seriousness of the offense. It is difficult to think of a more callous act than drowning your children. Second, the inmates conduct while in prison. Sex with guards and phone sex with potential financial supporters is not a good look for someone who wants the board's mercy. Finally, a fact that will play a significant role in the board's decision is the position of the judge, prosecutor and victim's family with regard to parole. Pope, Smith's prosecutor, has already said that he believes in truth in sentencing, "life should mean life."

Parole in South Carolina is a privilege, not a right. Smith may be ready to go, but she is likely to remain behind bars for the foreseeable future.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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The Sentencing Project: Media Guide for reporting on crime

 From The Sentencing Project:

Misleading news coverage of crime and criminal legal policies has played an integral role in the over 50-year history of mass incarceration. Following is The Sentencing Project’s guidance to newsrooms and journalists on how to accurately cover crime and justice. News coverage that adds context, mitigates biases, and ensures veracity can inform the public and policymakers on how to pursue the most effective and humane public safety policies.

• Situate crime trends and policies within their broader historical and geographic context.Nationwide, crime rates reached their peak levels in the 1990s then fell roughly 50% by year end 2019—a trend to which mass incarceration contributed only modestly. Then, the economic, social, and psychological turbulence of the COVID-19 pandemic created a seismic shift for the most serious crime: homicide. Homicides spiked up 27% in 2020 and remained at elevated rates until beginning a substantial decline in 2023. Reported rates of violent and property crime exhibited typical fluctuations amidst the pandemic, although household surveys of violent victimization showed a more dramatic increase across the country. Motor vehicle thefts, which were at near-historic lows by 2019, also increased in the subsequent years, as did carjackings.The country’s experience with mass incarceration has shown clearly that ratcheting up harmful police and prison policies is a counterproductive response to upticks in crime. Well-framed stories about crime increases should consider the following questions: Is the shift unique to one form of crime and is it attributable to a change in crime reporting or recording? How does the uptick compare to historical crime peaks and lows, and how does it compare with crime trends in other jurisdictions? If crime rates increased in several otherwise unrelated jurisdictions, this should inspire skepticism that a particular local reform is to blame. Be sure to also request and assess evidence of the effectiveness of proposed solutions. What broader policy shortcomings does the crime uptick point to and what broader solutions are being implemented? (E.g., access to mental health care and effective drug treatment programs, community-based violence prevention programs, gun control, summer youth programs, affordable housing, underemployment and low wages, unaddressed residential segregation, etc.).U.S. crime rates increased dramatically beginning in the 1960s, but between 1991 and 2019 crime rates fell by about half, just as they did in many other countries around the world. The decline has been especially steep for youth, whose arrest rate fell by 80% from 1996 to 2020. Polls show that throughout most of this crime drop, the majority of Americans continued to believe that crime was increasing nationwide. Sensationalist coverage does not advance public safety and distorts public understanding. Given longstanding public misperceptions about crime trends, consider: Why cover a crime incident at all? Routinized crime coverage and click chasing promote punitive and ineffective crime policies. As the Center for Just Journalism recommends, also consider whether you’re giving adequate attention to broader forms of harm caused by violations of civil or criminal law by powerful people.Media coverage should also test causal claims about the effectiveness of past crime policies by comparing local crime trends with regional and national patterns. The nationwide crime drop between the 1990s and 2019 challenges any claim that a particular local policy brought down crime rates. Do not award credit for crime declines to particular leaders, laws, or tactics without a rigorous assessment.
• 2.      Recognize the limited role of youth crimes and evidence on appropriate responses to adolescent crime.For much of the past quarter century, both youth crime and incarceration levels have fallen dramatically. Between 1999 and 2020, the youth arrest rate fell by 80%. Meanwhile, the number of youth held in juvenile justice facilities fell from 107,000 to 25,000 – a 77% decline – during roughly the same time period. The recent uptick in certain youth crimes has occurred alongside other promising trends. The most recent data show 32% fewer youth arrests in 2022 than in 2019, the year before the pandemic began. This general trend masks increases in youth arrests for homicide (up 45% from 2019 to 2022) and weapons offenses (up 19%). However, youth arrests for other serious offense categories fell over this period, such as for aggravated assault (down 14%) and robbery (down 36%). Overall, youth’s share of total arrests nationwide reached 9% in 2022. These trends have been misrepresented in a recent wave of alarmist youth crime coverage.In the mid-1990s, media reports, relying on unqualified sources, trumpeted “a ticking time bomb” of adolescent crime perpetrated by a new wave of allegedly remorseless and morally impoverished young “superpredators.” These predictions were based on faulty science and proved wildly inaccurate: youth crime rates began a sizable and prolonged downturn in the mid-1990s. Yet the coverage helped spark a wave of counterproductive, punitive laws that contradicted all available evidence on what works to address delinquency. In 2020, NBC News reviewed this history and concluded: “Though it failed as a theory, as fodder for editorials, columns and magazine features, the term ‘superpredator’ was a tragic success—with an enormous, and lasting, human toll.” Avoid repeating this history: double-check the data to verify an alleged trend, interview multiple experts, and ask hard questions before feeding a crime wave/surge narrative. Be aware that voluminous research finds that over-responding to adolescent misbehavior typically damages young people’s futures and harms public safety. Youth do better and reoffend less when they’re diverted from the court system rather than prosecuted, and incarceration likewise leads to worse public safety and youth development outcomes.
