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Tag: Washington Post

  • US military carries out second strike, killing survivors on suspected drug boat, sources say

    The U.S. military carried out a follow-up strike on a suspected drug vessel operating in the Caribbean on Sept. 2 after an initial attack did not kill everyone on board, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.That September strike was the first in what became a regular series of attacks on alleged drug boats.While the first strike appeared to disable the boat and cause deaths, the military assessed there were survivors, according to the sources. The second attack killed the remaining crew on board, bringing the total death toll to 11, and sunk the ship.Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had ordered the military prior to the operation to ensure the strike killed everyone on board, but it’s not clear if he knew there were survivors prior to the second strike, one of the sources said.The strike and deaths were announced by President Donald Trump on the day of the attacks, but the administration has never publicly acknowledged killing survivors.Trump said on Thursday that action on land to stop suspected drug trafficking networks in Venezuela could “start very soon,” amid ongoing questions about the legality of the U.S. military’s campaign around Latin America. Officials have acknowledged not knowing the identities of everyone on board the boats before they are struck, CNN has reported.“I have been alarmed by the number of vessels that this administration has taken out without a single consultation of Congress,” Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean told CNN this week. “Just last week, I took a look in a SCIF , because I’m a member of foreign affairs, at some documents around the sinking of these vessels and the murder of the people on those boats. Nowhere in there was there evidence of what was going on.”People briefed on the “double-tap” strike, said they were concerned that it could violate the law of armed conflict, which prohibits the execution of an enemy combatant who is “hors de combat,” or taken out of the fight due to injury or surrender.“They’re breaking the law either way,” said Sarah Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon who now serves as a senior analyst at the Crisis Group think tank. “They’re killing civilians in the first place, and then if you assume they’re combatants, it’s also unlawful — under the law of armed conflict, if somebody is ‘hors de combat’ and no longer able to fight, then they have to be treated humanely.”Details of the strikes were first reported by The Intercept and the Washington Post.Hegseth in a social media post Friday continued to defend the strikes on alleged drug boats, writing, “Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”“Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth said.The U.S. military was aware that there were survivors in the water following the first strike on Sept. 2 and carried out another to both sink the vessel and kill the remaining crew, the sources said. Pentagon officials told lawmakers in briefings afterward that the second strike was done to sink the boat so it would not pose a threat to navigation, the sources said.The U.S. military has hit boats multiple times in several instances to sink them, the sources said, but the Sept. 2 strike is the only known instance where the military deliberately killed survivors.It is not clear why the survivors were not picked up, as they were following another strike in the Caribbean in October. In that instance, the Trump administration rescued two survivors and repatriated them to their home countries.In a post announcing the Sept. 2 strike on Truth Social, President Donald Trump said that the U.S. military had conducted “a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility.”The administration has tried to legally justify its strikes on the boats by claiming they are carrying individuals linked to roughly two dozen drug cartels engaged in an armed conflict with the U.S. The White House has said repeatedly that the administration’s actions “comply fully with the Law of Armed Conflict,” the area of international law that is designed to prevent attacks on civilians.Many legal experts, however, say the suspected drug traffickers are civilians, not combatants, and that the strikes therefore amount to extrajudicial killings.Before the U.S. military began blowing up boats in September, countering illicit drug trafficking was handled by law enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard, and cartel members and drug smugglers were treated as criminals with due process rights.But in a classified legal opinion produced over the summer, the Justice Department argued that the president is legally allowed to authorize lethal strikes against 24 cartels and criminal organizations in self-defense, because the groups pose an imminent threat to Americans, CNN has reported.That argument has potentially been undercut by the behavior of the suspected traffickers who have been targeted: in at least one instance, a boat had turned around and was moving away from the U.S. before being struck. Survivors of the strike on Sept. 2 also posed no imminent threat, since they were effectively incapacitated, the sources briefed on the strikes and Harrison noted.Senior U.S. defense officials and U.S. allies have expressed skepticism of the legality of the military campaign. The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, offered to leave his post during a tense meeting last month with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after he raised questions about the legality of the strikes, CNN has reported. Holsey will leave his post in December, just one year into his tenure as the SOUTHCOM chief.Lawyers specializing in international law within DoD’s Office of General Counsel have also raised concerns about the legality of the strikes. Multiple current and former uniformed lawyers told CNN that the strikes do not appear lawful.The United Kingdom is also no longer sharing intelligence with the U.S. about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in U.S. military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, CNN has reported.

    The U.S. military carried out a follow–up strike on a suspected drug vessel operating in the Caribbean on Sept. 2 after an initial attack did not kill everyone on board, sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    That September strike was the first in what became a regular series of attacks on alleged drug boats.

    While the first strike appeared to disable the boat and cause deaths, the military assessed there were survivors, according to the sources. The second attack killed the remaining crew on board, bringing the total death toll to 11, and sunk the ship.

    Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had ordered the military prior to the operation to ensure the strike killed everyone on board, but it’s not clear if he knew there were survivors prior to the second strike, one of the sources said.

    The strike and deaths were announced by President Donald Trump on the day of the attacks, but the administration has never publicly acknowledged killing survivors.

    Trump said on Thursday that action on land to stop suspected drug trafficking networks in Venezuela could “start very soon,” amid ongoing questions about the legality of the U.S. military’s campaign around Latin America. Officials have acknowledged not knowing the identities of everyone on board the boats before they are struck, CNN has reported.

    “I have been alarmed by the number of vessels that this administration has taken out without a single consultation of Congress,” Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean told CNN this week. “Just last week, I took a look in a SCIF [sensitive compartmented information facility], because I’m a member of foreign affairs, at some documents around the sinking of these vessels and the murder of the people on those boats. Nowhere in there was there evidence of what was going on.”

    People briefed on the “double-tap” strike, said they were concerned that it could violate the law of armed conflict, which prohibits the execution of an enemy combatant who is “hors de combat,” or taken out of the fight due to injury or surrender.

    “They’re breaking the law either way,” said Sarah Harrison, a former associate general counsel at the Pentagon who now serves as a senior analyst at the Crisis Group think tank. “They’re killing civilians in the first place, and then if you assume they’re combatants, it’s also unlawful — under the law of armed conflict, if somebody is ‘hors de combat’ and no longer able to fight, then they have to be treated humanely.”

    Details of the strikes were first reported by The Intercept and the Washington Post.

    Hegseth in a social media post Friday continued to defend the strikes on alleged drug boats, writing, “Our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict—and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”

    “Every trafficker we kill is affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization,” Hegseth said.

    The U.S. military was aware that there were survivors in the water following the first strike on Sept. 2 and carried out another to both sink the vessel and kill the remaining crew, the sources said. Pentagon officials told lawmakers in briefings afterward that the second strike was done to sink the boat so it would not pose a threat to navigation, the sources said.

    The U.S. military has hit boats multiple times in several instances to sink them, the sources said, but the Sept. 2 strike is the only known instance where the military deliberately killed survivors.

    It is not clear why the survivors were not picked up, as they were following another strike in the Caribbean in October. In that instance, the Trump administration rescued two survivors and repatriated them to their home countries.

    In a post announcing the Sept. 2 strike on Truth Social, President Donald Trump said that the U.S. military had conducted “a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility.”

    The administration has tried to legally justify its strikes on the boats by claiming they are carrying individuals linked to roughly two dozen drug cartels engaged in an armed conflict with the U.S. The White House has said repeatedly that the administration’s actions “comply fully with the Law of Armed Conflict,” the area of international law that is designed to prevent attacks on civilians.

    Many legal experts, however, say the suspected drug traffickers are civilians, not combatants, and that the strikes therefore amount to extrajudicial killings.

    Before the U.S. military began blowing up boats in September, countering illicit drug trafficking was handled by law enforcement and the U.S. Coast Guard, and cartel members and drug smugglers were treated as criminals with due process rights.

    But in a classified legal opinion produced over the summer, the Justice Department argued that the president is legally allowed to authorize lethal strikes against 24 cartels and criminal organizations in self-defense, because the groups pose an imminent threat to Americans, CNN has reported.

    That argument has potentially been undercut by the behavior of the suspected traffickers who have been targeted: in at least one instance, a boat had turned around and was moving away from the U.S. before being struck. Survivors of the strike on Sept. 2 also posed no imminent threat, since they were effectively incapacitated, the sources briefed on the strikes and Harrison noted.

    Senior U.S. defense officials and U.S. allies have expressed skepticism of the legality of the military campaign. The commander of U.S. Southern Command, Adm. Alvin Holsey, offered to leave his post during a tense meeting last month with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after he raised questions about the legality of the strikes, CNN has reported. Holsey will leave his post in December, just one year into his tenure as the SOUTHCOM chief.

    Lawyers specializing in international law within DoD’s Office of General Counsel have also raised concerns about the legality of the strikes. Multiple current and former uniformed lawyers told CNN that the strikes do not appear lawful.

    The United Kingdom is also no longer sharing intelligence with the U.S. about suspected drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in U.S. military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal, CNN has reported.

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  • Washington Post confirms data breach linked to Oracle hacks | TechCrunch

    The Washington Post has said that it was one of the victims of a hacking campaign tied to Oracle’s suite of corporate software apps.  

    Reuters first reported the news on Friday, citing a statement from the newspaper that said it was affected “by the breach of the Oracle E-Business Suite platform.” 

    A spokesperson for the Post did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment 

    When reached by email, Oracle spokesperson Michael Egbert referred TechCrunch to its two advisories that it previously posted, and did not answer our questions. 

    Last month, Google said that the ransomware gang Clop was targeting companies after exploiting multiple vulnerabilities in Oracle’s E-Business Suite software, which companies use for their business operations, storing their human resources files, and other sensitive data.

    The exploits allowed the hackers to steal their customer’s business data and employee records from more than 100 companies, per Google.

    The hackers’ campaign began in late September when corporate executives reported receiving extortion messages sent from email addresses previously associated with the Clop gang, claiming that the hackers had stolen large amounts of sensitive internal business data and employees’ personal information from hacked Oracle systems. 

    Anti-ransomware firm Halcyon told TechCrunch at the time that the hackers demanded one executive at an affected company to pay $50 million in a ransom payment. 

    On Thursday, Clop claimed on its website that it had hacked The Washington Post, claiming that the company “ignored their security,” language that the Clop gang typically uses when the victim does not pay the hackers. 

    It’s not uncommon for ransomware or extortion gangs like Clop to publicize the names and stolen files of their victims as a pressure tactic, which can suggest that the victim has not negotiated a payment with the gang, or the negotiation broke down. 

    Several other organizations have confirmed they are affected by the Oracle E-Business hacks, including Harvard University and American Airlines subsidiary Envoy.

    Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

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  • Got a store rewards card? It might not be that rewarding – WTOP News

    If you own a rewards card to a department store or coffee shop, you might not be getting as many deals and freebies as you think.

    Washington Post’s Geoffrey A. Fowler speaks with WTOP’s Ralph Fox about surveillance pricing.

    If you own a rewards card to a department store or coffee shop, you might not be getting as many deals and freebies as you think.

