I want to first use this forum to offer support to George Floyd’s family, Breonna Taylor’s family, Ahmaud Arbery’s family, Black Lives Matter, the protesters, the organizers, and their brave acts of worldwide civil disobedience. (Below, there is information about where you can donate, and other resources you can use to help in any way you can.) Catalyzed by the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis on May 25, but also by centuries of systemic racism, gross violence, and continued police brutality, the protests over the last two weeks have started powerful conversations and brought the United States to an undeniable turning point.
And because this is a newsletter about the power of media, I also want to say I’m heartened by everyone who’s working to make sure that the story the protesters are telling remains intact, and is amplified as clearly yet complexly as possible: the reporters, anchors, scholars, professors, writers, clergy members, prosecutors, lawyers, politicians, activists, and citizens who are all keeping the multiple threads of this “narrative” straight, articulating the many competing but interconnected issues appropriately and loudly.
But I’m disheartened by The New York Times. In their coverage of the killing of George Floyd, the subsequent nationwide peaceful protests, and the ensuing political actions, The New York Times has been imprecise, sensationalistic, solipsistic, distracting, misleading, and slow.
First, at a more granular level, The New York Times has consistently made tonal, word- and image-choice errors as events have unfolded. Last week, on May 29, after Derek Chauvin was arrested (then charged with 3rd-degree murder and manslaughter, now upgraded to 2nd-degree murder) for the killing of George Floyd, the Associated Press set the tone with a “bungled” headline, that read, “BREAKING: Minnesota authorities say the police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck has been arrested.”
The passive “knelt on neck” completely misrepresents what actually happened and what needs to be conveyed, seemingly “erasing” any connection between Chauvin’s action and Floyd’s death, according to watchdog Media Matters for America. “To be clear, Chauvin has not been arrested for the act of kneeling on a man’s neck – he’s been arrested and charged with murder.”
Unfortunately, many major news outlets, including the Times, followed the AP’s lead, using similarly passive, disconnected wording: “Breaking News: Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee into George Floyd’s neck while Floyd pleaded that he couldn’t breathe, is in custody. Charges haven’t yet been announced.”
A day or two later, The New York Times was criticized again for an inappropriate and perhaps biased use of the passive voice. The Times tweeted a teaser to an article about harassment and attacks aimed at journalists covering the protests in Minneapolis. The tweet read:
Minneapolis: A photographer was shot in the eye.
Washington, D.C.: Protesters struck a journalist with his own microphone.
Louisville: A reporter was hit by a pepper ball on live television by an officer who appeared to be aiming at her.
As Poynter reports, readers criticized the wording of the tweet, which uses active construction “to highlight protesters’ violence but passive construction to downplay police aggression.” Per Poynter:
The Minneapolis line doesn’t name an aggressor. The Louisville line buries the actor, “an officer,” in the middle of the sentence, muffled by other details. The D.C. line, in contrast, leads with the actor – this time not police but “protesters.”
Readers on Twitter quickly pointed out the inconsistencies in replies to the tweet. @meyevee: “Fascinating how it’s only the protestors who have agency”; @jodiecongirl: “does your style guide require that you reserve the passive voice for police actions or was that your choice?”; etc.
And as Poynter notes, the tweet doesn’t mention “two Atlanta incidents the story covers, which also use active voice when protesters are the actors and passive voice when police are the actors.” Maybe these constructions are an “example of a pro-cop, anti-rebellion attitude at The New York Times, or at least of an unconscious bias. Most likely, instead, it’s one of endless reminders of the significant role of composition in journalism.” We may never know: neither the writer, Frances Robles, nor any Times social media editors, responded to Poynter’s request for comment on the tweet’s composition and intentions.
