Listen To This Story

I’d like to start this column off with an excerpt from the astute Brian Stelter’s CNN Reliable Sources newsletter:

Imagine we’re all stuck in an elevator together. The elevator is only moving in one direction — downward. Every time the doors open, we’re at some new, lower level. No one knows how to reverse course. No one knows what awaits us at the very bottom.

The American media is on that ride right now. Every time President Trump sues a news outlet, or wins a settlement, or causes a network to self-censor, the elevator reaches a lower level. Every time a prominent Trump adversary is canned, or a critical documentary is edited, folks in the elevator look around and wonder: How much lower can this go?

This week’s Jimmy Kimmel blackout felt different from, say, the defunding of public media or the denunciations of “fake news.” It felt unique because of the fact pattern: the blatant threat from FCC chair Brendan Carr, the business motivations of the local station owners that need his blessing, and the instant acquiescence by ABC. 

CNN’s Jamie Gangel said she “couldn’t even count the number of calls that I got from people for the first time who said this is too far.”

Absolutely correct. This has all gone too far. 

Unfortunately, the pressure to produce profits creates terror in top news executives when faced with government threats. And we cannot expect the legacy for-profit media to really make this point. 

Unsurprisingly, the top brass acted to protect the franchise. As Stelter notes, although it has (up to now!) been almost impossible for the FCC to take away broadcast licenses, it can at minimum impede highly lucrative mergers and acquisitions. 

Threats on this front have been making some large news entities self-censor. And more will almost certainly follow suit. Speaking of which, it’s reasonable to assume that the mounting Trump lawsuits against media companies will also have a chilling effect.

Fortunately, the for-profits are not the entire game. 

Nonprofits, too, are a part of journalism. To be sure, some of them face comparable pressures, including crippling lawsuits and the rational fear that their nonprofit status will be targeted by Trump loyalists abusing the IRS’s power and twisting its mission. 

Still, in this moment of growing urgency, with the legacy media under attack, it may well be the nonprofit media that shores up our democracy. Because, even if the IRS unjustly takes away nonprofits’ ability to accept tax-deductible donations, many Americans will still continue to support our work. 

We’ll continue to do that work on a highly cost-effective basis. And some lawyers will continue to offer their services pro bono, when nonprofits cannot afford the help of high-priced firms. 

No matter what happens in the ever-consolidating corporate media space, we nonprofits — and there are a lot of us — will continue, best as we can, to provide the public with critical insights, and to stand up to tyranny. 

In the past, feisty non-profits published many important stories that the established media wouldn’t touch. And now things are that much worse — the elevator that much closer to the basement — with those entities under fire and with their corporate leadership in retreat or cutting deals with the bad guys. This only underscores the value of smaller independents. I hope those reading this will think about it, because, for us, as with most nonprofit newsrooms, only a tiny fraction of readers ever step up to provide support. 

The more Trump and his cronies keep the outrages coming, driving the attention-span show and dictating what will get covered — the more they put others on the defensive — the less bandwidth the media overall has to deal with mounting evidence of bad intent and wrongdoing. 

That evidence now amounts to a torrent. And still, of all the stories we need to be doing, the Jeffrey Epstein inquiry is singular in many ways. Though some of the public is likely tired of that topic, it remains essential. 

First off, it’s a massive contemporary mystery that touches on so many issues — around the exercise of power, the use of leverage, the impunity of the rich, etc. 

And it is perhaps the biggest threat to Trump’s ability to continue consolidating his authoritarian construct. It seems to be the one area where the teflon has worn thin. 

*** 

The Epstein story has so many threads. But beyond the specific avenues of inquiry, the overarching matter raises questions about the basic nature and integrity of key individuals. Certainly this relates to Trump. 

And his freedom to lie. 

His claim that he didn’t write that winking, lewd birthday card greeting to Epstein stands out to me as a major scandal. 

Although we don’t yet know what precisely was the hold Epstein may have had over Trump and others, nor precisely what Trump did or didn’t do, we do see mounting, practically decisive evidence that he has publicly lied about the birthday card.

In what universe can a president so overtly lie to the people, and face no consequences? 

Besides the evidence that it was Trump’s ditty and Trump’s signature, it is worth recalling that Trump’s own CFO and accountant said that someone else had, without their consent, affixed what purported to be their (the CFO and accountant’s) signatures on Trump’s tax filings. Well, who might that have been? 

The big media has never figured out how to make the crimes and malfeasances of Donald Trump seem to matter. But even Trump fans probably will understand that faking other people’s signatures and signing lewd cards and then shamelessly lying about it to the world is on a level of petty yet outrageous crime that everyone tells their kids is wrong, wrong, wrong. 