    Retail loyalty cards which offer points, promotions, and freebies from stores such as Starbucks, Best Buy or GameStop can track your spending habits and find ways to charge you more, according to a recent exploration by Washington Post reporter Geoffrey Fowler.

    Utilizing California’s consumer privacy law, which allows users to obtain access to their data from companies as well as request their information to be deleted or not sold, Fowler took a look at the information Starbucks had on him from his loyalty card.

    Fowler told WTOP that the request revealed the coffee giant had information on all of his purchases and where he made them, building a dossier of his spending habits and building a profile of him.

    “Starbucks was trying to start a dossier on me and size me up, and ultimately figure out how much I would pay,” Fowler said.

    It even counted how often he opened the app.

    “It said one day last March, I tapped on the app more than 90 times,” Fowler said.

    Fowler discovered that Starbucks was also selling his information to data brokers and that he was rewarded less, even though he spent at Starbucks more often.

    “They call it personalized discounts. You might call it personalized ‘jacked up prices,’” he said.

    Fowler said it’s called “surveillance pricing,” where a company figures out what you are willing to pay and charges you exactly that, noting customers who use a company’s loyalty card or app less often are targeted with more deals to entice them back.

    “The opposite of what you thought was supposed to happen with a reward card was happening,” Fowler said.

    Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.

    © 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

    Jeffery Leon

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  • Q&A: Tom Sietsema on his 26-year career as a food critic and what’s next – WTOP News

    Tom Sietsema’s surprise announcement that he’s stepping down as The Washington Post’s food critic and revealing his identity landed like a thunderclap across D.C.’s dining scene: sudden, seismic and impossible to ignore.

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    Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema on his career and what’s next

    Tom Sietsema’s surprise announcement that he’s stepping down as The Washington Post’s longtime food critic and revealing his identity landed like a thunderclap across D.C.’s dining scene: sudden, seismic and impossible to ignore.

    For the past 26 years, Sietsema attempted to “eat under the radar” by remaining anonymous, while writing reviews, guides and Q&As that have been described by restaurant owners and chefs as “fair” and “honest.”

    In an interview with WTOP, Sietsema spoke about how he became a food critic, what the reality of being a food critic is like, why he’s stepping down and what he hopes to do next. Read the full Q&A below.

    The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      Let’s go back to the beginning. What were you doing before you were a food critic?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      I went to the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, thinking I was going to be a diplomat. That did not work out because I fell in love with journalism.

      I had two really great internships with the Chicago Sun Times and ABC News, Good Morning America, and I just fell in love. I found there are these people who are paid to do what they love to do, that was write and report. I’ve always been interested in writing. I’ve always loved food. My mom was a great home cook and everything. But all that came later, right?

      I took the first journalism class at Georgetown, which was conducted by Ted Gup, a Washington Post investigative reporter. In my class was Kara Swisher, who went on to become Kara Swisher, and Mary Jordan, the illustrious Washington Post correspondent.

      I got a job at the Post as a copy aide back in 1983, and you will do anything to get out of those jobs. … So one week, Bob Woodward was looking for an assistant, as was the legendary Phyllis C. Richman, food critic and food editor. And I applied for both, and soon thereafter, I got a lovely, “Thanks, but no thanks,” from Bob Woodward, and a green light from Phyllis Richman, my predecessor.

      … And in four years as her assistant, I learned how to cook. I probably prepared the bulk of the recipes back when we had two food sections a week.

      … And so I went from there to be the food editor at the Milwaukee Journal, and I went to San Francisco, and I was a food reporter there. I was a food critic in Seattle at the Post Intelligencer. And then I did a profile on a man who changed my life. He was the number two at Microsoft, and they were developing a new product called Sidewalk.com, and it was basically your weekend section online with 10 sites around the country … and I became the national restaurant producer for them, and that got me back to D.C.

      … When that folded, about three years later, I was hired at the Washington Post as a full-time food reporter. And then two years later, I became the food critic.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      Being a food critic sounds very glamorous and so fun, but are there any challenges that come with the job?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      Well, your weight and your health. I learned very early on the day I got this job, I hired a trainer, went to a gym, and it sounds like a yuppie affectation. But for me, it’s health insurance. I want to keep doing this job, and I ended up doing it for almost 26 years.

      … People might not think about that so much when they think of the job. You also spend a lot of time going to places, checking places out that aren’t ready for prime time for whatever reason.

      … It sort of takes over your life, in a way, I think if you do it right. And I was eating out 10 meals a week, which is a lot, and it’s also a lot of people. So, I had a regular posse, of maybe 70 people that I ate out with, which sounds like a lot, but not when you’re eating 10 meals a week. And then you’ve got to factor in where people live. So I felt like a lot of my job was being a concierge, booking tables under different reservations, remembering those names, killing off a pseudonym when too many restaurants found out about it.

      … I really tried as hard as I could to eat under the radar.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      What words of advice or words of warning would you have for others who aspire to be food critics?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      There’s so many people writing about food, and I welcome that.

      … I think the more people at the table, the better. I do think if you want to really stand out, you should just start something. Don’t expect to get anywhere. Just do a blog, a newsletter, something that you’re really passionate about, and have someone who’s a really good writer or a friend, someone who knows how to edit, edit you and look it over and make suggestions and learn from that.

      Read the greats. Read about Ruth Reichl, Bill Addison, M.F.K. Fisher, I mean, the list goes on and on. Jonathan Gold — all these people who are or were great writers, and I also think it helps to travel as widely as you can, given your budget or whatever.

      … It gives you a marker by which to judge other restaurants here and elsewhere in the country. I also think don’t take yourself too seriously, but take what you do seriously.

      … I also think it really helps to become an expert in something that no one else is interested in. Tim Carman, my colleague at the Post, has been very good at carving out coffee and barbecue and bargain eating as his sort of areas of expertise, for instance.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      What are some of your favorite reviews that you’ve written? Are there any that stand out for you that you’re really proud of?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      As a food critic, it was very important me to write about other than just what’s on the plate and what’s going on in restaurants. I was really proud of the year that I took to write about the 10 best food cities in the country. The Post sent me around the country for over a year to spend a week in each of the 12 cities that I looked at, and at no small expense.

      … I loved going undercover as a dishwasher in Houston. I went down there and worked in a 400-seat upscale Mexican restaurant and spent a very long shift with two young Guatemalan guys who showed me their life, and I realized you cannot exist as a restaurant without dishwashers. And I interviewed a whole slew of big-name chefs who started out as dishwashers. And what I love about that is that it’s a pathway toward getting ahead in this country.

      … I loved covering the fast food chains. I went to the top 10 most popular chains in the country, and I treated them seriously.

      … It’s easy to think about raves or rants, but one of the reviews that I’m most proud of is when I went and stood in at the nonprofit shelter, Miriam’s Kitchen, which feeds people who are homeless, who might need work, restaurant-quality food. I was extremely proud of that, and I went in just as anyone else would, and I was amazed at the way the volunteers prepared food that was well-balanced, beautiful and treated everyone as a guest, and they would call everyone a guest. And I thought that was beautiful.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      Have you ever heard from a restaurant owner after a critical review?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      Oh, plenty. Yeah, plenty. And it’s always a difficult conversation. I always tell people when I’m fact-checking, a lot of times, chefs would ask me, “How’d we do?” I say, “You know what? I can’t, in fairness, tell you what the review is about. But I did go three or more times, and I feel like I’ve given it a fair shake. But if you’d like to talk about this afterward, or if you have any questions for me, I’m happy to answer them.”

      I’m sort of amazed at the responses that I’ve gotten. Not everyone has, but people who I never would have expected to call me back to thank me for critical review. I really admire those people, after the fact, because that’s tough.

      I realize a lot of people are employed in restaurants. It can affect people’s futures and everything and their reputations, and they always say, “Everyone should have a story written about him or her to know what it feels like. Are you misquoted? Did the reporter get something wrong?”

      So I was always very sensitive to that.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      Are there any restaurant reviews or just food stories that you wish you had written?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      I always wanted to cover a White House State Dinner. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s Republican or Democrat, they really don’t want you in there eating the food and giving it a yay or nay or something else.

      … Mario Batali, he cooked an Italian dinner or helped cook an Italian dinner for the Obamas. And smart man that he was in that respect, he passed around these little, tiny plin — these little, tiny, filled pastas — for the press corps to try, and it’s the only time I’ve ever had a taste of something that was actually served at a state dinner at the White House.

      I have eaten in the mess. I’ve eaten on the Hill. I got into the CIA to review their dining room, which was the hardest story I’ve ever had to fact check. So, I’ve eaten around in a lot of government places, but the one that got away from me was a White House State Dinner. I would have loved that.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      What is the best restaurant you could say you have eaten at?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      Wow, you know that just depends so much about where I am, who I’m eating with, the moment, my mood.

      People often ask about your favorites, and I think those favorites change. The same restaurant that I would pick in the fall wouldn’t be the same place I wanted to eat in the summer and vice versa.

      But when I think of magical places, I mean one that comes to mind was in India when I got a chance to eat at Indian Accent many years ago. And this is when a lot more middle-class Indians were actually going to restaurants for the first time, and because of that very famous chef in India wanted to replicate dishes to remind them of maybe childhood memories that they had eaten.

      So, the desserts were served, for instance, on a dish that looked like an Indian bed. And I thought was very clever. That was fun.

      When Atomix in New York opened, it was really one of the first fine dining Korean restaurants in the country, and that was really fun to experience. It really felt new and novel.

      But I’m also really interested in much humbler places, too. … I do go to restaurants that are maybe better known, but the best meals are almost always, street food meals.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      Can you tell me about some of the worst restaurants you’ve eaten at?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      Probably, the one I’m best known for is Founding Farmers, which I reviewed a long time ago, and since went back to to rereview because I think it’s important to give people second chances and do-overs.

      And it’s parting advice that I’m giving to diners in my farewell essay, and I thought was important for me to walk the talk. So, I did go back to Founding Farmers, and it’s better than it was when I first encountered it.

      … There were a lot of people who hated that review and a lot of people who applauded that review, and I sometimes think as a critic if a large number of people don’t like what you’re doing and a large number of people do like what you’re doing, you’re probably doing your job.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      D.C. has become such a food town. It’s become such a destination. What do you think has led to that?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      I think this is the smartest audience I’ve ever written for. People are from all over the world. We’re a world capital. People have a little bit more money here to go out or have in the past. And I think people are very curious here. Washingtonians are very opinionated, too. I think that helps.

      If I get a detail wrong about a West African restaurant, I’m going to hear about it from 20 people who were Peace Corps members or worked at the World Bank or the ambassador. That’s just the nature of living in Washington, D.C.

      And I also think we got great food at both ranges compared to other bigger markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York. I think it’s a little easier, or was until recently, a little easier, to do business here in town because we benefited from people from San Francisco and New York and elsewhere coming here to raise a family and start their own business after working for famous chefs elsewhere.

      … I love that this city is as curious and hungry as it is.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      I think the big question that I really wanted to ask you is, why are you stepping down now?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      Last year, I celebrated my 25th anniversary, and it just felt like a good time, but I wasn’t quite ready. And when the Post offered buyouts this year, I decided maybe this is an opportunity I really need to jump on and use that money as seed money for my next endeavors.

