|
Stories of interest
Major TV Networks Declined to Film Xi’s Arrival
By Michael M. Grynbaum
The New York Times
It could be remembered as a landmark moment in U.S.-China relations: the arrival on Wednesday evening of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in the United States, where he was greeted by President Trump at Joint Base Andrews.
But because of Mr. Trump’s continuing standoff with the White House press corps, no major network camera captured the proceedings.
Since Monday, the networks that operate the White House TV pool — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC — have declined to film Mr. Trump’s public events as an act of solidarity with CNN, which, along with MS NOW and Politico, has been barred by the Trump administration.
Because of a quirk in timing, an unusual scene unfolded on the Andrews tarmac as reporters waited for Mr. Xi’s plane to land.
Crews from CBS, Fox News and NBC had set up their camera and audio equipment earlier in the afternoon, because a federal judge in Washington was hearing arguments in a lawsuit filed by the three banned outlets to restore their access to the White House.
If the judge had issued a ruling from the bench to suspend Mr. Trump’s press ban, and if the TV pool had decided to resume operations, the crews would have been ready to broadcast live footage of Mr. Xi.
Read more here. Shared by Dennis Conrad.
-0-
Fox News Finds Itself at Odds With Trump on Press Ban
By Michael M. Grynbaum
The New York Times
Fox News’s bond with President Trump is undeniable. Prime time stars like Sean Hannity and Jesse Watters cheerlead his policies, the president’s daughter-in-law hosts a weekly show on the network, and Fox’s founder, Rupert Murdoch, attended Mr. Trump’s nominating convention in 2024.
Nonetheless, this week Fox News has joined other networks in standing up for the rival media outlets that Mr. Trump decried as “fake” and banned from the White House — and two senior Fox journalists emerged as lead actors in the White House press corps’s standoff with the administration.
At a glance, it’s an unlikely position for Fox News, wrought in part by history and in part by sheer coincidence. And it’s confused some liberal Fox critics and caused some heartburn for Trump hard-liners.
So first, some facts.
Fox News is one of the five major networks — the others are ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC — that form the presidential TV pool, sharing the duties and costs of generating video footage of Mr. Trump’s everyday activities. When the president barred CNN, along with Politico and MS NOW, from the White House last week, the networks rebelled, refusing to film his daily public events until CNN was reinstated.
Fox News did not hesitate to go along with the plan. On Tuesday night, for instance, Fox was the scheduled pool crew for Mr. Trump’s Air Force One arrival at Joint Base Andrews, but it declined to film the event.
Read more here. Shared by Dennis Conrad.
-0-
An international media watchdog calls for protection of journalists in Serbia ahead of an election
By Jovana Geck
The Associated Press
BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — An international media watchdog has warned that journalists in Serbia are increasingly under threat of violence and hostility ahead of a high-stakes early parliamentary election next month that will test populist President Aleksandar Vucic ‘s rule.
The Committee to Protect Journalists urged Vucic’s government this week to ensure that journalists can follow the Oct. 25 ballot “safely and without fear.”
“Journalists covering the polls are at serious risk of threats, violence and hostility of the sort that has become increasingly common” during Vucic’s term, CPJ said in a statement released on Tuesday.
The group called on “Serbia’s European partners to monitor the situation closely, encourage Belgrade to guarantee the rule of law is respected and speak out to challenge violations of press freedom.”
The Serbian government did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for a comment. In the past, Serbia’s Ministry of Information has told the AP it condemned any attacks on journalists and urged a quick state reaction.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
-0-
Iowa judge dismisses Trump’s lawsuit against Des Moines Register and pollster
By Hannah Fingerhut
The Associated Press
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A judge on Wednesday dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit accusing The Des Moines Register and its former pollster of misrepresenting the state of the 2024 presidential race, rejecting the president’s claim that the newspaper’s poll coverage violated Iowa’s consumer fraud law.
Calling the case extraordinary, Iowa District Judge Scott J. Beattie said that allowing the lawsuit and its “faulty” claims to proceed could have a chilling effect that “can discourage others from reporting on and debating public affairs.” He sided with pollster J. Ann Selzer and the newspaper in affirming that the poll and coverage of it were constitutionally protected political speech, not a commercial product.
The ruling Wednesday came hours after a judge heard arguments but did not rule from the bench in a case on Trump’s ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds. Trump banned the three outlets last Friday, assailing what he called “fake news.”
