KNOCK, KNOCK

By issuing subpoenas to five Times journalists, the Trump administration reveals its first response to unwanted national security coverage: go after reporters.

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

On Friday evening, federal agents showed up at the homes of multiple New York Times reporters to deliver subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury. Those who received—or may soon receive—subpoenas include Julian E. Barnes, Adam Goldman, Eric Lipton, Tyler Pager, and Eric Schmitt, according to an email that Joe Kahn, the paper’s executive editor, sent Times staff over the weekend. The journalists had been part of a team investigating security concerns related to Donald Trump’s new Air Force One—a gift from Qatar last year that was quickly refurbished and decorated in the gaudy cream-and-gold that is typical of Trumpist style. The Times decided to immediately go public about the subpoenas, which seek to compel the reporters to testify in Manhattan on Wednesday. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, the Times newsroom lawyer, said in a statement on Friday. “This brazen act should be seen as nothing more than an attempt to prevent the public from knowing what is happening in their country by intimidating journalists from doing their jobs.”

Since returning to office, Trump has complained about the look of presidential planes. Other countries had newer planes that appeared “bigger and sleeker and sharper” than Air Force One, Trump told Fox News last year, “and it doesn’t look right.” In May of 2025, the US accepted Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747-8 jetliner. It was reportedly worth about two hundred million dollars, and was intended to be the president’s official plane until two Boeing aircraft, commissioned in 2018 but repeatedly delayed, were ready. The Qatari plane was retrofitted to become “a flying White House at a level of luxury that nobody’s ever seen before,” Trump said when he unveiled it in a hangar in Maryland last month. “Now when we land at airports in London and Germany and different places, nobody tops this one.”

But last Wednesday, Barnes, Lipton, Pager, and Schmitt heard from sources that, as a security precaution, Trump had been forced to switch back to the old Air Force One when leaving a NATO summit in Türkiye. They wrote about concerns that the Qatari plane may not have been outfitted with security improvements, such as a missile defense system, that officials felt were necessary because of renewed threats from Iran. It was a classic public interest story: millions in taxpayer dollars had been spent to refit the plane that carries the commander in chief and a large entourage of officials, staff, and journalists, but was it even equipped with the necessary defensive features? According to the Times’ Michael Grynbaum, a senior official at the FBI requested that the Times hold the article—calling it a matter of national security—and asked to know the sources of the information. (The piece cited “people briefed on the new plane’s capabilities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive security issues.”) The Times refused both requests and hit publish. The article was followed, on Thursday, by another piece that delved more deeply into the specific defensive countermeasures that may have been skipped when refitting the Qatari plane. The reporting made the Times’ front page on Friday and Saturday. Trump was “fuming,” “embarrassed and angry,” according to CNN.

The episode fused two phenomena that have long infuriated Trump: being embarrassed on the international stage, and the use of anonymous sources in reporting that does not flatter him or his administration. He instructed Kash Patel, the FBI director, to oversee a leak investigation, the Times reported (quoting more people who spoke “on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal discussions”). Patel was on his way to Chicago but canceled the trip, instead spending eight hours at the White House on Friday. The subpoenas were issued soon after, from the Southern District of New York. They are strikingly uncommon in leak investigations—let alone as the first step in such a probe. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department insisted on Saturday that “reporters are not the targets; those leaking classified information are.”

But the subpoenas must be seen as part of a wider push by the Trump administration to criminalize routine newsgathering practices, especially on topics related to national security. Last month, the Justice Department issued grand jury subpoenas to journalists at the Washington Post, reportedly for a story relating to Venezuela, and the Wall Street Journal, for a story on military action against Iran, but later backed down and withdrew them after the news organizations pushed back. (The filings in those cases are sealed.) In January, the FBI raided the home of Hannah Natanson, a Post reporter, seizing her devices and referring to her reporting materials as “contraband” in a case “virtually without comparison,” as Maddy Crowell wrote for CJR at the time. And Trump has personally sued multiple news organizations for coverage he didn’t like. Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, described the Times subpoenas as an “extraordinary escalation” in efforts to “threaten and intimidate independent news organizations.”

The latest case is particularly revealing because it tells us that the Trump administration’s first impulse is now to pursue reporters, even before conducting a thorough internal leak investigation. This seems to treat journalists as criminals for legally receiving information, and looks like a cynical excuse to try to comb through their notebooks and ransack their contact lists. If the five Times journalists are forced to appear before a grand jury, they could be asked to reveal their sources—and, as Perry Stein writes in the Post, they could face charges of contempt of court or obstruction of justice if they refuse to comply. “This is not something that should be normal,” Jon Schleuss, the president of the NewsGuild-CWA, of which the subpoenaed reporters are members, told me on Sunday. “But when the president attacks journalists every single day, that becomes an unfortunate normalization—and if we ignore it, then we’re doomed.” The “really scary thing,” Schleuss added, is that Trump’s tactics against the press “are filtering down at the state and the county and the city level. You have county sheriffs who will see this and say, ‘This is how we actually prevent reporting about the no-good contracts that we’ve got.’”