      I do not plan on retiring. I’ve left the Post, but I’m not retired, and I have a book in me. I have other projects that people have talked to me about. I’ve gone on sort of a listening tour in the last three or four months with people in TV, radio and elsewhere to just get a sense of what might be out there.

      So, I’m going to surprise myself, in part, but what I’m starting with, I launched my personal website, tomsietsema.com, recently. And what I want to do most immediately is recreate those joyful moments that I had in restaurants around the table. That’s the real perk of the job is getting smart, engaged, good people around a table to share food with you.

      … I think we just need more joy in our lives right now, and these are dark times, but we are not powerless. And I think we can change one meal at a time, and I’m going to do that my personal life and hopefully promote it on my website and encourage other people to do something similar.

    • Michelle Goldchain:

      So, if there’s one thing you hope people take away from your 26-year career, what would you want that one thing to be?

    • Tom Sietsema:

      I would hope that they saw me as their trusted friend who wanted to point out really good work and steer them away from not good work, and who really had their best interests at heart.

      And the great thing about food is it really can be something that brings people together. I love my online chat. That audience has been very special to me, and it’s probably been the most important thing I do every week.

      … I hope I’ve been a good friend. I hope I’m a trusted guide. I hope I’ve shined a light on people who might be struggling a little bit and need that extra push, and got it for me.

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    © 2025 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

    Michelle Goldchain

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  • Those closest to Tyler Robinson made horrifying discoveries in hours after Charlie Kirk killing, authorities say

    In the frantic hours after political activist Charlie Kirk was killed by a sniper at a Utah university, those closest to the alleged shooter began making wrenching discoveries, authorities said.

    In charging Tyler Robinson, 22, authorities revealed new details about the hours after the shooting and how they led to the arrest. Robinson was charged with seven counts, including one count of aggravated murder and two counts of obstruction of justice, for allegedly hiding the rifle used in the killing and disposing of his clothes, said Utah County Atty. Jeffrey Gray. He is also facing two counts of witness tampering after he allegedly instructed his roommate to delete incriminating texts, and asking them not to talk to investigators if they were questioned by authorities.

    Kirk, 31, was an influential figure in conservative and right-wing circles, winning praise for his views on heated topics, including abortion, immigration and gender identity. His death by a single gunshot during a speaking engagement at Utah Valley University last week shocked the nation and has led to vigorous debate over the motivations of his accused killer.

    Text exchanges

    Gray also provided details of a text exchange between Robinson and his roommate, a person transitioning to female with whom he was romantically involved, in which Robinson apparently confessed to the killing.

    According to the exchange detailed in charging documents, Robinson’s partner appeared to have no knowledge that Robinson had taken a rifle and had planned the shooting for about a week.

    After the shooting, authorities say, Robinson allegedly texted the partner to say: “Drop what you’re doing, look under my keyboard.” The roommate found a message that read: “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk and I’m going to take it.”

    “What??????????????” the roommate responded to Robinson in a text message. “You’re joking, right????”

    Robinson appears to confess to the killing in the text messages, and describes details of the shooting as he allegedly tried to evade authorities.

    “You weren’t the one who did it, right?” the roommate texted Robinson after the shooting, according to Gray.

    “I am, I’m sorry,” Robinson responded, according to court filings.

    While local and federal officials searched for the gunman, Gray said, Robinson allegedly texted his partner, explaining his decision to kill Kirk.

    “Why?” his partner, who was not identified by Gray, texted Robinson.

    “Why did I do it?” Robinson responded.

    “Yeah,” the roommate replied, according to Gray.

    “I had enough of his hatred,” Robinson allegedly replied. “Some hate can’t be negotiated.”

    Parents’ suspicions

    It took nearly a day before officials released grainy photos of the suspect.

    Gray said authorities were led to Robinson by his parents, including his mother who first recognized him from pictures that were released to the public of the suspected shooter. She then showed the images to her husband, who agreed the person looked like their son, according to Gray.

    Robinson’s mother told investigators that in the last year, her son had “become more political and had started to lean more to the left, becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” Gray said.

    Robinson had also spoken to his parents about Kirk visiting the Utah campus, and had accused Kirk of “spreading hate,” Gray said.

    When his parents confronted him, Robinson admitted to the killing and said he was thinking of killing himself, Gray said.

    “Robinson implied he was the shooter and didn’t want to go to jail,” Gray said. “When asked why he did it, Robinson explained, ‘There’s too much evil, and the guy,’ referring to Kirk, ‘spreads too much hate.’”

    Discord chat

    The Washington Post reported earlier this week that Robinson appear to confess to members of a Discord chat group two hours before he was arrested.

    Citing a source, the Post quoted the message this way: “Hey guys, I have bad news for you all. It was me at UVU yesterday. im sorry for all of this.”

    The Post said he was arrested soon after.

    Agents are also interviewing people who interacted with the suspect online, FBI Director Kash Patel said.

    That includes a Discord chat that seems to have involved more than 20 people after the shooting.

    “We’re running them all down,” Patel said.

    The weapon

    The rifle, Gray said, had apparently been given to Robinson by his father as a gift. According to text exchanges with his roommate, the rifle had belonged to his grandfather at one point, and Robinson seemed concerned he would be unable to retrieve it.

    “I’m worried what my old man would do if I didn’t bring back grandpas rifle,” Robinson texted. “How the f— will I explain losing it to my old man…”

    Suspicious that his son was involved in the shooting, his father asked Robinson to send a picture of the rifle, but his son didn’t reply, according to Gray.

    Richard Winton, Salvador Hernandez

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  • Vance, Hegseth greet troops in Washington, face jeers from protesters

    White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called DC protesters who heckled the pair “stupid white hippies.”

    Top Trump administration officials on Wednesday thanked troops deployed in the nation’s capital and blasted demonstrators opposed to the aggressive anti-crime efforts as “stupid white hippies.”

    At Union Station, Washington’s central train hub, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, accompanied by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, shook hands with National Guard soldiers at a Shake Shack restaurant.

    “You’re doing a hell of a job,” Vance said, as demonstrators drowned him out with jeers and shouts of “Free DC!” He urged troops to ignore the “bunch of crazy protesters,” while Miller dismissed them as “stupid white hippies.”

    The unfamiliar scene – the country’s vice president and top defense official visiting troops deployed not to a war zone but to an American city’s tourist-filled transit hub – underscored the extraordinary nature of the Trump administration’s crackdown in the Democratic-led District of Columbia.

    Thousands of Guard soldiers and federal agents have been deployed to the city over the objections of its elected leaders to combat what Trump says is a violent crime wave.

    City officials have rejected that assertion, pointing to federal and city statistics that show violent crime has declined significantly since a spike in 2023.

    The president has said, without providing evidence, that the crime data is fraudulent. The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether the numbers were manipulated, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing unnamed sources.

    Rifle, shotgun possession

    Amid the crackdown, federal prosecutors in the District have been told to stop seeking felony charges against people who violate a local law prohibiting individuals from carrying rifles or shotguns in the nation’s capital.

    The decision by District of Columbia US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, which was first reported by the Washington Post, represents a break from the office’s prior policy.

    In a statement, Pirro said prosecutors will still be able to charge people with other illegal firearms crimes, such as a convicted felon found in possession of a gun.

    “We will continue to seize all illegal and unlicensed firearms,” she said.

    The White House has touted the number of firearms seized by law enforcement since Trump began surging federal agents and troops into the city. In a social media post on Wednesday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the operation had taken 76 illegal guns off the streets and resulted in more than 550 arrests, an average of 42 per day.

    The city’s Metropolitan Police Department arrested an average of 61 adults and juveniles per day in 2024, according to city statistics. The Trump administration has not specified whether the arrest totals it has cited include those made by MPD officers or only consist of those made by federal agents.

    A DC code bars anyone from carrying a rifle or shotgun, with narrow exceptions. In her statement, Pirro, a close Trump ally, argued that the law violates two US Supreme Court decisions expanding gun rights.

    In 2008, the court struck down a separate DC law banning handguns and ruled that individuals have the right to keep firearms in their homes for self-defense. In 2022, the court ruled that any gun-control law must be rooted in the country’s historical traditions to be valid.

    Unlike US attorneys in all 50 states, who only prosecute federal offenses, the US attorney in Washington prosecutes local crimes as well.

    DC crime rates have stayed mostly the same as they were a year ago, according to the police department’s weekly statistics.

    As of Tuesday, the city’s overall crime rate is down 7% year over year, the same percentage as before the crackdown. DC has also experienced the same declines in violent crime and property crime as it did beforehand, according to the data.

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  • (Media News) Washington Post Loses 200,000 Subscribers as Bezos Defends Decision to Halt Endorsements; Gannett Joins in 2024 Shift

    (Media News) Washington Post Loses 200,000 Subscribers as Bezos Defends Decision to Halt Endorsements; Gannett Joins in 2024 Shift

    In a notable shift for the 2024 election, The Washington Post and Gannett’s USA Today Network have opted out of endorsing presidential candidates, claiming to reinforce neutrality and respond to public trust concerns. The Washington Post’s decision, reportedly directed by owner Jeff Bezos after an editorial favoring Vice President Kamala Harris had been drafted, led to over 200,000 digital subscription cancellations and spurred several resignations, including senior editor Robert Kagan and two editorial board members.

    Bezos defended his stance in an op-ed, arguing that endorsements risk perceptions of bias and emphasizing that “neither campaign nor candidate” influenced the choice. Gannett’s USA Today Network, encompassing over 200 local papers, similarly announced it would avoid presidential endorsements, focusing instead on local and state-level issues.

    Critics of the endorsement halt argue that these decisions may reduce the role of major publications in guiding public understanding during critical elections. Disappointed by the decision, some Washington Post subscribers have pointed to the paper’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto as a call for stronger editorial positions, especially in polarized times. Additionally, analysts have questioned whether Bezos’s diverse business interests might complicate the perception of neutrality. At the same time, some argue that Gannett’s move could diminish the national impact of its outlets, limiting their voices on broader issues affecting American voters.

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  • Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema on 25 years of dining undercover – WTOP News

    Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema on 25 years of dining undercover – WTOP News

    For 25 years in the D.C. region, Washington Post Food Critic Tom Sietsema has been helping people decide where they’ll dine out with his honest reviews.

    For nearly 25 years, Washington Post food critic Tom Sietsema has been helping people in the D.C. region decide where they’ll dine out with his honest reviews. From lavish sit-down restaurants to hole-in-the-wall spots, he’s secretly reviewed hundreds of restaurants.

    “I was taking notes under the table on pieces of paper with this thing called a pen, and stealing menus, or ‘filching menus,’ we like to say,” Sietsema recalled of his early days on the job.

    His job and the job of a spy have a lot in common.

    “Over the years, I have used hair pieces, facial hair. I’ve used stained teeth,” he said.

    The teeth idea didn’t work out well: “I would have to take the stained teeth off, put them in my napkin and actually chew the food separately, and then put my stained teeth back on and sort of look around in the dining room,” Sietsema said.