• 3.      Avoid amplifying false or unsupported claims: fact check police, prosecutors, and legislators. “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction,” the Minneapolis police department reported after its officers killed George Floyd. Video of the incident contradicted their account, reinforcing that police reports cannot be trusted as facts. Relatedly, there’s a growing understanding that prosecutors don’t just enforce laws, but play an active role in creating them, making them active players in many legislative debates. This is why it’s important to verify claims about crime incidents and trends, and to include sources beyond criminal legal practitioners to ensure that you are reporting the truth. Seek out the perspective of currently and formerly incarcerated people as both sources and journalists. Also, remember that not all numbers are equally reliable: apply a critical lens to internally-conducted polls whose questions and sampling methods are obscure, such as those conducted by some police unions of their members. Finally, report verifiable facts as facts, rather than as claims. For example, did an expert claim that people with violent convictions leaving state prisons have lower recidivism rates than others, or does data show it to be a fact? (See #8.)
• 4.      Reassess the newsworthiness of crimes and identities.Given the racial biases in criminal legal enforcement and the lasting harm of being named in media stories that are easily accessible on the internet, some outlets including The Boston Globe are scaling back their coverage of petty crimes and trimming the long tail of these stories by amending or erasing their archives. The Associated Press will stop naming individuals involved in stories about low-level arrests. “A consensus appears to be emerging among newspaper publishers,” writes The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple, “that crime coverage and its stickiness in a search-engine world need a systemic update.” News outlets should emulate these “right-to-be-forgotten” initiatives and ensure that they are accessible and fair. As a rule, news media should not reveal the names or include photos of young people who are involved in the juvenile court system, which seeks to protect their identities to minimize the long-term consequences of youthful misbehavior.
• 5.      Avoid creating backlash bait with partial coverage of reforms and recidivism.Situate the impact of sentencing reforms within the massive scale of mass incarceration. For example, 448,000 people were released from prison in 2022 (see Table 9 here for a state breakdown). If a particular reform expedites the release of some hundreds or thousands of people, contextualize that within the much larger number of people that are typically released from prison each year. Unless the pace of decarceration dramatically increases, it will take over seven decades to return to 1972’s prison population, before the era of mass incarceration. If you have identified unfairness in the reform process, be sure to also hold government officials accountable for the persistent unfairness and ineffectiveness of current prison sentences, which scholars have shown to be too long, imposed too frequently, and racially imbalanced.Even the best policies that dramatically reduce recidivism rates cannot get these rates to zero. If policies are evaluated by the recidivism of the few, then elected officials and practitioners will be pressured to abandon effective policies in the face of public opinion misinformed by skewed media coverage. As The Marshall Project explains, furloughs and work release programs in prisons were otherwise hugely successful but news coverage of “Willie” Horton brought that to an end. Avoid turning one tragic incident into the harbinger of tragic criminal legal policies by informing your audience about the relative infrequency of such incidents, and by asking what preventative policies—beyond further incarceration—might avert another similar tragedy. If an arrest you’ve covered results in a dismissal or finding of innocence, ensure that your coverage follows through to the conclusion of the case.
• 6.      Conduct a racial equity audit on the quantity of your crime coverage.Media coverage often overrepresents crime committed by Black males and victimization experienced by white females. Researchers have shown that journalists gravitate to unusual cases when selecting homicide victims (white women) and to more common cases when selecting people who have committed homicide (Black men), suggesting that newsworthiness is not a product of how representative or novel a crime is, but rather how well it can be “scripted using stereotypes grounded in White racism and White fear of Black crime.” Homicide victims were more likely to make the news if they were white or killed in majority-white neighborhoods, according to a Chicago study. Media outlets should therefore conduct an audit comparing how their crime coverage compares to the community’s crime and victimization rates, with awareness that arrest rates oversample crimes committed by people of color. Such audits should also be conducted of headlines and push notifications. Examine also whether your coverage reflects the fact that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens. Also ensure diversity among sources and news staff, in terms of racial and other identities including exposure to the criminal legal system.