***

I read the Trump lawsuit against The New York Times (et al) as soon as it dropped. And wrote up a commentary on it. But now I see that a federal judge, a Republican appointee, has already rejected the suit — for being “decidedly improper and impermissible.”

As reported: 

In a ruling dripping with derision, a federal judge has rejected President Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, asserting that the rambling 85-page suit did not follow federal rules for filing civil complaints.

The president’s team has been given a month to refile, and a Trump spokesperson indicated that they will do so. 

It’s obviously a Trump priority. In fact, the legal “complaint” reads like it was dictated almost entirely by Trump himself, and contains the usual litany of grandiose claims and insults, with a few typos thrown in.

Trump, likely through selective use of quotes, makes his case that Times reporters had decided that he was one bad dude, that his father was a lout, that his reputation for business prowess was ill-deserved, and that they relentlessly made that case in articles and a book. 

His primary and almost sole obsession is the assertion that Mark Burnett, the man behind The Apprentice reality show, had “discovered” Trump. Obviously, Trump couldn’t be discovered since he was already well known, so Trump is upset by the notion — $15 billion in compensatory damages worth of upset.

Presumably, “discovered” wasn’t the most precise term, though I think the Times writers were making the argument that Burnett uniquely realized that in Trump he had an electric “influencer” personality who could generate a huge hit. 

Anyway, Trump’s suit goes on and on, larded with whining and hand-waving not befitting a serious legal filing, to claim that many things said about him, his companies, his father, his practices and track record, are untrue, and that the reporters were guilty of “actual malice” — knowing something is false and publishing it anyway, the standard for proving defamation required under the historic 1964 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan that to this day determines the limited cases where free speech can be punished. 

Trump not only wants $15 billion in compensatory damages, he also wants multiples of that in punitive ones. He’s had recent success in shaking multimillion-dollar settlements out of major media companies in cases he had little if any chance of winning, so why not? 

He loves to sue and he loves to make a splash, and he got his splash on this one, while MAGAworld, if even informed of it, will naturally write off the complaint’s dismissal as the typical anti-Trump stunt of some deep-state judge.

More ominously, Trump may also be angling to get a defamation case like this to his friends on the Supreme Court, who have hinted at some willingness to possibly overturn Sullivan. 

According to Judge Steven Douglas Merryday, who threw out Trump’s complaint, Trump can begin, if he so chooses, by coming back to his courtroom within 28 days, having axed at least 45 pages of his 85-page potboiler complaint and conformed its language to basic standards of legal pleading under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. 

Which shouldn’t be that hard, if the president can find a quasi-competent, entry-level lawyer and let them do their work without his hot breath on their neck.

***  

In line with the administration’s Orwellian devotion to rewriting history and turning facts on their head, this week we learned how, after Charlie Kirk’s death, Trump’s Department of Justice removed an online posting of a study which concludes that, by a very wide margin, most violent political acts are committed by… right-wing extremists. 

We know this thanks to a sharp-eyed PhD student named Daniel Malmer — whose name was excised from all the legacy media accounts that cannibalized his finding. 

***

Speaking of the DOJ, you probably saw FBI Director Kash Patel’s angry attack on Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who had publicly asked why Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) from a rodent-infested federal correctional institution to a cushy minimum-security facility after talking to the DOJ. Patel should have said to “ask the AG” — since the BOP is under the Justice Department, not the FBI — but instead went ballistic. 

The ever ready Patel must have been ordered to stonewall — rather than pass the buck to Trump fave/BOP boss Attorney General Pam Bondi.

***  

Vice President JD Vance and wife Usha — she’s the daughter of Indian immigrants; her mother, as a university provost, fought especially hard for DEI — recently paid lavish tribute to Charlie Kirk, who among other things stated “America does not need more visas for people from India.” 

In fact, a look at who works in our most dynamic and innovative technology companies proves how wrong this statement was. And even beyond tech, Indian Americans are proving tremendous talents and contributors across almost every facet of American society (Usha Vance and Kash Patel being MAGA-beloved exceptions proving the rule). With most of these immigrants and children of immigrants, we’re damned lucky to have them. 

I’d gladly take all the people whose principal activity is stoking hatred for the “other” and trade each one for a hard-working Indian immigrant any day. 

*** 

Joke of the week (with late-night comics dropping like flies, we all better pick up the slack!): 

Pam Bondi has given new meaning to “exercising free speech” — given how often she walks back her words.