    With better technology, he knows more restaurants likely have his picture up on kitchen walls, so it’s also not uncommon for him to dine with a group or show up late, once the waitstaff is set and the appetizer orders are in.

    When deciding which restaurant to review, he likes to mix things up, from the neighborhood and city to the cuisine type — though he said a famous chef’s new restaurant also has news value.

    His first review in August of 2000 was at The Prime Rib on K Street because he said steakhouses, at the time, were places where people would go for celebrations, meetings or just a special dinner out.

    Times have since changed.

    “We can let that descriptor, ‘Washington is a steakhouse town,’ just die,” he said. “It hasn’t been true for a long time.”

    He said since then, D.C. has seen a boom of neighborhood restaurants, many of which are not aimed at people in a specific tax bracket.

    “What we have now is these really great, solid, middle-tier restaurants. Places where you would choose to go if you don’t feel like cooking on a Tuesday or Wednesday night,” he said.

    Sietsema said that over the years, he’s also watched people out in the suburbs get more and more great options, so a trip to D.C. wasn’t needed to get a good meal. His examples ranged from Padeak — a “Thai plus Laotian” restaurant in Arlington — to Melina, a Greek restaurant in North Bethesda.

    “There are dozens of places like that. That means you can stay close to home and eat well at the same time,” he said.

    In his 25th year at the Post, Sietsema said he is trying to be “reflective” with his annual guide for foodies. That means with “The 40 best restaurants in and around D.C.,” he said readers will get some classics, along with some new arrivals.

    The classics include OBELISK and its five-course Italian dinners, as well as The Bombay Club, known for its Indian cuisine.

    “I look at them, I think, ‘Wow, to be able to do something so well at such a good, high level for such a long time, is really an honor,’” he said.

    His No. 1 restaurant is Chicatana, which opened during the pandemic in Columbia Heights and, despite being close to his home, he didn’t learn about it until recently.

    “I’m celebrating Chicatana, which is owned by three young guys who have worked hard, kept their nose the grindstone, and are quietly doing a fabulous job of serving Mexican food,” he said.

    As newspapers across the country do away with their food critics, Sietsema said he is lucky the Post supports him in his role.

    “I think the Washington Post treats restaurant criticism as seriously as it does government and politics, which we are best known for,” he said.

    This includes paying for multiple dinners that include multiple diners on several occasions, because he doesn’t only visit restaurants once before reviewing them. Instead, they are thoroughly vetted through multiple visits.

    “A restaurant on Monday night is much different than a restaurant on Saturday night. Dining by yourself at the bar is a much different experience than dining with four or six people in the dining room,” he said.

    He also said in today’s world, the critic can find himself criticized after a review not everyone agrees with.

    “I think it’s kind of fun, because years ago, if people had a beef with a restaurant critic, they would call the restaurant critic, they would write in,” Sietsema said. “Now … if you read the comments following a review, we’re all being reviewed, right?”

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    © 2024 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.

    Mike Murillo

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  • Washington Post CEO Will Lewis’ status ‘increasingly untenable’ as newsgathering controversies mount – WTOP News

    Washington Post CEO Will Lewis’ status ‘increasingly untenable’ as newsgathering controversies mount – WTOP News

    A report from the New York Times on Saturday alleges Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s embattled new publisher and chief executive, used fraudulent and unethical methods to obtain information for articles while working at the London-based Sunday Times in the early 2000s.

    Will Lewis, founder of The News Movement, is seen here in September 2023 at the publisher’s headquarters in London, UK. A report from the New York Times alleges Lewis used fraudulent and unethical methods to obtain information for articles.

    New York (CNN) — A report from the New York Times on Saturday alleges Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s embattled new publisher and chief executive, used fraudulent and unethical methods to obtain information for articles while working at the London-based Sunday Times in the early 2000s.

    Citing a former co-worker of Lewis’, a private investigator and its own investigation of newspaper archives, the New York Times said Lewis used phone and company records that were “fraudulently obtained” through hacking and paying sources for information.

    Through the haze of accusations, it remains unclear whether these claims will prompt Lewis to step down from the helm of one of the most distinguished outlets in the country. Even so, experts see Lewis’ grasp on the newsroom as one that is increasingly weakening. Margaret Sullivan, executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, told CNN on Sunday that Lewis’ position is “increasingly untenable.”

    These latest allegations of questionable journalistic ethics could also leave an enduring impression on a newsroom already reeling from the blindsiding ouster of its executive editor, Sally Buzbee. The allegations may also end up reflecting on the paper’s own reputation as a standard-bearer for American journalism.

    Late on Sunday, the Washington Post itself published a story about Robert Winnett, whom Lewis appointed to take the top job at the Post’s core newsroom after the US presidential election in November. TThe Post article alleged that Winnett, a Lewis protege, was linked to a man who used dishonest means to obtain information that Winnett then used in his journalism.

    In a statement, the Washington Post said: “We cover The Washington Post independently, rigorously and fairly. Given perceived and potential conflicts, we have asked former senior managing editor Cameron Barr, who stepped down from that position in 2023 and now has a contractual relationship as a senior associate editor, to oversee this coverage. The publisher has no involvement in or influence on our reporting.”

    Winnett did not immediately respond to a CNN query via LinkedIn.

    The Society of Professional Journalists, which represents about 7,000 members across the country and whose journalism standards are recognized in many newsrooms, warns journalists in its Code of Ethics: “Do not pay for access to news.”

    While SPJ does not explicitly address hacking as a means of newsgathering, it does tell journalists to “avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public” but cautions that “pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance of undue intrusiveness.”

    The new accusations come as Lewis tries to fend off resurfacing allegations of his involvement in a UK phone hacking scandal coverup, in which he has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. Lewis has previously said his role in the scandal consisted of rooting out problematic behavior.

    A spokesperson for the Washington Post told CNN Lewis declined to comment.

    A Washington Post source with knowledge of internal meetings at the paper last week told CNN that Lewis has told employees “his role as publisher is to create the environment for great journalism and to encourage and support it, that he will never interfere in the journalism and that he is very clear about the lines that should not be crossed.”

    The decade-old scandal engulfed right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World tabloid and was revived in recent years in a new lawsuit filed by Prince Harry and Hollywood figures including Guy Ritchie and Hugh Grant. At the time of the News of the World controversy, Lewis was a senior executive at Murdoch’s News Corporation.

    But a cascade of claims has followed Lewis in recent weeks, mostly involving alleged attempts to suppress stories about his connection with the coverup. Earlier this month, the New York Times first reported that Lewis, who took the reins at the Washington Post on January 2, clashed with Buzbee over publishing an article in May that named him in connection to the scandal, although a spokesperson for Lewis has denied he pressured Buzbee to quash the article, according to NPR.

    Buzbee abruptly left the company earlier this month. Days later, an NPR reporter said Lewis offered him an interview in exchange for quashing a forthcoming article about the scandal.

    The Washington Post did not respond to CNN with regard to these allegations.

    A spokesperson for Lewis told the New York Times earlier this month when the story broke that “when he was a private citizen ahead of joining The Washington Post, he had off the record conversations with an employee of NPR about a story the employee then published.” The spokesperson added that any request for an interview after he joined the Washington Post was “processed through the normal corporate communication channels.”

    Buzbee’s departure has seemingly frayed Lewis’ command of his newsroom even further. A number of Post staffers who spoke to CNN have described plummeting morale. “It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it, truly,” one staffer said earlier this month, noting that the Washington Post has hit “rough patches” before but that the stormy atmosphere hanging over the outlet is unprecedented.

    In an opinion piece for the Guardian on Wednesday, Sullivan wrote that firing Lewis and finding a new CEO is “the cleanest, best move” Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos could make. Lewis’ insistence on tamping down reporting about him “has motivated several news organizations to look more deeply into his past; it’s possible that some new revelation will make his Post leadership position even more untenable and will force Bezos’ hand,” she added.

    Sullivan also wrote in her op-ed that Lewis could try to repair the trust both within and outside the newsroom by acknowledging that he will not cross any ethical lines and reiterating his commitment to giving staffers “true editorial independence.” He could also work toward reinstating an independent public editor or ombudsman — a position the Washington Post nixed more than a decade ago — who would oversee the paper’s implementation of journalistic ethics.

    The-CNN-Wire
    ™ & © 2024 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.

    WTOP Staff

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  • Sally Buzbee Steps Down As Executive Editor Of The Washington Post – KXL

    Sally Buzbee Steps Down As Executive Editor Of The Washington Post – KXL

    FILE – Sally Buzbee, then-senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press, poses for a photo, Dec. 13, 2018, in New York. The Washington Post said Sunday, June 2, 2024, that Buzbee, its executive editor, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of journalism’s most storied brands. (AP Photo/Chuck Zoeller, File)

    NEW YORK (AP) — The Washington Post said Sunday that its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of journalism’s most storied brands.

    She will be replaced by Matt Murray, former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, through this fall’s presidential election. Following that, Robert Winnett, deputy editor of the Telegraph Media Group, will take over as editor as the newsroom restructures its operations.

    No reason was given for Buzbee’s departure. She wasn’t quoted in the news release announcing that she was leaving, and did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

    The Post also announced that it was launching a new division in its newsroom dedicated to reaching audiences who want to pay for and consume news in a different way.

    Buzbee, former top editor at The Associated Press, was selected as the Post’s top editor in May 2021. She replaced a renowned predecessor, Martin Baron, after the Post exploded in popularity during the Trump administration.

    Buzbee was the first woman to serve as executive editor of The Washington Post. And like Jill Abramson, the first woman to be top editor at The New York Times, her tenure was short: Abramson had her job from 2011 to 2014.

    It has been a miserable few years financially for the news industry, including for the Post. It has bled subscribers to the point where new publisher, Will Lewis, told employees last month that the newspaper lost $77 million last year.

    “To speak candidly, we are in a hole, and have been for some time,” Lewis said, according to the Post.

    Lewis was named late last year to replace Fred Ryan as Post publisher. He has worked at both The Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph in England, the places he turned to to find the new executives.

    He’s talked about creating a multi-tier subscription plan for The Post, similar to that in place at Politico. In an email to employees late Sunday, Lewis said the new department will focus on more video storytelling, will embrace artificial intelligence and flexible payment methods. It will begin this fall, he said.

    In an earlier meeting, “we highlighted the need to move away from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach in the news media industry and focus on creating news for a broader range of readers and customers.”

    It augurs a change to the traditional structure of the Post. In his memo, Lewis mentioned “three newsrooms.” Winnett will not take on the title of executive editor, but he will be responsible for the “core coverage areas” of politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features. He has run The Telegraph’s news operations since 2013, the Post said.

    Murray will take over as leader of the newly-created department starting Nov. 6, the Post said. No one will have the title of executive editor: Murray, Winnett and David Shipley, the editorial page editor who will lead the “opinions newsroom,” will each report directly to Lewis, the Post said.

    “By creating three strong journalism functions — core, service/social and opinions — we are taking a definitive step away from the ‘one size fits all’ approach and moving towards meeting our audiences where they are,” Lewis said.

    The Post won three Pulitzer Prizes last month, including one in national reporting for a vivid series on the impact of the AR-15 rifle.