And these choices are not only confined to language. In last Sunday’s print edition, the front page featured an image of a burning building and lone protester, fist raised. Not, for example, an image of a massive crowd of peaceful protesters, or an image of police violently abusing those same protesters. These image selections are a tic of photojournalism and its editing, which prizes the stark, the scary, or the overbearingly emotional over the more informative, if less “direct” or compositionally interesting. As CNN Business managing editor Alex Koppelman wrote at length in Brian Stelter’s May 31 newsletter,
The Washington Post, New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle all led their front pages with similar images Sunday – fire, and raised fists. The photos were newsworthy and compelling, almost beautiful in that haunting, horrible way that photojournalists’ work can be. But they were also revealing of unconscious, unexamined biases affecting coverage at so many outlets, biases which mean a significant part of the story is pushed to the side…
This is not a suggestion that we need to be anything other than objective. It is a suggestion, though, that we need to realize our coverage – the language we use, the choices we make, the conventions of this kind of reporting – is already slanted in ways that have wrongly come to be accepted as objective…
The Times’ choice to use the picture it did was a fine one. But it is a choice, and not a neutral one, to use that photo over, say, the image of two police vehicles driving into protesters in Brooklyn Saturday night…
But while there are police in some cities who are joining protesters and calming tensions, many accounts have others escalating or even starting the violence, and social media has been flooded with footage of some engaging in horrifying acts – pulling down the mask of and then pepper spraying a man with his hands up, macing someone who is by all appearances a child, kicking a defenseless woman sitting on the ground, firing “non-lethal” projectiles that can in fact maim and kill at people whose only crime is reporting the news. Why, then, are so many of our front pages and homepages still reflecting only one of these things?
Echoing these ideas, Errin Haines, editor of The 19th, said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” “I certainly can understand that cameras are drawn to things like fires and destruction of property,” but news coverage should be “centering on the peaceful protestors.” And Vox’s Jane Coaston added, “We have to add in the necessary context about how we got here; why this is happening; why the violence has erupted; and how we can do something about it.” This “centering” and the emphasis on added context requires a wider, more historical view than most news organizations are accustomed to taking, but it is extremely critical right now. Failure in this regard to context is failure to report reality.
On Monday, June 1, Trump (or Barr, evidently) ordered a gathering of peaceful protesters to be forcibly removed by mounted police and armed officers who fired tear gas/pepper balls into the crowd, so he could walk across the street and stage a deeply bizarre photo-op outside St. John’s Church – an act that has already gone down in history as perhaps the most sinister moment of Trump’s presidency. The New York Times clearly missed the gravity of the moment completely, describing the situation with this unhelpful and confused front page headline on Tuesday: “AS CHAOS SPREADS, TRUMP VOWS TO ‘END IT NOW.’” With the subhead adding only, “President Issues Threat to Send Military In.”
As you can see, and as Brian Stelter notes emphatically, neither of the headlines “mentioned how protesters in the capital of the United States of America were attacked at the foot of the White House for exercising their Constitutional right to protest.”
It’s obviously worth noting that the story the headline introduced is accurately representative of the situation. But the headline matters. And upon its release, The New York Times found itself again the subject of much wider and more serious criticism.
“They brutalized peaceful protesters for a photo op,” tweeted Los Angeles Times correspondent Matt Pearce. “This one will be taught in journalism schools,” tweeted Agence France-Presse White House correspondent Andrew Beatty. “Just pathetic. An insult to readers and everyone else,” tweeted Pod Save America host Jon Lovett.
Members of the Joe Biden campaign also criticized the Times’s headline. “This is absolutely embarrassing, and also utterly unsurprising,” Biden national press secretary TJ Ducklo tweeted. And Biden’s director of rapid response Andrew Bates tweeted, “This could be a @FoxNews headline.”
Finally, David Boardman, the dean of the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University in Philadelphia, said of the headline: “I’m not among those who love bashing the @nytimes, which I consider our frontline defense against tyranny. But this headline is stunningly bad, totally missing what may be the most chilling day in the Trump presidency.”
And again, per Stelter, “Of note: A spokesperson for NYT didn’t respond to my request for comment...” After the criticism, however, the Times did change the headline online to the much more accurate, “As Trump Calls Protesters ‘Terrorists,’ Tear Gas Clears a Path for His Walk to a Church.” (Although “Tear Gas Clears” is still quite passive. Did armed officers fire the tear gas? Or did the tear gas clear a path all by itself?)
All of the above errors in judgment are bad, and dangerous. But they are not necessarily only found in the pages of The New York Times. Many large media outlets right now are struggling to publish the nuanced coverage that’s required, and/or having a hard time making the editorial choices that are needed to achieve it. But what happened next, unfortunately, could only happen at The New York Times.
On Wednesday, June 3, the Times published an “Op-Ed” in the “Opinion” section written by Tom Cotton, the Republican Senator from Arkansas, under the headline “Send In the Troops”; subhead, “The nation must restore order. The military stands ready.”