• 7.      Conduct a racial equity audit on the quality of your crime coverage.Ensure that your crime coverage is treating people of color—both those accused of crime and those who are victims—as humanely and fairly as it is treating white people in similar circumstances. Chicagoans killed in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods were less likely to be treated through the “lens of complex personhood,” such as by noting the victim’s family and community roles. White mass shooters have been presented more sympathetically, such as by recognizing underlying mental illnesses, than Black counterparts. News images of people—often white—impacted by the opioid crisis have depicted well-lit spaces, stressed domesticity, and emphasized close-knit communities while past drug crises tended to depict nighttime scenes on seedy streets or portrayed individuals—often Black—interacting with the police, courts, or jails, and often using starker black and white photography. Past research on television news found that Black individuals accused of crime were presented in more threatening contexts than whites: Black individuals were disproportionately shown in mug shots and in cases where the victim was a stranger. Black and Latino individuals were also more often presented in a non-individualized way than whites—by being left unnamed—and were more likely to be shown as threatening—by being depicted in physical custody of police. Regular audits can help to catch and correct biased coverage. To correct these disparities, level up rather than down: reassess whether crimes are newsworthy (see #4) and present the nuance and humanity of everyone.
• 8.      Be cognizant that growing prison terms for violent crimes are a key driver of mass incarceration and its racial disparities, and that an abundance of evidence has proven these sentences to be largely ineffective.Over half of the prison population was convicted of a violent offense, which ranges from assault and robbery to sexual assault and murder. Growing sentence lengths for this population has been a major driver of mass incarceration. Over 200,000 people in U.S. prisons were serving life sentences as of 2020—more people than were in prison with any sentence in 1970. Nearly one in five imprisoned people have already served at least 10 years, the maximum duration of most “criminal careers” and a point at which recidivism rates fall measurably. Racial disparities in sentencing also grow with sentence length. People released after decades of imprisonment for the most serious crimes have extremely low recidivism rates. This fact indicates that they have been imprisoned long past the point at which they pose an above-average public safety risk. More generally, when the Bureau of Justice Statistics examined individuals released from state prisons in 2008, it found that those with violent convictions were less likely to be arrested than those with drug or property convictions. Consider these facts when reporting on reforms impacting, or omitting, people convicted of violent crimes. Since most coverage focuses on people at the time of their crime and not years later, profiling people released after spending many years in prison is an important contribution.
• 9.      Accurately present crime victims and survivors as having a complexity of views.Crime survivors are not monolithic and many have unmet needs that go beyond extreme punishment. Increasingly, victim services and advocacy organizations are supporting criminal legal reforms, noting that incarcerated people are often victims of crime and trauma, and are calling for effective investments to prevent future victimization. Black and Latino people have been far more likely than white people to be serious crime victims, and to be more fearful of becoming crime victims, and yet they have been less supportive of punitive criminal legal practices while being more supportive of investments in rehabilitation and crime prevention. Be mindful of the impact of your reporting on crime survivors and assess whether your coverage includes a spectrum of views. Ultimately, a survivor’s desire for punishment must be balanced with societal goals of advancing safety, achieving justice, and protecting human dignity.
• 10.  Use humanizing language and toss doublespeak and the exonerative tense.Remember that crime coverage is fundamentally about people. Using person-first language (e.g., people in prison, people with criminal records, youth) impacts public perception of these individuals and supports humane policies. Using shorter labels or bureaucratic jargon (e.g., prisoner, inmate, felon, juvenile) in headlines or stories comes at the expense of casting stigma on a vulnerable population by defining them based on a negative dimension of their lives. Destigmatizing language regarding substance use disorders supports public health solutions, instead of the failed War on Drugs. More precise and accurate language for people convicted of a crime of a sexual nature can also support their rehabilitation.Many punitive criminal legal concepts have Orwellian names that downplay their harm and exaggerate their efficacy, such as “truth in sentencing” and “sentencing enhancements.” The catchall “tough on crime” label is also a form of doublespeak. While such policies are certainly tough on people accused or convicted of crime, why echo this term for policies that often contribute little to community safety?Finally, the “exonerative tense” replaces “police shoot and kill man” with “man struck by officer’s bullet.” The noun “officer-involved shooting” is no clearer than “officer shooting” in conveying who did the shooting and who was shot. Strive for clarity and precision, especially with headlines. According to the AP Stylebook: “Avoid this vague jargon for shootings and other cases involving police. Be specific about what happened. If police use the term, ask for detail. How was the officer or officers involved? Who did the shooting? If the information is not available or not provided, spell that out.”