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    Grant McHill

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  • Sally Buzbee steps down as executive editor of The Washington Post – WTOP News

    Sally Buzbee steps down as executive editor of The Washington Post – WTOP News

    The Washington Post said Sunday that its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of journalism’s most storied brands.

    FILE – Sally Buzbee, then-senior vice president and executive editor of The Associated Press, poses for a photo, Dec. 13, 2018, in New York. The Washington Post said Sunday, June 2, 2024, that Buzbee, its executive editor, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of journalism’s most storied brands. (AP Photo/Chuck Zoeller, File)(AP/Chuck Zoeller)

    NEW YORK (AP) — The Washington Post said Sunday that its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, has stepped down after three years at the top of one of journalism’s most storied brands.

    She will be replaced by Matt Murray, former editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, through this fall’s presidential election. Following that, Robert Winnett, currently deputy editor of the Telegraph Media Group, will take over as editor.

    No reason was given for Buzbee’s departure. She wasn’t quoted in the news release announcing her departure and did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

    The Post also announced Sunday that it was launching a new division in its newsroom dedicated to reaching audiences who want to pay for and consume news in a different way.

    Buzbee, former top editor at The Associated Press, was selected as the Post’s top editor in May 2021. She replaced a storied predecessor, Martin Baron, after the Post exploded in popularity during the Trump administration.

    Yet it has been a miserable few years financially for the news industry, including for the Post. It has bled subscribers, to the point where new publisher, Will Lewis, told employees last month that the newspaper lost $77 million last year.

    “To speak candidly, we are in a hole, and have been for some time,” Lewis said, according to the Post.

    Lewis was named late last year to replace Fred Ryan as Post publisher. He has worked at both The Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph in England, the places he turned to find the new executives.

    He’s talked about creating a multi-tier subscription plan for The Post, similar to that in place at Politico. In an email to employees late Sunday, Lewis said the new department will focus on more video storytelling, will embrace artificial intelligence and flexible payment methods. It will begin operation this fall, he said.

    In an earlier meeting, “we highlighted the need to move away from the traditional one-size-fits-all approach in the news media industry and focus on creating news for a broader range of readers and customers.”

    The Post won three Pulitzer Prizes last month, including one in national reporting for a vivid series on the impact of the AR-15 rifle.

    Copyright
    © 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, written or redistributed.

    Ivy Lyons

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  • Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing

    Why Trump Won’t Stop Suing the Media and Losing

    Why would the most notoriously cash-strapped man in America waste money on frivolous lawsuits?

    On Monday, Donald Trump—whose lawyers recently announced that he can’t come up with the money to post a $454 million bond in his civil fraud case—fired off yet another suit against a news organization that reported facts he didn’t like. The targets this time are ABC News and its anchor George Stephanopoulos, who Trump alleges defamed him by stating that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll.

    The case looks like a sure loser. Trump was technically found liable under New York law for sexual abuse, not for rape, but the judge in the civil case ruled that, by forcibly penetrating Carroll’s vagina with his fingers, “Mr. Trump in fact did ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.” But no matter. The Stephanopoulos suit slots into a well-worn groove for Trump, who for years has lodged periodic lawsuits against alleged purveyors of “fake news” about him. Targets have included The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, Bob Woodward, and a Wisconsin TV station that ran an attack ad against him during the 2020 campaign. Trump has even gone after the board of the Pulitzer Prizes for awarding Pulitzers to the Post and the Times for their coverage of his connections to Russia.

    Filing these suits has been costly for Trump—or rather, for donors to his campaign and affiliated political action committees, who have footed millions of dollars in legal fees. Not one of Trump’s media lawsuits has ever succeeded, nor is one ever likely to, given both the underlying facts and the towering bar a president or former president faces in proving defamation. In one case against The New York Times, a judge found Trump’s argument so flimsy that he ordered Trump to pay the Times’ legal fees. In other cases, such as the one involving the Wisconsin station, the suit was quietly withdrawn a few months after it was filed.

    David A. Graham: Trump’s money problems are very real and very bad

    So why does he keep doing it? On a basic level, this appears to be just Trump being Trump—peevish, headstrong, and narcissistic. For decades, his love-hate relationship with reporters has tended to flare into legal action, as it did in 2006 when he sued the writer Tim O’Brien over a few pages in a book that questioned Trump’s personal wealth. As Trump told me in an interview in 2016, he knew he couldn’t win that suit (he didn’t) but brought it anyway to score a few points. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and [O’Brien’s publisher] spent a whole lot more,” he said then. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

    But Trump’s quixotic legal crusades are not as irrational as they appear. Suing the press serves as a branding exercise and a fundraising tool. The lawsuits show his supporters that Trump is taking the fight to those lying journalists—so won’t you contribute a few dollars to the cause? They thus have become an end unto themselves, part of an infinite loop: sue, publicize the suit, solicit and collect donations, sue again. The cases may be weak on the legal merits, but they “further his narrative of being persecuted by the radical left media,” Brett Kappel, a campaign-finance lawyer who has researched Trump’s legal actions against the press, told me.

    This narrative has been a fixture of Trump’s fundraising pitches for years. A few weeks after his inauguration, in 2017, one of his fundraising committees sent out an email urging donors “to do your part to fight back against the media’s attacks and deceptions” by sending contributions that would help “cut through the noise” of news reports. Even before Trump filed a lawsuit against CNN in August 2022 (for describing his election lies as “the Big Lie”), his campaign was using the nonexistent suit to drum up contributions. “I’m calling on my best and most dedicated supporters to add their names to stand with me in my impending LAWSUIT against Fake News CNN,” read a fundraising email. A second email sent out under Trump’s name a few hours later struck a sterner tone: “I’m going to look over the names of the first 45 Patriots who added their names to publicly stand with their President AGAINST CNN.”

    When Trump got around to filing the suit two months later, the appeals began anew. “I am SUING the Corrupt News Network (CNN) for DEFAMING and SLANDERING my name,” the campaign email read, in a chaotic typographical style reminiscent of a ransom note. “They’ve called me a LIAR, and so far, I’ve been proven RIGHT about EVERYTHING. Remember, when they come after ME, they are really coming after YOU … I’m calling on YOU to rush in a donation of ANY AMOUNT RIGHT NOW to make a statement that you PROUDLY stand with me.” The suit was dismissed last year by a federal judge appointed by Trump. Trump is appealing.

    Of course, the cost of suing news organizations is a pittance compared with what Trump’s donors are spending on his criminal defense. But it isn’t cheap. According to Federal Election Commission records culled by Kappel, the Trump-controlled Save America PAC shelled out nearly $500,000 to the firm that sued the Pulitzer Prize board on Trump’s behalf in 2022. It paid $211,000 last year to another law firm that handled Trump’s litigation against CNN, among other matters, and an additional $203,000 to the firm handling the appeal.

    The biggest recipient, by far, has been the attorney Charles Harder, the defamation specialist who represented Hulk Hogan in his successful suit against Gawker Media in 2016. From early 2018 to May 2021, according to FEC records, Harder took $4.4 million in fees from Trump-affiliated organizations. At one point in 2020, Harder’s Beverly Hills firm received more money than any other firm doing work for Trump.

    From the January/February 2024 issue: Is journalism ready?

    Harder’s work on Trump’s behalf didn’t produce anything close to his career-making Hogan verdict, which resulted in a $140 million award that drove Gawker into bankruptcy. Harder took the lead in Trump’s effort to suppress publication of Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury in 2018; he sent cease-and-desist letters to Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., before the book’s release, claiming that it contained libelous passages. The book was released as scheduled and became a best seller, and Trump didn’t sue. In 2020, Harder handled Trump’s lawsuit against the Times, alleging that an opinion piece by the former Times editor Max Frankel was defamatory. A judge dismissed that suit in 2021. (Harder, who no longer represents Trump, declined to comment for this story.)

    Whether Trump’s beat-the-press strategy is a net financial winner, once all the donations are collected and the attorney fees are subtracted, is hard to say. But Trump’s filing of another hopeless lawsuit this week suggests that the math may be in his favor. Why bother paying lawyers millions of dollars to sue and appeal if the return on investment is less than zero? Trump may be petty and irrational, but he has never been accused of neglecting his own financial interests. (A Trump spokesperson didn’t return a request for comment.)

    At the moment, of course, Trump has much bigger headaches. As of this writing, he’s days away from having his assets seized to satisfy that civil-fraud judgment. His overall fundraising has lagged President Joe Biden’s. And he is burning through his supporters’ money to pay for his criminal defense. Despite all that, he still finds a way to keep filing lawsuits against the media. You almost have to admire the commitment.

    Paul Farhi

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  • ‘Independent’ Columnist Insults Americans and Republicans With Experiment in Acting Like A Republican For a Month

    ‘Independent’ Columnist Insults Americans and Republicans With Experiment in Acting Like A Republican For a Month

    James McNellis from Washington, DC, United States, via Wikimedia Commons

    Stereotypes are tricky. Growing up, I was taught to get to know people and who they are on the inside before making assumptions about their likes, dislikes, beliefs, and character.

    At the same time, I was also taught to be wary of individuals who dressed like thugs or acted foolishly in public because, as the saying goes, “If you act like a clown, you will attract the circus.” I am often misjudged based on my appearance and the demographics that I fill.

    I sport my signature mohawk, which lately I’ve been dying blue. I am the breadwinner in our house, while my husband is the caretaker.

    Many would assume I have liberal proclivities based on my looks, age, and family dynamic. However, I am also a woman of faith; my husband homeschools our children, we are gun owners, and we are proud veterans – clearly MAGA Republicans…right?

    According to one Washington Post columnist, I fit the bill of a MAGA Republican almost perfectly.

    A futile attempt

    Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank claims to have been an Independent voter for most of his life. However, for the D.C. presidential primary, he decided to register as a Republican.

    He made this decision after a friend convinced him they could be a part of history, possibly securing former President Donald Trump’s first primary loss to then-candidate Nikki Haley. His hope and that of his friends was that:

    “As Republicans in 15 states go to the polls on the Super Tuesday primaries, I can only hope that the timeless political maxim holds: As goes the District of Columbia, so goes the nation.”

    Rather predictably, Mr. Milbank’s hopes were destined to be scattered by the winds of political inevitability as the former President swept Super Tuesday minus Vermont. As D.C. goes, so goes Vermont…and so goes Nikki Haley, who finally suspended her campaign after her unsurprising loss.

    Mr. Milbank’s attempt to help turn the tide for Nikki Haley wasn’t his only goal; he decided to take the opportunity to see what it’s like to be a Republican. His experiment, or perhaps better put, charade, didn’t unveil the realities of Republican living but instead illustrated the allure of a candidate like Donald Trump.

    RELATED: MSNBC Hosts Mock Virginia Voters For Being Concerned About Immigration

    They hate you

    In his opinion column for the Washington Post titled My month of living Republicanly, Dana Milbank attempts to comically explore the stereotypical lifestyles of what many refer to as MAGA Republicans. As he put it in his column:

    “…if I was going to register as a Republican, it was only right that I should start acting Republican.”