Besides the substance of the “argument” – a stand for invoking the Insurrection Act and deploying the U.S. military against Americans in U.S. cities – in the piece, we also find wildly distorted facts, and racist, coded language:
Bands of looters roved the streets, smashing and emptying hundreds of businesses. Some even drove exotic cars; the riots were carnivals for the thrill-seeking rich as well as other criminal elements.
And:
Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.
And:
One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers. But local law enforcement in some cities desperately needs backup, while delusional politicians in other cities refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.
Words obviously matter. As Representative Maxine Waters has said, “A lot of negative language gets used against black people, describing what whites often believe is true about us: that language includes ‘lazy,’ ‘criminal,’ and ‘rioting’… It’s all negative language used far too often in a description of black people by folks who fundamentally don’t see black people the same way they see whites and others.”
After “Send In the Troops” was published, the Times faced a swift and broad backlash, largely from its own employees – which is rare. Dozens of Times employees and writers condemned the decision to publish Cotton’s piece, criticizing its point of view, dangerous, incendiary language, and the fact that the Times ran it in the first place. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times Magazine contributor who won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on the 1691 Project, tweeted, “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.” And Roxane Gay wrote on Twitter,
As a NYT writer I absolutely stand in opposition to that Tom Cotton “editorial.” We are well served by robust and ideologically diverse public discourse that includes radical, liberal, and conservative voices… This is not that. His piece was inflammatory and endorsing military occupation as if the constitution doesn’t exist.
Times Opinion columnist Charlie Warzel tweeted that he felt “compelled to say that i disagree with every word in that Tom Cotton op-ed and it does not reflect my values.” And Mara Gay, of the The New York Times “editorial board” tweeted, “Running this puts black people in danger. And other Americans standing up for our humanity and democracy, too.” – similar wording was also used by dozens of other less well-known Times journalists who also denounced the Cotton Op-Ed on Twitter. (Cotton has written two other Op-Eds for the Times: “We Should Buy Greenland,” published on August 16, 2019, and “The Case for Killing Qassim Suleimani,” published on January 10, 2020.)
Not stopping there, The New York Times took it upon itself to publish, later Wednesday evening – a night, you might remember, on which significant real, non-New York Times-related events were unfolding in the capital and around the country – a piece about the piece and the various (but mostly Times employees’) reactions to the piece headlined “Senator’s ‘Send In the Troops’ Op-Ed in The Times Draws Online Ire.” The writer, Marc Tracy – who Tweeted the link to the article with the wink “(yes, we cover ourselves sometimes)” – seems to equate “drawing ire” with being important, stating in the subhead, “Staff members at the newspaper, including a Pulitzer winner, denounced an opinion essay by Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, calling for a military response to protests.”
In the article, Tracy hints that the Times employees speaking out about the Cotton piece on Twitter had violated “the newspaper’s social media policy,”
which instructs newsroom employees not to post partisan comments and to be “especially mindful of appearing to take sides on issues that The Times is seeking to cover objectively.”
And we learn, remarkably, that three Times journalists said that some “sources told them they would no longer provide them with information because of the Op-Ed.” And a freelance writer named Kara Brown turned down an assignment from the Times because of the Cotton piece, writing in an email she posted a picture of, that she’s not really interested in “having my byline anywhere near your publication at the moment.”
Tracy also quotes Opinion editor James Bennet on his defense of his decision to publish Cotton’s piece (the quotes are taken from his earlier Twitter thread defending his decision):
Times Opinion owes it to our readers to show them counter-arguments, particularly those made by people in a position to set policy… We understand that many readers find Senator Cotton’s argument painful, even dangerous. We believe that is one reason it requires public scrutiny and debate.
Bennet’s sophistries are insulting. There is no “debate” to be had here. Cotton is operating disingenuously from word one. There’s no way to “prove” if Cotton believes in his “argument,” but it in any case it is full of lies and “misinformation” – some of which the Times “news side” had already warned against in print and debunked prior to the publication of the Op-Ed. Gary Snyder at Columbia Journalism Review, called the Op-Ed “dishonest, not only reprehensible.”
