This week’s newsletter is sponsored by the Online News Association.
This week, our top story asserts the importance of legal journalists covering the Supreme Court with the same scrutiny as any other political body — something freelance writer and 1L law student Grady Martin points out they’ve not always done.
A heads up! Our newsletter will be going on a short break throughout September. We’ll still be publishing, but after next week’s issue, we won’t be in your inbox again until October.
In this issue:
And also: Urgent ideas to defend press freedom in Palestine, Poynter launches initiative to track attacks on U.S. press, philanthropy looks to shore up public media, and a looming TV deal that would blow past current media consolidation and ownership caps. Plus, the resource of the week is Auto Archiver, another tool for archiving website copies.
—James Salanga
Pre-order The Objective’s second print magazine today.
In a new collaboration between The Objective and News Futures, 14 practitioners share their perspectives on building local, participatory, and durable information systems for the next decade.
LABOR, GENDER & SEXUALITY
The Supreme Court is political. These journalists say treat it that way
Since Trump returned to office, the Court has been a key ally of the most extreme elements of his agenda. Trump’s three appointments to the Court have created a 6-3 conservative supermajority that some experts predict will hold until the 2050s. Even before his re-election, the Court ended the right to abortion, gutted gun regulations, and ended affirmative action.
But legal journalists, many of whom are lawyers — a profession that venerates the Court — have not historically treated the Court as a political branch. Journalists covering the court regularly focus on the legal arguments behind major cases, as opposed to the political machinations behind the scenes and their broader implications. This leads some analysts to see traditional media as going easy on the Court, especially since media organizations sometimes fail to consider their own role in these battles.
An example of this is the recent U.S. v. Skrmetti decision — the New York Times’ coverage of trans healthcare was cited 29 times in briefs arguing for the Court to permit states to ban gender-affirming care for minors. Clarence Thomas’ concurrence arguing for the bans cited the Times seven times. Yet the paper has not publicly acknowledged its role in providing justifications for crackdowns on trans Americans.
And the Washington Post, for example, sat for three years on the story that an upside-down American flag — a symbol of the January 6th insurrection — flew outside Republican justice Sam Alito’s home shortly before Joe Biden’s inauguration.
As the Court presides over decisions that target the legal rights of those most marginalized in the U.S., coverage of the body and the legal fights within is crucial.
Yet the Supreme Court Press Corps is, just like the Supreme Court itself, an exclusive institution. Only 23 journalists hold coveted “hard passes” granting them access to all of the Court’s arguments. Outsiders have to navigate a complex process to get a day pass to watch arguments.
Historically, said Chris Geidner, the publisher of Law Dork and a twenty-year veteran of writing about the Court, those institutional journalists can give the Supreme Court some deference in their reporting.
—Grady Martin
Sponsored by the Online News Association
WHAT ELSE?
A bit more media
Urgent ideas for defending press freedom in Gaza: Twenty-two journalists and those in adjacent fields share what they’d like to see journalism do in the face of ongoing, relentless targeting of journalists in Gaza. Among the ideas: Journalists could strike for change or resign en masse in protest of their Palestinian counterparts’ killings. They can work to gather and uplift Palestinian journalists, and hire them for work. They can stop uncritically repeating Israeli military and government claims.
Poynter officially launches Press Freedom Watch: “Poynter is compiling a list of federal actions affecting journalists, including lawsuits, policy changes, investigations, funding cuts, firings and detentions,” Poynter’s announcement reads. “The list will be updated periodically and does not include verbal attacks, threats or media companies’ anticipatory compliance.”
New $50 million philanthropic fund aims to shore up rural public media stations: The Knight Foundation, along with other leading philanthropic organizations, will create an application form for stations whose budgets were at least 30% reliant on Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding. They hope to dole out the money before the end of the year. Analysis from Semipublic cautions that NPR and PBS — not the fund’s target — are in more trouble than they let on.
Nexstar acquires Tegna for over $6 billion in major TV network consolidation: The deal would mean Nexstar’s footprint “far exceeds the longtime 39% limit on ownership of stations, which had been kept in place by both Republican and Democratic administrations over the past three decades,” reporter Dade Hayes writes. The Federal Communications Commission is taking public comment about removing the cap, and regulatory approval for the merger could take up to a year.
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.
Sponsored by the Online News Association
Join the Online News Association for ONA25, Sept. 10–13 in New Orleans!
The Online News Association’s annual conference is a gathering for digital leaders to collaborate on insights to build the next iteration of digital media. Register today!
JOURNALISM IN A GRAF
Quote of the week
“Overall, journalists tend to side with Israel … Journalists have to stop repeating whatever the Israeli government and army are stating. For example, parroting—even critically—the statements that people ‘are Hamas’ is lending credibility to their statements.”
FINALLY…
Resource of the week
This week’s resource is … Auto Archive, an archival tool for saving copies of websites while reporting.
Around a week ago, Bellingcat journalists released a new version of Auto Archiver, the OSINT-fueled news organization’s tool for preserving copies of online digital content at any snapshot in time and saving them locally or remotely.
That’s crucial because Reddit is starting to block the Internet Archive from making archival copies of any pages on the site, in a move meant to force tech companies to pay for the privilege of crawling its site to either show up in their search engines or train their large language models.
“Worryingly, it’s not hard to imagine other publishers following suit with the same reasoning, which could radically reduce our knowledge of the web that was,” Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton writes in an explanation of the tool.
For support or a demo launching the tool — organized in a GitHub repo — you can [email protected] with the subject “Auto Archiver at [my team/organisation]” with more about your archiving needs.
Thanks for reading. We’ll have more for you next week.
— 30 —