    It would’ve been sufficient if Mr. Milbank was just a Republican. Still, most Haley supporters aren’t, so why should he be different?

    He goes on to claim:

    “I ate like a Republican, slept like a Republican, shopped like a Republican. I watched TV like a Republican and spent my leisure time like a Republican.”

    These alleged Republican activities included:

    • Rooting against the Kansas City Chiefs (huh?)
    • Eating at Chik-fil-A
    • Buying a MyPillow
    • Driving a gas-powered vehicle
    • Attending a gun show
    • Shopping at Hobby Lobby
    • Going to the Museum of the Bible
    • Watching NASCAR

    All the while, Mr. Milbank pokes fun at Americans who are pro-life, exercise their Second Amendment rights, believe in God, and enjoy outdoor activities. It drips with clumsy attempts at humor that consistently betray Mr. Milbank’s elitist core.

    RELATED: ATF Director Showcases Astonishing Firearms Ignorance While Advocating for Stricter Gun Control

    I don’t eat at Chik-fil-A because of the company’s political and religious positions. I eat there, as do millions of Americans, because they have a superior spicy chicken sandwich, and the customer service is always excellent.

    I shop at Hobby Lobby because they have a better selection than their competitors. And while I’d rather watch paint dry than NASCAR on television, attending a race in person is an exhilarating experience.

    We’re sick

    I wouldn’t consider myself a MAGA Republican or even that strong of a Donald Trump supporter. Early in the Republican primaries, I was very interested in Governor Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Governor Doug Burgum.

    What I will say is I get why so many Republicans are die-hard Donald Trump supporters. When the rest of the country, including some of your “fellow” Republicans, despise you so much, why not support the one candidate who doesn’t care how you dress, where you eat, or how you shop?

    Mr. Milbank writes:

    “D.C. Republicans are a wealthy and well-educated set, and when I showed up to cast my ballot in the primary, I was the only person in the place wearing camo gear.”

    That sentence alone explains why it was comical that Ms. Haley won the swamp and why Mr. Trump not winning D.C. was an overall win. After Mr. Milbank cast his vote, he discovered that Nikki Haley was coming to speak to the voters.

    RELATED: Trump Gets Major Applause At Packed UFC Event With Ivanka, NFL Stars Joe Burrow And Nick Bosa

    He said as he stood amongst the D.C. Republicans listening to Nikki’s speech:

    “The D.C. Republicans in that room were, in a genuine sense, my fellow partisans. They are from the roughly 30 percent of Republican voters who want to cure the party of its MAGA sickness.”

    Characterizing voters who believe in God and all the rest of the millions of Donald Trump supporters as “sick” is precisely why Donald Trump is where he is.

    The truth

    Mr. Milbank ended his column with his reaction to Nikki’s statement:

    “Can you imagine a country where we could strongly disagree and not hate each other for it? That’s where we want to go.”

    Mr. Milbank wrote with almost an audible sigh to his tone:

    “That’s exactly where I want to go.”

    No, it’s not. And he just proved it in the very same column.

    His column ridiculing millions of his fellow Americans is proof of elite hatred for them.

    Now is the time to support and share the sources you trust.
    The Political Insider ranks #3 on Feedspot’s “100 Best Political Blogs and Websites.”

    Kathleen J. Anderson

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  • How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory

    How Hur Misled the Country on Biden’s Memory

    Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.

    First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media. Political operatives know this, and it’s that indelible impression they want, one that sticks like a greasy fingerprint and that no number of follow-ups or awkward corrections could possibly wipe away.

    Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.

    In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option. Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, wrote in 2020 that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”

    David A. Graham: The Special Counsel’s devastating description of Biden

    As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”

    Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has been indicted on charges that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)

    In Hur’s own summary of his investigation, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading.

    Sparking alarming headlines about Biden’s mental faculties, Hur had written that Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.” As with Barr’s, that conclusion set off a media frenzy in which many mainstream outlets strongly reinforced conservative propaganda that Biden was mentally unfit to serve, a narrative that reverberated until the president’s animated delivery of the State of the Union address last week.

    In press coverage following the report, Hur’s phrase was frequently shortened to an “elderly man with a poor memory,” turning the evaluation of a potential legal strategy into something akin to a medical diagnosis. A cacophony of mainstream-media coverage questioning Biden’s age and fitness followed, while conservative politicians and media figures outright declared Biden incapacitated and demanded he be removed from office according to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for succession in case a president is “unable to discharge his duties.”

    The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden illuminate Hur’s summary as uncharitable at best. As a report in The Washington Post noted, “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”

    Hur wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Yet the transcript shows Biden remembering the exact day, May 30, after which staffers offer the year—2015—and Biden says, “Was it 2015 he had died?” In another exchange Hur singled out as indicative of Biden’s poor memory, he said Biden mischaracterized the point of view of an Obama-administration official who had opposed a surge of combat troops to the war in Afghanistan, but left out that Biden correctly stated the official’s views in an exchange later that day. The transcript also shows Biden struggling with other dates while answering questions about when he obtained certain documents or in the interval between the Obama and Biden administrations, when he decided to run for president. But as The New York Times reported, “In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”

    The transcript does not completely refute Hur’s description of Biden’s memory, but it is entirely incompatible with the conservative refrain that Biden has “age-related dementia.” Indeed, both Barr and Hur framed their conclusions with a telltale lawyerly touch that would push the media and the public toward a far broader conclusion about Trump’s supposed innocence or Biden’s alleged decline while allowing them to deny that they had been so explicit.

    There’s no question that both Biden and Trump are much older than they used to be. To watch clips of either of them from 20 years ago is to recognize a significant difference. But the transcript shows Biden exactly as he appeared in the State of the Union last week, as someone who has lost a step or two as he’s aged but is fully capable of grasping the politics and policy implications demanded by the presidency. “Mr. Biden went into great detail about many matters, the transcript shows,” the Times reported. “He made jokes over the two days, teasing the prosecutors. And at certain points, he corrected his interrogators when they were the ones who misspoke.” During an exchange about Biden’s home, Hur remarked that Biden had a “photographic understanding and recall of the house,” a remark Hur acknowledged in yesterday’s testimony before the House that he had left out of his original report.

    People with serious cognitive decline do not simply have verbal flubs or memory lapses of the sort both campaigns are constantly highlighting on social media. They avoid asking questions they fear might betray their loss of memory; they struggle to recollect the season, the time of day, the state they are currently in. They awkwardly attempt to hide their inability to recall recently relayed information in ways that simply underline its absence. They repeat innocuous statements that they do not realize they made minutes earlier. They pretend to know people they’ve never met and fail to recognize people they’ve known for decades. The late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the clearest recent example of this in politics, was reported to have had incidents such as a meeting at which lawmakers had to “reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2022.

    During his testimony before the House, Hur insisted that “partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work.” He tried to have it both ways, insisting that his report was accurate while refuting the most uncharitable right-wing characterizations of Biden’s memory. But as legal experts pointed out after the report was released, Hur’s description of Biden’s memory was not a necessary element of his duties, and it is unlikely that someone with as much experience in Washington as Hur would be so naive as to not understand how those phrases would be used politically.

    Yet Hur’s report is itself something of a self-inflicted wound for Democrats, a predictable result of their efforts to rebut bad-faith criticism from partisan actors by going out of their way to seem nonpartisan. The age story caught fire in the press, not only because of genuine voter concern over Biden’s age but because this is the sort of superficially nonideological criticism that some reporters feel comfortable repeating in their own words, believing that it illustrates their lack of partisanship to conservative sources and audiences. Coverage of the Hillary Clinton email investigation reached saturation levels in 2016 for similar reasons.

    There are more parallels between those stories. Then-President Barack Obama appointed James Comey, a Republican, to run the FBI, in an effort to illustrate his commitment to bipartisanship; Attorney General Garland’s decision to appoint Hur probably had similar intentions. Comey, like Hur, declined to press charges but then broke protocol. In Comey’s case, he did so by first holding a press conference in which he criticized Clinton, and later, during the final days of the presidential campaign, announcing that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton while keeping the bureau’s investigation into Trump a secret. A 2017 analysis published by FiveThirtyEight makes a compelling argument that the latter decision threw a close election to Trump.

    Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable

    For reasons that remain unclear to me, Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican insistence that only Republicans are capable of the fairness and objectivity necessary to investigate or enforce the law. Any lifelong Republican who fails to put partisanship above their duties is instantly and retroactively turned into a left-wing operative by the conservative media. Acting to prevent complaints of bias (as opposed to actually being fair) is ultimately futile: Comey’s last-minute gift to the Trump campaign didn’t prevent Trump from smearing him as a liberal stooge.

    These efforts to work the refs pay off. Right-wing criticism of Obama probably influenced him to pick a grandstanding Republican to head the FBI, an agency that has never been run by a Democrat, just as it likely influenced Garland to pick a grandstanding Republican to investigate Biden. Conservative criticism of the mainstream press leads too many journalists to attempt to prove they aren’t liberals, which results in wholesale amplification of right-wing propaganda to deflect criticisms that the media aren’t objective; the facts become a secondary concern.

    Fairness, objectivity, and due process are important values, but there is a difference between upholding them and seeking to convince everyone that that’s what you’re doing. Performatively pursuing the latter can easily come at the expense of the former. If you try too hard to convince people you are doing the right thing instead of just doing the right thing, you often end up doing the wrong thing.

    Adam Serwer

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  • Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?

    Are Gen Z Men and Women Really Drifting Apart?

    Judging by recent headlines, young men and women are more politically divided now than ever before. “A new global gender divide is emerging,” the Financial Times data journalist John Burn-Murdoch wrote in a widely cited January article. Burn-Murdoch’s analysis featured several eye-popping graphs that appeared to show a huge ideological rift opening up between young men and young women over the past decade. The implications—for politics, of course, but also for male-female relations and, by extension, the future of the species—were alarming. A New York Times opinion podcast convened to discuss, according to the episode title, “The Gender Split and the ‘Looming Apocalypse of the Developed World.’” The Washington Post editorial board warned, “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.”

    But nearly as quickly as the theory gained attention, it has come under scrutiny. “For every survey question where you can find a unique gender gap among the youngest age cohort, you can find many other questions where you don’t find that gap,” John Sides, a political-science professor at Vanderbilt University, told me. “Where we started with this whole conversation was that there’s this big thing happening; it’s happening worldwide. Then you just pick at it for a few minutes, and it becomes this really complex story.” Skeptics point out that, at least as far as the United States goes, the claims about a new gender divide rest on selective readings of inconclusive evidence. Although several studies show young men and women splitting apart, at least as many suggest that the gender gap is stable. And at the ballot box, the evidence of a growing divide is hard to find. The Gen Z war of the sexes, in other words, is probably not apocalyptic. It may not even exist at all.

    The gender gap in voting—women to the left, men to the right—has been a fixture of American politics since at least the 1980 presidential election, when, according to exit polls, Ronald Reagan won 55 percent of male voters but only 47 of women.