In Tracy’s self-coverage, we also learn that Bennet (who is also responsible for a significant number of other “high-profile blunders”) “was the editor in chief of The Atlantic before he became the head of the opinion department in 2016.” Tracy goes on, rolling out the kind of back-patting meta palace intrigue that is sadly far too common in The New York Times:
The opinion section is run separately from the news side. Mr. Bennet reports to the publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, as does the paper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, who is in charge of news coverage. The distinction between opinion pieces and news articles is sometimes lost on readers, who may see an Op-Ed – promoted on the same home page – as just another Times article.
Yes, they “may.” (And are those readers for whom the “distinction between opinion pieces and news articles is sometimes lost on” the same ones the Times “owes it to”?)
This precious “distinction” has long been a bugbear for the Times, yet it’s also a shield they can use when taken to task for their wilder, more irresponsible Op-Eds. But the distinction is, in a very real sense, meaningless. When something appears in The New York Times, it quite literally appears in The New York Times. When you share a link to Tom Cotton’s Op-Ed, the first thing you see is “Send In the Troops” and The New York Times, its telltale typeface glowing with integrity. Publishing it in the The New York Times gives the argument the full legitimacy of the Times, no matter what “distinction” the editors may believe exists between opinion and news. (It may be “lost on” most readers, or it may just be purposely ignored.) (Trump, of course, immediately tweeted the link to the Op-Ed.)
As Snyder puts it in CJR,
At some point, the Times and its opinion page are going to have to learn how to speak in terms of the values they believe in – and be able to distinguish them from those they oppose. As I wrote on Monday, this is not an alien concept at the Times: It is rooted in its founding spirit of its motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”
The racism currently under protest by thousands in this country is rooted in lies that white people tell about black people. Standing for the truth – and against racism – requires unmasking those lies. The Times fails in its mission to seek the truth when it lends its platform to others to tell lies.
But it does not end here. Not content to let this completely self-inflicted blunder be, on June 4, “Mr. Bennet” (as referenced in another tweet from Marc Tracy that strikes me as particularly out of touch) decided to publish his own Op-Ed explaining why he decided to publish Tom Cotton’s in the first place (apparently his extant Twitter thread was not enough explanation). In this Op-Ed, Bennet states (clarifies?) that he disagrees with Tom Cotton’s argument and is “personally fearful that adding the military to the mix would only lead to more violence against the innocent.” (By the way, speaking of word choice, “to the mix” seems a little…light.)
Bennet goes on to repeat the admittedly “platitudinous” defense that the piece was published out of a “commitment” to Times readers “to provide a debate on important questions like this.” Not to publish these kinds of contrary voices would “betray what I think of as our fundamental purpose – not to tell you what to think, but to help you think for yourself.”
He then hits the nail more or less on the head, though, stating,
We legitimated Cotton’s point of view by publishing it in The Times… That’s a category of concern we’ve worried about often… It’s never an easy call, and this is never a criticism to be ignored or dismissed lightly.
But, in this case, I worry we’d be misleading our readers if we concluded that by ignoring Cotton’s argument we would diminish it.
Okay. That’s a “category of concern,” for sure. But again, I think it’s too convenient to just say this is “Cotton’s argument”: he has not randomly written and then published a hypothetical thinkpiece out of the clear blue sky pondering the concept of deploying the U.S. Military against the American people. There are troops on the ground in Washington as we speak. This is real. And Cotton has taken a political action, with amplification courtesy of the Grey Lady.
Cotton is – do not forget – a sitting Republican Senator, not merely a provocative thinker, a professor, or an economist. (David Brooks, incidentally, came to Bennet’s defense.) Cotton has exploited an obvious loophole in the Times’s editorial structure to publicly advocate for a sudden new development he believes his constituents will be happy he has publicly advocated for. He could have, obviously, published it elsewhere. That he published it in the Times only sweetens the deal, giving it a wider audience, and the aforementioned (and sought-after) legitimacy.
We’re not done. Bari Weiss, a provocateur of the The New York Times Opinion section, didn’t miss an opportunity to fan the flames, either. Collecting her thoughts into a rapid-fire Twitter thread, she characterized the debate as “The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes the (mostly 40+) liberals.” Her thread enraged Times staffers and readers alike – she was subsequently “buried” by colleagues – and was turned into its own Fox article.
Also on June 4, in light of the Cotton backlash, the publisher of The New York Times, A.G. Sulzberger, sent a statement to staff gingerly defending Cotton’s piece (“The Op-Ed page exists to offer views from across the spectrum,” etc. ), thus seemingly bringing the saga to an end.