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
-0-
Stanford AI-Edits Photo to Change Student’s Race and Gender
By Matt Growcoot
PetaPixel
Stanford University violated its own policies after using AI to swap out a Hispanic male student with a Black female student in a school photograph. Billy Ramirez, the student who was replaced in the photo, spoke to the independent student newspaper, The Stanford Review, which broke the story.
Ramirez says he was “immediately baffled” when he first saw the AI-edited image. “At first, I found it hilarious that they had used AI to completely change our appearances, including my race and gender,” he tells the student paper.
“But after looking at the comparison, I was also upset because I don’t agree with Stanford making those choices about how we were represented. Seeing my identity changed and being left out of the picture made me feel, in a way, silenced and erased from a representation that was supposed to include me.”
Not only was Ramirez totally erased from the pictures, but the two people he’s standing with are noticeably thinner.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
-0-
The Blade’s Shocking, Inevitable News
By Liz Skalka
Columbia Journalism Review
When I joined as a political writer, Toledo’s famed daily was known for its ambitious local newsroom. Now it’s preparing to publish its final issue.
On Labor Day, about a dozen current and former journalists from The Blade marched in Toledo, Ohio’s annual parade. Representing the Toledo NewsGuild, they carried signs drawn in marker—“Quality Work Deserves Fair Pay” and “Union Town Union Newspaper”—and wore shirts with the slogan “The Blade Works Because We Do” spilling out of a typewriter. The next morning, Block Communications Inc. (BCI), The Blade’s parent company, announced that the paper would close on December 31. “The financial losses The Blade has endured for years are simply not sustainable,” the company’s COO wrote in an email to the union. BCI said it was exploring a possible sale of the paper’s assets. If Toledo loses its newspaper, the city will become one of the largest in the United States without a major print or digital outlet.
The Blade’s journalists, many of whom I worked alongside as the paper’s political writer from 2018 to 2021, had been bracing for this news since the summer, when management resumed labor negotiations with the NewsGuild. For nearly a decade, The Blade’s unionized newsroom has been working under an expired contract; longtime guild members hadn’t seen across-the-board contractual salary increases since the early 2000s. During my time at The Blade, BCI appeared set on prolonging labor talks indefinitely as it made cost-cutting moves, such as eliminating a majority of print days beginning in early 2019. Then, this July, The Blade proposed a two-year contract that would eliminate seniority and allow guild work to be outsourced to artificial intelligence or management, terms that many members feared would hasten the newsroom’s decline. Guild members told me the company also planned to lay off a third of its seventy-five-member bargaining unit, which includes members of the ad sales and circulation teams along with journalists.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
-0-
Dispatches from the world: OPC honors the most impactful storytelling, filed from abroad
By Bob Miller
Editor and Publisher
They are the Lewis and Clarks, the Neil Armstrongs and Christa McAuliffes of international journalism. Foreign correspondents are more than reporters and photographers. They’re adventurers, leaving the comforts of their homes to explore the rest of the world, telling stories of people, politics, economics and war beyond the borders of the U.S., often in dangerous places. Since 1939, the Overseas Press Club (OPC) of America has committed to giving these journalism journeyers their due.
The OPC is best known for its awards dinner, a sincere and sometimes somber celebration of the commitment it takes to do the job. This year marked the 87th annual event. Julie Pace, executive editor at The Associated Press (AP) delivered the keynote.
Notably, the OPC was formed around the time reporters were covering Hitler in Germany, the Spanish Civil War and Japanese aggression. A group of those correspondents started a club, and it’s been active ever since.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
-0-
DOJ Lawyer Behind Legal Filing in Press Ban Case Once Admired Hitler — and Praised Him for Understanding the ‘Importance of Propaganda’
By Kathianne Boniello
Mediaite
The Department of Justice attorney who signed a heavily criticized legal filing in the department’s battle over press access to the White House once voiced his admiration for Adolf Hitler — and how much the murderous dictator valued propaganda.
Michael Velchik is listed as the DOJ’s senior counsel on the legal papers filed Tuesday in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
The late-night filing accused CNN, MS NOW and Politico of “trafficking in verifiable falsehoods about national security and other issues, and publishing sensitive or classified information.”
Liz Oyer, the DOJ’s former pardon attorney who was fired by the Trump administration in March 2025 and has since taken to Instagram as a frequent critic of her former agency, made the connection between past reporting on Velchick’s — and his love of Hitler — to the current legal brief in a Monday post.
Read more here. Shared by Doug Pizac.
| 