    Some evidence suggests that the divide has recently widened. In 2023, according to Gallup data, 18-to-29-year-old women were 15 percentage points more likely than men in the same age group to identify as liberal, compared with only seven points a decade ago. Young men’s ideology has remained more stable, but some surveys suggest that young white men in particular have been drifting rightward. The Harvard Youth Poll, for example, found that 33 percent of white men aged 18 to 24 identified as Republican in 2016, compared with 41 percent in 2023. This trend has begun appearing in new-voter-registration data as well, according to Tom Bonier, a Democratic political strategist. “Believe me, as a partisan Democrat, I would prefer that it’s not the case—but it appears to be true,” he told me. “We’re still generally arguing about if it’s happening, which to me is silly. The conversation hasn’t moved to why.”

    Ronald Brownstein: Is Gen Z coming for the GOP?

    Why indeed? Several factors present themselves for consideration. One is social-media-induced gender polarization. (Think misogynistic “manosphere” influencers and women who talk about how “all men are trash.”) Another, as always, is Donald Trump. Twenty-something-year-old women seemed repelled by Trump’s ascendance in 2016, John Della Volpe, who heads the Harvard Youth Poll, told me. They were much more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Then there’s the #MeToo movement, which emerged in 2017, soon after Trump took office. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market-conservative think tank, argues that it durably shaped young women’s political consciousness. A 2022 poll found that nearly three-quarters of women under 30 say they support #MeToo, the highest of any age group. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade also seems to have been a turning point. Going into the 2022 midterm election, 61 percent of young women said abortion was a “critical” concern, according to a survey conducted by AEI. “Young women increasingly believe that what happens to any woman in the United States impacts their lives and experiences as well,” Cox told me. “That became really salient after Roe was overturned.” Gen Z women are more likely than Generation X or Baby Boomer women—though slightly less likely than Millennial women—to say that they have been discriminated against because of their gender at some point in their life.

    Not so fast, say young men. Gen Z men are also more likely than older generations to say that they’ve been discriminated against based on gender. “There’s this kind of weird ping-pong going on between Gen Z men and women about who’s really struggling, who’s really the victim,” Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. Reeves, who founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, argues that although men still dominate the highest levels of society in the U.S., those on the lower rungs are doing worse than ever. They are far less likely than women to go to college or find a good job, and far more likely to end up in prison or dead. These young men feel—rightly, in Reeves’s view—that mainstream institutions and the Democratic Party haven’t addressed their problems. And, in the aftermath of #MeToo, some seem to believe that society has turned against men. Survey data indicate that Gen Z men are much less likely to identify as feminists than Millennial men are, and about as likely as middle-aged men. “I really do worry that we’re trending toward a bit of a women’s party and a men’s party in politics,” Reeves told me.

    But if young men and women really were drifting apart politically, you would expect to see evidence on Election Day. And here’s where the theory starts showing cracks. The Cooperative Election Study, a national survey administered by YouGov, found that nearly 68 percent of 18-to-29-year-old men voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, compared with about 70 percent of women in that age group—the same percentage gap as in 2008. (The split was larger—nearly seven points—in 2016, when Trump’s personal behavior toward women was especially salient.) Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results based on voter-file data, found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections. In the 2022 midterms, according to Pew’s analysis of validated voters, considered the gold standard of postelection polling, the youngest voters had the smallest gender divide, and overwhelmingly supported Democrats.

    Richard V. Reeves: Redshirt the boys

    Many of the polls that show a widening gender divide ask about ideology. But research shows that many people don’t have a clear idea of what the labels mean. Gallup, whose data partly inspired the gender-gap frenzy, notes that only about half of Democrats identify as liberal. Ten percent describe themselves as conservative, and the remainder say their views are moderate. The ideological lines are only slightly less scrambled among self-identified Republicans. “Everything here hinges on what characteristics or questions we are trying to measure,” Sides told me. “When you ask people if they identify as liberal or as a feminist, you learn whether people believe that label describes them. But you didn’t ask how they define that label.” People might dislike the term liberal but still support, say, abortion access and high government spending. Indeed, 2020 polling data from Nationscape, which assesses people’s positions on individual issues, indicated that young men and women are no more divided than older generations. In every age group, for example, women are more in favor of banning assault rifles and providing universal health care than men are, by a comparable margin.

    Or perhaps the unique Gen Z gender divide just hasn’t shown up electorally yet. Most 2024 election polling doesn’t break down different age groups by gender—and even if it did, trying to draw firm conclusions would be foolish. Twenty-somethings are just hard to study. Young people are less engaged in politics, with high rates of independent and unaffiliated voters. Their worldviews are still malleable. Many of them are reluctant to answer questions, especially over the phone. Under those circumstances, even high-quality polls show wildly, even implausibly divergent possibilities for the youth vote. A recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that, in a hypothetical 2024 rematch, Trump beat out Biden among registered voters under 35—an almost-unheard-of shift within four years. In October, a New York Times/Siena poll suggested that the youngest generation is equally split between Trump and Biden, whereas last month’s Times survey showed Biden winning young voters by double digits even as he lost ground overall.

    Whatever is going on inside all of those young minds, the old people studying them have yet to figure it out. The biggest chasm, as always, may be not between young men and young women, but between young people and everyone else.

    Rose Horowitch

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  • Tom Shales, Pulitzer Prize-Winning TV Critic, Dies at 79

    Tom Shales, Pulitzer Prize-Winning TV Critic, Dies at 79

    Tom Shales, a Pulitzer-winning television critic at the Washington Post who spent nearly 40 years at the publication, has died. He was 79.

    Shales died Saturday at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va., from complications due to COVID-19 and renal failure, his caretaker, Victor Herfurth, told the Washington Post.

    Shales began his career as the Post’s chief TV critic in 1977, and was known for his incisive and sharp commentary on various forms of television, from cable dramas to network sitcoms, from State of the Union speeches to late-night shows. He was first hired by the Post in 1972 as a style writer.

    In 1988, Shales won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, becoming the fourth TV reviewer to earn the honor in journalism.

    Shales took a buyout from the Washington Post in 2006, but remained on contract for an additional four years, according to the paper, “before being, in his view, unceremoniously edged out because of a salary of about $400,000 per year.”

    Thomas William Shales was born in Elgin, Ill., on Nov. 3, 1944. He attended Elgin Community College before transferring to American University, where he became the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.

    After graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, Shales worked as an entertainment editor at the D.C. Examiner until the early ’70s.

    In addition to his work for the Washington Post, Shales wrote for the Huffington Post, TelevisionWeek and Roger Ebert’s film and television review website. He wrote two books — “Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live” (2002) and “Those Guys Have All the Fun: “Inside the World of ESPN” (2011) — with fellow Post reporter James Andrew Miller.

    Michaela Zee

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  • We Got Lucky With the Mystery Dog Illness

    We Got Lucky With the Mystery Dog Illness

    In late July 1980, a five-month-old Doberman pinscher puppy in Washington, D.C., started throwing up blood. It died the next day at an animal hospital, one of many pets that suffered that year from a new illness, parvovirus. “This is the worst disease I’ve ever seen in dogs,” a local veterinarian told The Washington Post, in an article describing the regional outbreak. It killed so fast that it left pet owners in disbelief, he said.

    The world was in the middle of a canine pandemic. The parvovirus, which was first recognized in 1978, can live for months outside the body, spreading not just from animal to animal but through feces, sneaking into the yards of dog owners via a bit of excrement stuck to the bottom of a person’s shoe. It quickly traveled across countries and continents, infecting thousands and possibly millions of dogs in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Essentially every dog alive at the time caught it, Colin Parrish, a virology professor at Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, told me. And untold numbers  died: A single Associated Press report from August 1980 mentions the city of Chicago losing 300 dogs by July of that year, and South Carolina losing more than 700 in just two months.

    A vaccine was quickly developed, but with doses in short supply, the outbreaks dragged on for years. Today, puppies are routinely vaccinated for parvovirus, and the 1978 canine pandemic has faded from public consciousness. Since then, no outbreak has unfolded on that scale, even as dogs have become more integrated into American households. Few people stay up at night worrying about what might happen if a new and devastating disease did appear. Yet, for a moment at the end of last year, it seemed like one might have.

    In late 2023, veterinarians started noticing something odd. They’d seen an uptick in cases of dogs sick with respiratory symptoms responding poorly to antibiotics. Some would develop severe pneumonia quickly and die. Soon, cases of this suspected illness started popping up in states across the country. Around Thanksgiving, media reports began warning dog owners about a “mystery dog illness” spreading nationwide.

    Many experts now suggest that there probably was no “mystery dog illness.” More likely, some mix of previously known illnesses were surging around the same time. Still, the case is not entirely closed, and the prospect of a deadly new disease has left dog owners fearful and jumpy: How much should they worry? Could that seemingly normal cough in the family pet actually be something much more dangerous?

    And if a new disease had started a modern dog pandemic, the world’s first in almost 50 years, what would have happened next is not entirely clear. Unlike humans and livestock, companion animals do not have sophisticated, coordinated infrastructure dedicated to monitoring and managing their diseases. The technology and science might exist to fight a dog pandemic, but any response would depend on what kind of illness we found ourselves dealing with—and whether it could infect humans as well.

    Because dogs don’t interact with one another as much as humans do, dog transmission networks are different from ours. They see one another on walks, in day cares, or in dog parks. Some might travel between states or even between countries, but many just stay in their backyard. Their cloistered networks make it hard for some viruses to move among them. In 2015 and 2016, outbreaks of a nasty canine flu called H3N2, which was traced to a single introduction in the United States from South Korea, never reached full pandemic status. “I just remember seeing so many of these pretty sick dogs, like every day,” Steve Valeika, a veterinarian and infectious-disease specialist in North Carolina, told me. “And then it just stopped.” Most of his cases were from one boarding facility.

    A disease such as parvo, which can spread without direct contact, has a better chance of circulating widely. But even then, authorities could respond quickly, maybe even quicker than in 1978. The same mRNA tools that led to the speedy development of a COVID vaccine for humans could be used in a dog pandemic; the ability to test for dog diseases has improved since parvovirus. Information travels that much faster over the internet.

    Read: COVID drugs are a miracle cure for cats

    Still, as companion animals, dogs and cats fall into an awkward space between systems. “There is no CDC for dogs,” Valeika said. “It’s all very patchwork.” Typically, animal disease is managed by agricultural agencies—in this country, the USDA. But these groups are more focused on outbreaks in livestock, such as swine flu, which threaten the food supply, the economy, or human safety. If an outbreak were to emerge in companion animals, veterinary associations, local health departments, and other dog-health groups may all pitch in to help manage it.

    The dairy and pig industries, for example, are far more coordinated. “If they said, ‘We need to get all the players together to talk about a new emerging disease issue on pigs,’ that’d be easy. They’d know who to call, and they’d be on the phone that afternoon,” Scott Weese, professor in veterinary infectious diseases at the University of Guelph, in Canada, explains. Organizing a conference call like that on the topic of a dog disease would be trickier, especially in a big country like the United States. And the USDA isn’t designed around pets, although “it’s not that they don’t care or don’t try,” he said. (The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.) No one is formally surveilling for dog disease in the way government agencies and other groups monitor for human outbreaks. At base, monitoring requires testing, which is expensive and might not change a vet’s treatment plan. “How many people want to spend $250 to get their swab tested?” Parrish asked.