To recap, there’s the original piece, then another piece about the original piece, then a third piece about the original piece, and then a long internal statement from the publisher defending the aims of the original piece. Done and done. Right?
No. Mere hours later, the same day, June 4, The New York Times published its fourth piece related to the Tom Cotton Op-Ed. A complete volte-face, the piece (also by Tracy, and two other writers) is titled, “New York Times Says Senator’s Op-Ed Did Not Meet Standards.” In it, we learn that, in fact, the Op-Ed “did not meet our standards,” and that the Times “scrambled on Thursday to address the concerns of employees and readers who were angered” about Cotton’s “opinion essay.”
Then there’s this: “James Bennet, the editor in charge of the opinion section, said in a meeting with staff members late in the day that he had not read the essay before it was published.” This admission seems unbelievable, and couldn’t possibly be true – unless it is, which is even worse; in any case, it sounds like a pretty bad defense.
Then more palace intrigue, courtesy of “a Times spokeswoman” (keep in mind you’re reading this in the Times!):
“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication,” Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, said in a statement. “This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short-term and long-term changes, to include expanding our fact-checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.
This mea culpa article also divulges another remarkable fact: apparently the paper received a letter signed by over 800 of its own staffers protesting the publication of Cotton’s Op-Ed. The letter was “addressed to high-ranking editors in the opinion and news divisions, as well as New York Times Company executives.” The letter “argued” that Cotton’s piece “contained misinformation.”
Sulzberger is also quoted, apparently writing in a “a Slack message sent to company employees,” “We don’t publish just any argument – they need to be accurate, good faith explorations of the issues of the day.” He blamed the publication of an Op-Ed “that did not meet our standards” (Cotton’s) on “a rushed editorial process.”
All of the Times’s confusion and hedging allowed Cotton to capitalize even further, easily turning his piece’s new contraband/“under review” status into a win-win-win-win, telling Fox on Thursday, “My op-ed doesn’t meet The New York Times’s standards. It far exceeds their standards, which are normally below left-wing sophomoric drivel.” And, in reference to the Times’s decision to “reduce” the number of Op-Eds it publishes, he manages this zinger: “I will say to the world ‘You’re welcome’ for getting The New York Times to run less of the garbage that you normally see in their pages.”
The Times walked right into this wood chipper, even after giving itself multiple chances to at least partially save (some) face. But what’s most maddening is that they seem vindicated by (or oblivious to) this manipulation by the right. They seem proud of their wishy-washy decisions, reveling in their tedious boards, layer upon layer of gleeful bureaucracy, and self-centered meaninglessness.
Again and again, we see that it all seems like a game to the Times. Walking around in a fog of their own importance, they defend a “debate” that anyone can see was in bad faith to begin with. It’s also hard to shake the feeling that, if it weren’t for the 800-strong staff outcry, the Times’s leadership wouldn’t have thought they’d done anything wrong. As an organization, The New York Times has ceded substantial moral, ethical, and intellectual ground here, and real legitimacy. Not to mention, at this moment, how much valuable time has been wasted by this distraction, taking attention away from the actual events on the ground.
Coda I: In the spirit of debate, I suppose, the Times on Thursday (June 4) published another Op-Ed, contra Cotton, called “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed,” by Michelle Goldberg. (As might be expected, it’s not really so much about Cotton, fascism, or real-world events, and is mostly just about the inner-workings of Times’s Opinion section.)
Coda II: Friday morning, June 5, the conservative National Review published a piece entitled, “The Inside Story of the Tom Cotton Op-Ed that Rocked the New York Times.” It begins, “When a newspaper publishes a bombshell op-ed, it doesn’t want the chief casualty to be its own credibility.” And goes on to say, on Monday Cotton and his team pitched the Times with an idea for a piece about the Insurrection Act, along with another proposal topic, “but the editors were interested in a piece focused solely on the Insurrection Act.”; “There were at least three drafts back and forth. The Times would send along edits for approval, and the Cotton team would sign off, and then there would be another round.”; etc.
