This week, the top story is by Assigned Media’s Evan Urquhart — not-so-happy Pride coverage about how a new podcast on gender-affirming care in the United States from the New York Times fails to meaningfully include the voices of those most impacted by said care.

In this issue:

And also: Muck Rack releases its state of journalism report for 2025, looking at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s long legacy of harm, Politico’s union says the newsroom’s AI tool spits out made-up slop, and bill to cut public media funding passes in the House. Plus, the resource of the week is a reminder about the protest paradigm accompanied by acknowledgment of newsrooms providing thoughtful coverage about the Los Angeles immigration raids.

This story was co-published with Assigned Media.

The Protocol, the New York Times’ new podcast on the history of gender-affirming care for youth, largely excludes the voices of trans youth receiving that care. The narrative, as in previous Times coverage, is that something has gone wrong with youth gender care in the United States.

The podcast’s creators continue to create smoke around gender-affirming care while suggesting there must be fire, a pattern consistent in Times coverage. Starting in 2022, the paper has published repeated stories raising questions and concerns about aspects of these treatments. It’s a remarkable (and remarkably one-sided) focus for the paper of record to concern itself with the minutiae of healthcare impacting fewer than 0.1% of American children. This has been highlighted repeatedly, by Parker Molloy for The Objective, numerous LGBTQ+ organizations, and even many of the Times’s own contributors.

Throughout The Protocol, trans people’s supposed experiences with healthcare in the U.S. are relayed through the prism of medical providers’ perspectives in lengthy interviews, while our own voices are relegated to brief, contextless clips in the final episode.

The podcast makes time for F.G., a 50-year-old Dutch trans man, to voice his opinion that younger trans people are participating in a fad. But it makes no room for young trans people to answer back. They don’t get to tell Times listeners that a life of fear and hiding is no longer good enough, or that times have changed.

While the first two episodes feature interviews with trans adults from the Netherlands who were early recipients of puberty blockers, the podcast only briefly returns to the experiences of patients.

Those were the only full-length conversations with trans people who received care and were recorded in the Netherlands, not the U.S.

“I think it's telling that Ghorayshi apparently couldn’t secure on record interviews with American families who’ve had positive experiences with gender-affirming care — those families absolutely exist,” Molloy said.

Read the full story on The Objective.

— Evan Urquhart

Muck Rack releases 2025 state of journalism report: The publisher surveyed over 1,500 reporters to assess industry trends. Among the highlights: 77% of respondents reported using AI tools for work in the past year, with ChatGPT the most frequently used tool; Facebook displaced X as the top platform for journalists; the largest proportion of respondents viewed mis- and disinformation, dwindling public trust in journalism, and lack of funding as the biggest threats to journalism.

🗞️ Read the survey in Muck Rack.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s legacy of harm: Even before it published an August 2021 editorial in support of building Cop City, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a “history of co-signing police terror and inciting racist vigilantism for the sake of maintaining ‘public order.” Independent Atlanta-based journalist Aja Arnold, who founded the abolitionist outlet Mainline, covers that history, spanning from 1906 to the present.

📰 Read the story in Scalawag Magazine.

Politico’s AI tool spits out made-up slop, union says: The newsroom’s union says Capital AI, the newsroom’s new AI product for high-paying subscribers, has generated “garbled or made-up Washington intelligence, including a lobbying effort by a fictional basket-weaver guild.” The union filed a complaint against the newsroom earlier this year, alleging Politico violated contract stipulations for use of AI.

📂 Read the story in Semafor.

Package to remove $1.1 billion from public media moves to Senate, passes in House: The measure passed largely along partisan lines, 214 to 212; if it passes the Senate, it would eliminate the next two years of federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates that money to public media outlets. The CPB is also currently suing the administration over the president’s efforts to control its board.

📻 Read the story in NPR.

Have a story you think we should include in this section of next week’s newsletter? Let us know here or by responding to this email.

This week’s resource is … a refresher on the protest paradigm and a shoutout to local Los Angeles outlets doing an excellent job at covering responses to the ICE raids.

It’s been a minute, my dear Front Page readers, and I come bearing an explanation: I stepped down from my position with U.S. Democracy Day earlier this month to focus on reporting. Still, this column will continue. My commitment to democracy-centered journalism is ironclad.

Moreover, there’s a need for reporters to hear from other reporters about what it takes to do responsible journalism right now — and more importantly, how taking shortcuts to get a story out on time or make a tough job a little easier can harm communities even more during this particular moment.

Angelenos have been protesting downtown for a week straight after Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents raided — and continue to patrol — southern California for undocumented immigrants. Many of the demonstrations were peaceful, with people primarily  waving signs and flags as police officers plowed into them with horses and shot at them with rubber bullets as National Guard officers deployed by President Donald Trump patrolled federal property.

Predictably, some national and large local media outlets fell right into the trap of the protest paradigm, even though LA Mayor Karen Bass herself said that the National Guard’s presence “provoke the population”. These reports overemphasize spurts of conflict and damaged property at the expense of explaining the impact on people, their grievances, and why these mass protests are happening: The nature of the ICE raids.

For more about the protest paradigm and examples of coverage bucking it, read my full column on The Objective’s site.

—Beatrice Forman, Democracy Journalism Columnist

Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.

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