Good Thursday morning. First, some housekeeping. Unless there is big news today, there will not be a Poynter Report on Friday, as I catch up on some other work. I’ll be back on Monday.
Having said that, there likely will be a bunch of news today. How do I know that? Because that’s where we are at the moment with media news. Just look at the past week.
Whenever you think things might calm down to a light simmer, the pot boils over with major news.
We had the Sarah Palin-New York Times trial this week, and even more drama involving CNN (with, apparently, plenty more to come). There have been plenty of stories, many of them ugly, coming out of the Winter Olympics. And this on top of a thrilling Super Bowl that once again produced humongous TV numbers.
Meanwhile, news outlets continue to look closely at the latest with COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine situation, and you can always find a headline with the word “Trump” in it.
But, today, I want to draw your attention to two stories that came out earlier this week, and really deserve your attention. I’ve already mentioned them in the newsletter, but if you missed them or just glazed over them, you need to take some time to catch up.
First, news broke Tuesday night that Allison Gollust, CNN's chief marketing officer, was resigning. It was her relationship with Jeff Zucker and the failure to disclose that relationship that was used as the excuse for Zucker to step down as CNN president two weeks ago. In announcing Gollust’s resignation to staff, Jason Kilar, CEO for CNN’s parent company, WarnerMedia, wrote, “Based on interviews of more than 40 individuals and a review of over 100,000 texts and emails, the investigation found violations of Company policies, including CNN's News Standards and Practices, by Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust, and Chris Cuomo. We have the highest standards of journalistic integrity at CNN, and those rules must apply to everyone equally. Given the information provided to me in the investigation, I strongly believe we have taken the right actions and the right decisions have been made.”
Gollust fired back, saying in part, “WarnerMedia's statement tonight is an attempt to retaliate against me and change the media narrative in the wake of their disastrous handling of the last two weeks.”
As all this was going down Tuesday, The New York Times was publishing a major story that featured five bylines: Emily Steel, Jodi Kantor, Michael M. Grynbaum, James B. Stewart and John Koblin. Ben Smith, who doesn’t even work at the Times anymore, was given a contribution credit. The story was as provocative as the headline: “How a Secret Assault Allegation Against an Anchor Upended CNN and Jeff Zucker.”
The detailed piece goes over Chris Cuomo’s sketchy journalism ethics for advising his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, against multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. And it gets into some serious allegations involving Chris Cuomo that influenced Zucker’s decision to fire him. As Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote, it was an “investigation that laid out the now-familiar timeline of events and added one critical new dimension to the story: in the heat of the #MeToo uprising, Chris Cuomo had used the CNN platform to try to placate a would-be accuser.”
There’s so much to the story that it would be an injustice to try to describe in just a few sentences here. It should be read in full.
So that’s the first story I encourage you to read.
The second is another story I featured earlier this week. It’s Wesley Lowery’s story about The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Black City. White Paper.” It’s the first chapter in a series called “A More Perfect Union,” which sets out to examine the roots of systemic racism in America through institutions founded in Philadelphia.
I received plenty of feedback from readers (in particular, journalists) about Lowery’s story and how they would like to see other papers across the country take an honest look at their histories and workplaces.
The Inquirer’s Patricia Madej wrote, “Four takeaways from Wesley Lowery’s report on The Inquirer, ‘Black City. White Paper.’”
They were:
- The Inquirer’s founding mission has yet to be fulfilled.
- It took generations to begin diversifying.
- Powerful anecdotes from inside the newsroom.
- Progress has been made, but there’s still a ways to go.
Credit the Inquirer for this first step — a strong self-examination written by someone who has nothing to do with the Inquirer.
So, check out the Times’ investigative piece on CNN and Lowery’s story in the Inquirer. It will be time well spent.
A matter of time
Well, we should’ve seen this coming.
On Monday, the judge presiding over Sarah Palin’s libel trial against The New York Times announced he was going to toss out the jury's verdict because Palin had not proven her case that the Times acted with “actual malice.” But Judge Jed Rakoff announced that decision while the jury was still deliberating, and he allowed it to continue to work its way toward a verdict. He even acknowledged at the time that he was going to let the jury continue with its deliberations.
“I certainly considered the possibility that I should wait until after the jury had rendered its verdict in this case,” Rakoff said on Monday, “but the more I thought about it over the weekend, the more I thought that was unfair to both sides. We’ve had a very full argument on this; I know where I’m coming out.”
Rakoff said he wanted potential appeals courts to hear what a jury said in this case, as well as his ruling.
By the end of that day — again, this was Monday — the jury had not reached a verdict and Rakoff let them go home for the day.
Now here’s the part we should’ve seen coming: Despite the judge telling them to avoid coverage of the trial, members of the jury did find out that Rakoff was planning on throwing out the verdict.
Rakoff wrote in a two-page order on Wednesday, “These jurors reported that although they had been assiduously adhering to the Court’s instruction to avoid media coverage of the trial, they had involuntarily received ‘push notifications’ on their smartphones that contained the bottom-line of the ruling.”
Rakoff said the jurors, who returned a unanimous verdict in favor of the Times on Tuesday, assured him they were not impacted by Rakoff’s decision.
Is that true? Was the jury unaffected by the judge’s ruling? It’s impossible to say, although it should be noted that the jury did continue to deliberate for part of the day Tuesday before coming to a final verdict.
But this could come up when Palin’s team appeals this case, as they have already indicated that they will do.
What’s next for Palin?