Coda III: On Friday, June 5, The New York Times held a “tense” town hall-style staff meeting led by Bennet, Sulzberger, executive editor Dean Baquet, managing editor Joe Kahn, executive vice president and COO Meredith Kopit Levien, and CEO Mark Thompson. Reportedly, Bennet apologized for the mess and said he had allowed the Opinion section to be “stampeded by the news cycle.” He also said Cotton’s piece would not appear in Sunday’s print edition, as was previously planned. And, taking questions from an “irate staff,” he also admitted again that he didn’t read the piece before publishing it, claiming that that oversight was “another part of the process that broke down.” He added, “I should have been involved in signing off on the piece... I should have read it and signed off.” (This obviously begs the question, if Bennet didn’t read it, who did? According to National Review’s report, there were “at least three drafts.”) When asked about Cotton’s claim (also in National Review) that the Times approached Cotton about writing the piece, Bennet admitted that he had “seen Cotton’s tweets on the subject,” and stated, “We did ask if he could stand up that argument. I’m not sure we suggested that topic to him but we did invite the piece.” He also mentioned he was unhappy about the “civil war” tweets posted by Bari Weiss the previous day.
Baquet, meanwhile, said he was “impressed” and “proud” of the Times staff following the publication of Cotton’s piece, “telling staff he stayed up all night following its publication on Wednesday reading their comments.”
Levien said, “We all work at the Times because we believe this institution can help right wrongs in a way that few others can. I’m sorry that this time we increased pain rather than reduced it.” She added that the issue was a “leadership problem, and we will treat it as such.”
Sulzberger defended Bennet, saying he has “as tough a job as anyone I can imagine in any newsroom.” He also admitted the Op-Ed was “sloppy” and stressed that the Times leadership regretted publishing the piece altogether.
Coda IV: Late Friday night, The New York Times appended an “editor’s note” to the original Cotton Op-Ed online. The note rehashes many of the concerns raised in the other pieces laid out above, but there is new information. This line seems essential:
Given the life-and-death importance of the topic, the senator’s influential position and the gravity of the steps he advocates, the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved.
The note also says, “the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate,” and that the Times (“not Senator Cotton”) wrote the headline “Send In the Troops,” which “was incendiary and should not have been used.”
Then, per Brian Stelter, in a final flourish, Caroline Tabler, Tom Cotton’s communications director, issued a brief statement, saying, “This editor’s note is another humiliation for The New York Times. Senator Cotton stands by every word he wrote.”
It may be possible to write off all of the above as editorial, or even semantic, squabbles, or just growing pains, the results of an already-stressed organization now working under even greater pressure. But we can’t ignore these consistent mistakes and “leadership problems.” As Kevin G. Barnhurst has written, “The prestige press requires close scrutiny because, despite predictions of imminent demise, these newspapers remain the most authoritative of media forms.” At such a fraught time for our country – when respected, capable, wide-ranging, and well-funded news coverage is more and more necessary – these moves by our most authoritative newspaper are simply unacceptable. I have long been a critical reader of The New York Times; now, I’m upset.
I urge you to seek out news and information from media voices that have a full grasp on reality and an understanding of the gravity of the situation at hand. Again and again, The New York Times has shown itself to be unfit to report reality. Instead, the paper of record is stymied by its increasing obsession with its own cult-like internal processes and self-made mythology.
Where to Donate/Find Resources ☎
8cantwait is working to implement eight policies that would reduce police violence by 72%; you can see how many of these policies your city has (or hasn’t) enacted.
The Minnesota Chapter of the ACLU.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
ActBlue Bail Funds lets you donate to multiple bail funds at once.
The Marshall Project is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to sustaining national urgency around criminal justice reform.
Official George Floyd Memorial Fund.
Justice for Breonna Taylor Petition and Fundraiser.
Official Ahmaud Arbery GoFundMe.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund works to bail out arrested protestors.
Reclaim The Block promotes community-led safety initiatives and works to reduce the use of the police.
Contact your city council member, and city council speaker, Corey Johnson, and demand police funding be reallocated (New York City).
Communities United Against Police Brutality has a crisis hotline where people can report police abuse. It also offers legal, medical, and psychological resource referrals, and engages in political action against police brutality.
@patiasfantasyworld’s Google Doc master list of resources to dismantle systemic racism.
The End of Policing is now available as a free ebook from Verso.