    Dogs aren’t human. But they are close to humans, and it is easy to imagine that, in a dog pandemic, owners would go to great lengths to keep their pets safe. Their closeness to us, in this way, could help protect them. It also poses its own risk: If a quickly spreading dog disease jumped to humans, a different machinery would grind into gear.

    If humans could be vulnerable and certainly if they were getting sick, then the CDC would get involved. “Public health usually takes the lead on anything where we’ve got that human and animal side,” Weese told me. These groups are better funded, are better staffed, and have more expertise—but their priority is us, not our pets. The uncomfortable truth about zoonotic disease is that culling, or killing, animals helps limit spread. In 2014, after a health-care worker in Spain contracted Ebola, authorities killed her dog Excalibur as a precaution, despite a petition and protests. When the woman recovered, she was devastated. (“I’ve forgotten about everything except the death of Excalibur,” she later told CNN.) Countries routinely cull thousands of livestock animals when dealing with the spread of deadly diseases. If a new dog-borne pathogen threatened the lives of people, the U.S. would be faced with the choice of killing infected animals or dedicating resources to quarantining them.

    A scenario in which pet owners stand by while their dogs are killed en masse is hard to imagine. People love their pets fiercely, and consider them family; many would push to save their dogs. But even in a scenario where humans were safe, the systems we’ve set up might not be able to keep pets from dying on a disturbing scale. Already, there’s a nationwide shortage of vets; in a dog-health emergency, people would want access to emergency care, and equipment such as ventilators. “I am concerned that we don’t have enough of that to deal with a big pandemic as it relates to pets,” Jane Sykes, a medicine and epidemiology professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and the founder of the International Society for Companion Animal Infectious Diseases, told me.

    Congress has mandated that the CDC, USDA, and Department of the Interior, which oversees wildlife, work on strengthening “federal coordination and collaboration on threats related to diseases that can spread between animals and people,” Colin Basler, the deputy director of CDC’s One Health Office, wrote in an email statement. A new, deadly canine disease would almost certainly leave experts scrambling to respond, in some way. And in that scramble, pet owners could be left in a temporary information vacuum, worrying about the health of their little cold-nosed, four-legged creatures. The specifics of any pandemic story depend on the disease—how fast it moves, how it sickens and kills, and how quickly—but in almost any scenario it’s easy to imagine the moment when someone fears for their pet and doesn’t know what help will come, and how soon.

    Caroline Mimbs Nyce

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  • The Year in Media: 7 Cliff-Hangers as We Close out 2023

    The Year in Media: 7 Cliff-Hangers as We Close out 2023

    Can Mark Thompson save CNN?

    I began this same feature last year by asking, “Can Chris Licht Turn CNN Around?” It turned out the answer to that question was ‘no.’ But the oddsmakers may feel more confident about Mark Thompson, still fewer than three months into his tenure leading the beleaguered cable news network. Behind the scenes, Thompson has, by all accounts, been saying the right things to instill confidence in CNN’s long-suffering worker bees that he was the right choice for the job, anointed by Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav practically in a heartbeat after Licht’s notorious implosion. The seasoned BBC pedigree, the triumphant New York Times turnaround, the crucial blend of television and digital smarts—these are the résumé highlights that seem to be nudging most observers to place their chips on Thompson. 

    Mark ThompsonBy Bloomberg/Getty Images.

    Cable, of course, is an industry struggling with inexorable decline, and CNN continues to struggle with ratings that typically keep the channel in a distant third behind MSNBC and Fox News. There’s also the question of whether the digital transformation Thompson oversaw as CEO of the Times is something he can replicate for an entirely different business model. Puck’s Dylan Byers reported recently that Thompson is at work on a 2024 business plan that will reorient CNN around a “multiplatform philosophy.” Which is to say, we should have a better sense of where things are headed in the coming months. As one CNN journalist put it to me on the day of Thompson’s coronation, “You have to think, if he can’t make this work, then no one can.”

    Can Will Lewis win over The Washington Post?

    Will Lewis, the former Telegraph and News Corp. honcho whom Jeff Bezos recently appointed to steady the Post, is another executive whose London lilt has served him well in meet and greets. “I think we’re all really excited by your enthusiasm,” one Post journalist told the incoming publisher last month during an introductory town hall. “I think we’re like most Americans who are charmed by the accent.” (Can’t hurt that the guy was knighted a few months ago.) 

    William Lewis

    William Lewisby Elliott O’Donovan for The Washington Post/Getty Images.

    But make no mistake: Lewis is inheriting a restive staff, currently in the painful process of shedding about 240 jobs. He’s likewise inheriting business challenges that include stagnant revenues, soft subscription growth, and a miserable advertising market. (Then there’s the question of whether Lewis will seek to replace executive editor Sally Buzbee, although she presumably has a rapport with Lewis via his board seat at the Associated Press, where Buzbee served as executive editor before arriving at the Post, so there’s that.) For Lewis’s part, he’s projecting nothing but mojo. “We’re going to expand. We’re going to get our swagger back,” he said in a recent interview. “I know that right now is not our greatest time, but we’re going to grow again. And we’re going to get that confidence back and that swagger back. I can tell you that with absolute confidence.” 

    Will Fox and Smartmatic settle?

    Joe Pompeo

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  • Tucker Carlson Network Parks Billboard Trucks At Major News Outlets Proclaiming 'Corporate Media Is Dead'

    Tucker Carlson Network Parks Billboard Trucks At Major News Outlets Proclaiming 'Corporate Media Is Dead'

    Politics

    Gage Skidmore/Flickr/Creative Commons

    Popular conservative pundit Tucker Carlson announced he was creating his own network recently, hoping to draw viewers who are either sick of Fox News or a bit more conservative than your average Republican.

    On Thursday he let everyone know in a different kind of advertising campaign: the former Fox News host had trucks with billboards travel to different major media outlets to greet everyone with a special message.

    RELATED: Former Facebook Diversity Executive Pleads Guilty To Stealing $4 Million To Live Large

    ‘Corporate Media is Dead’

    Tucker, always quick to laugh, decided to troll his competitors in the major corporate media.

    The Hill reports:

    Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) set up photo-ops with the trucks outside of CNN, NBC News, The New York Times and The Washington Post. The advertisement on the billboard reads, “Corporate Media is Dead.”

    The advertisement echoes the apparent slogan for the network in the tagline on its X — the platform formerly known as Twitter — account, which reads fully, “Corporate media is dead. Join us.”

    The trucks showed up on the same day the network boasted its “first episode of Ask Tucker” in a post to X.

    Carlson announced the new venture Saturday, offering an annual subscription to the service for $72, or $6 per month. 

    Speaking about his network, Carlson said in a video, “We’ve been out of work for seven or eight months now, hard to know. Time flies when you’re unemployed.”

    “But actually, we have been working in secret and producing an awful lot of material for months now, interviews, et cetera,” he added.

    RELATED: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu Admits Racist ‘Electeds Of Color’ Christmas Party Has Been Around For Years

    Tucker’s Popularity Endures

    Carlson has produced free content on X, formerly known as Twitter, for months.

    In April, Fox News severed ties with Carlson over the host’s criticism of his employers and management. Jesse Watters was later named as a replacement for Carlson’s old time slot of 8 PM ET.

    Tucker Carlson was Fox News’ most watched host when he departed the cable news network, and that popularity has translated to X, where his videos have received millions of views.

    MSNBC Guest: Americans Should Get Used To Inflation, Lower Prices Are ‘Kind Of A Bad Thing’

    John Hanson

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  • “People Are Disgusted”: Why Washington Post Staff Walked Out

    “People Are Disgusted”: Why Washington Post Staff Walked Out

    The Guild is asking for 4% raises a year for three years, while the company is offering 2.25% for the first year of the contract, and 2% the next two years. “We deserve a contract that has job security protections and that respects seniority and the value of the employees who have given multiple decades of their lives to this company,” said Kaplan. “We deserve a buyout process that is fair and truly voluntary, and that is not deceptively a worse deal than the company claims it is. And most of all we just deserve to be dealt with fairly by our employer.”

    “We respect the rights of our Guild-covered colleagues to engage in this planned one-day strike. We will make sure our readers and customers are as unaffected as possible,” a Post spokesperson said in a statement. “The Post’s goal remains the same as it has from the start of our negotiations: to reach an agreement with the Guild that meets the needs of our employees and the needs of our business.”

    With hundreds of staffers pledging support for the walkout earlier this week, a second Post staffer said “it’s going to be noticeable,” but questioned “whether it’s going to be effective.” In some cases, entire departments, such as the Metro and investigative teams, committed to walking out, Post reporter Marissa Lang said, as did “colleagues on the commercial side, and in the print plant,” who walked off their jobs in the early hours of Thursday morning. “A walkout of 750 people touches every part of the Washington Post organization,” said Lang. Earlier this week, Post Guild released an open letter asking readers to “respect our walkout by not crossing the picket line,” meaning “do not engage with any Washington Post content.” If you did read the Post on Thursday, though, you may have noticed some stories—like one about a new crime center in DC to the paper’s own coverage of its labor protest —had a general byline: “By Washington Post Staff.” Either reporters had their names stripped off stories, or the generically bylined pieces were written by editors.

    Staffers I spoke to had mixed feelings about how much this action will really do. “I think people are genuinely impressed by how this young contention of leaders has revived the union, and doubled its membership,” said a third Post staffer. But “a lot of the same people are disappointed to see that they’re acting out in this way that doesn’t seem to be connected to any real prospect of progress on pay of jobs.” I’m told that there was internal second-guessing on Thursday among reporters who’d agreed to walk out but were now wondering, among other things, what would come next. Some high-profile staffers signed onto the strike out of fear of being publicly called out if they didn’t participate, according to a Post staffer. A piece in Semafor did just that to two top New York Times reporters, Peter Baker and Michael Shear, last year when the two opted out of the Gray Lady union’s walkout—an article, the Post staffer said, that had been circulating in recent days.

    Asked about the Guild’s plan following the strike, Lang said they would “extend another one-day invitation to the company to sit down with us and meaningfully bargain over the terms of our contract. If they refuse and continue to engage in some of the behavior we’ve seen, we’re prepared to continue to pressure them,” she said.

    The Post Guild’s decision to walk off the job amid lagging contract negotiations comes nearly one year to the day that the Times’s unionized staffers rallied outside the newspaper’s headquarters in their own historic act of protest. Several months later, the Times’s bitter labor fight came to an end as the staff union and company agreed to a contract. In August, Axios reported that members of the Times union briefed staffers from the Post union as the Post considered a walkout of its own.

    There are distinctions between the staff appeals at the two papers. Part of the Times union’s rallying call last year was tied to the company having increased compensation for some top officers and increased its dividend payout to shareholders. The Post’s walkout, on the other hand, comes as the company has admitted it’s been operating on faulty financial projections and is buying out—or, potentially, laying off—about 10% of its workforce. While one Post staffer acknowledged its New York–based rival is on firmer financial footing these days, they also pointed out the Times is “not owned by the second richest guy in the world.”

    Charlotte Klein

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