Live Bait 🦑
On May 31, Amazon tweeted a disingenuous, noncommittal statement about its “solidarity with the Black community”; on June 3, it followed up with a Twitter statement about donating “a total of $10 million” to a variety of organizations, including the ACLU; however, Amazon has remained silent about its Ring video doorbell/home surveillance technology, its facial recognition tools, and its numerous law enforcement partnerships. (Amazon’s Ring has partnered with over 500 police departments around the country. The partnerships “permit law enforcement officers to directly contact Ring owners and ask for video to use when investigating nearby crimes”; Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey has said the partnerships “could easily create a surveillance network that places dangerous burdens on people of color and feeds racial anxieties in local communities.” Last year, over 30 civil rights organizations signed an open letter to elected officials to end Ring’s police partnerships. It reads, in part: “A key component of the partnership turns police departments into marketing agencies and police officers into salespeople for Amazon.” And, “With no oversight and accountability, Amazon’s technology creates a seamless and easily automated experience for police to request and access footage without a warrant, and then store it indefinitely.” In addition to Ring, Amazon also makes a facial recognition tool called Rekognition, which, in 2018, the ACLU criticized after conducting a test in which it misidentified black people more often than white people.)
In addition to Amazon, the protests have renewed scrutiny of other tech companies’ ties to law enforcement.
On Monday, Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” to protest Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to let Trump’s incendiary posts be; on Tuesday, Zuckerberg held a “tense” meeting with 25,000 Facebook employees defending his decision (see transcript); dozens of early Facebook employees wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg “disavowing” his stance; on Friday, Zuckerberg posted a long memo to his personal Facebook page, acknowledging “the real pain expressed by members of our community,” and saying the company will be reviewing its content policies, specifically those related to “state use of force” and “voter suppression.”
Ben Smith’s media column reports that CNBC is considering turning its prime time hours “over to right-wing talk shows”; and CNN CEO Jeff Zucker is thinking of running for Mayor of New York City.
Digiday on how “nervous advertisers” are reacting to the “current news cycle.”
Nike already released an ad about the protests, entitled “For once, Don’t Do It”; it came out on May 29.
Activision is postponing new updates for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Call of Duty: Mobile, and Call of Duty: Warzone, stating, “Right now, it’s time for those speaking up for equality, justice, and change to be seen and heard.”
Doreen St. Félix, in The New Yorker, notes re CNN’s Omar Jimenez’s on-air arrest last week: “The network has spoken out on behalf of its reporter, and in defense of journalism, but we would be remiss not to interrogate how it has wrung the injustice that Jimenez experienced for high-drama TV… CNN makes a spectacle of its own act of watching, which is not the same as neutral investigation.”
The ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of journalists abused by police in Minnesota.
The ACLU is also suing the Trump administration over the use of force used to disperse peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington on Monday.
Governor Andrew Cuomo – burning up any goodwill he may have earned from his COVID-19 response – replied to a question about NYPD officers (on video) beating protesters with batons by calling the question itself “offensive,” “incendiary,” and then asking, “Do you think there’s any sensible police officer who believes their job is bludgeoning a peaceful person with a baton?… It’s not a fact! It’s not even an opinion! That is a hyper-partisan rhetorical attack!”
In Buffalo, New York, police violently shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground and he began bleeding from the ear/head immediately; he is in the hospital; on Friday, two officers responsible were suspended, and 57 other officers resigned from their unit (not the force) in solidarity with their suspended colleagues.
James Mattis: “We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”
George Will: “Trump must be removed.”
John Allen: “The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020.”
Masha Gessen on Trump’s fascist performance.
The Washington Post says the White House is “effectively a fortress.”
A group called Republican Voters Against Trump has started airing anti-Trump ads on Fox News; one called “The Panic Room President” just came out.
D.C.’s Mayor Bowser painted BLACK LIVES MATTER in huge, street-wide yellow letters on the street that leads to the White House, and also officially renamed it Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Trump held a disastrous press conference Friday morning, invoking George Floyd’s name at one point, among many other deeply troubling remarks; he also tried to “shush” PBS White House correspondent Yamiche Alcindor.
Al Sharpton announced a “new march on Washington.”
Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke with Ezra Klein.
Kanye West donated $2 million to support the families of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor; he also established a payment plan to fully cover college tuition for Gianna Floyd, George Floyd’s 6-year-old daughter.
“You’re reaping what you sow”: Cornel West made a must-see appearance on CNN.