The Times has signaled its intention to aggressively fight the subpoenas. “This is a naked attempt to intimidate individual reporters and to prevent the Times and other independent news media from doing important reporting protected by the First Amendment,” Kahn wrote to staff on Saturday. The paper has a very good chance of winning. As I wrote for CJR in April, the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on critical journalism have not gone down well in many courtrooms. Kahn, in his email, pointed out that the “impulsive” subpoenas “used vague pretenses of a threat to national security,” and said that “we expect to prevail.” But he also issued a warning about the impending strain of the subpoenas on the lives and families of the five targeted journalists, who, for however long this takes, will be tangled up in Trump’s sprawling web of litigation.

Other Notable Stories...

By Jem Bartholomew

On Wednesday night, Graham Platner, a Senate candidate from Maine, announced on X that he was suspending his campaign, after Politico published a story in which Jenny Racicot, a woman who dated him, said Platner sexually assaulted her. (He denied the allegations.) Betsy Morais, the editor in chief of CJR, wrote about the extraordinarily difficult, sensitive task of reporting on sexual violence. “A story like this asks you to hold two things at once: real sensitivity toward a source who is describing a traumatic experience and real rigor in testing the account,” Jessica Piper, one of the authors of the Politico story, told Morais.In May, Riddhi Setty and I wrote for CJR about how the Trump administration was helping a white, male editor, Bryant Rousseau, sue the New York Times for discrimination; Rousseau is alleging that he was subjected to “unlawful employment practices” when he was not put forward for the role of deputy real estate editor at the paper. Last Friday, the Times said in a court filing that the administration had violated the First and Fifth Amendments with the suit—and called it an act of retaliation for its journalism. The Times asked for the suit to be dismissed. (Rousseau resigned from the company in June, the Times’ Erik Wemple reported.)On Friday, a federal court in Los Angeles ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop using force to prevent journalists, legal observers, and members of the public from documenting immigration enforcement operations in the Central District of California. The case, filed in June of last year by plaintiffs including the LA Press Club, the NewsGuild-CWA, and three individual journalists, came after DHS agents used militarized crowd-control weapons against people documenting immigration raids. “No federal agency has the authority to use force to prevent the public from documenting and holding the government accountable for its actions,” Jonathan Markovitz, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, said in a statement.In the UK, Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, won a major case at the High Court in London on Tuesday against a lineup of claimants including Prince Harry, Elton John, and Doreen Lawrence, who became an advocate for police reform after the racially motivated murder of her son Stephen in 1993, and is now a member of the House of Lords. The plaintiffs alleged a pattern of unlawful information gathering by the news organization—following revelations of phone-hacking in the British tabloid press during the aughts—but Justice Matthew Nicklin said they had failed to prove that the Mail engaged in unlawful activity. At a hearing later this month, the claimants could be ordered to pay tens of millions of dollars in legal bills. (They are reportedly deciding whether to appeal.)In the occupied West Bank on Sunday, Israeli settlers attacked several journalists, including some from CNN, who were reporting on the one-year anniversary of the killing of Saif Musallet, a Palestinian American who was beaten to death by settlers near the village of Sinjil, north of Ramallah. Soon after the journalists arrived, four people showed up wielding “wooden and metal rods and stones,” according to a CNN write-up. (Israeli police said four suspects were arrested.) Jeremy Diamond, CNN’s Jerusalem correspondent, who was present, said that a full report on the attack would air on Monday night. In related news, the Committee to Protect Journalists on Wednesday urged Israeli authorities to investigate two recent attacks that targeted the entrances of the Tel Aviv offices of two news organizations—Haaretz, a newspaper, and Channel 12, a broadcaster—with concrete blocks or stones. The vandalism, according to CPJ, seemed like attempts “to intimidate journalists and media workers.” And several Iranian journalists said they were denied US visas to cover the World Cup, according to an article in Nieman Reports, which described the refusals as “unprecedented.” The Trump administration’s travel restrictions on several countries represented in the tournament—Iran, Haiti, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast—included an exemption for athletes, staff, and immediate family members, but it did not extend to fans or media workers. For more on the World Cup—now narrowed to four semifinalists: France, Spain, England, and Argentina—see Amos Barshad’s piece for CJR on news outlets bringing politics into their coverage of the tournament, which concludes next Sunday.

READ ORIGINAL STORY HERE

THE INTERVIEW: ‘All I Have Is The Power To Talk And Be Heard’

Tucker Carlson - Wikipedia

Tucker Carlson on pitying Donald Trump, never listening to podcasts, and planning a new political party—while selling you nicotine pouches.

BY AMOS BARSHAD

On a recent afternoon, I drove down a wooded Maine road, past serene ponds with no people in sight, until I reached a big white barn. I parked, in patchy grass, near a Ford F-350 with a crane bolted onto the back, an American flag, and an idling black SUV. A guy in the driver’s seat of the SUV, whose tattoos peeked out beneath the sleeves of a white dress shirt, sent me thirty feet down the road to another guy, in a large white SUV, who politely told me to wait. Tucker Carlson was still recording.

I wouldn’t have been surprised to see anyone—a United States senator? A prison guard claiming to have evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered? Donald Trump?—walk out of that barn. Carlson, who is fifty-seven, occupies a singular space in American media: after decades in corporate television, most famously at Fox News, he now hosts The Tucker Carlson Show, a video podcast, where he can and does follow his every whim, taking his hordes of fans along with him. A recent episode, “The Secret History of Biblical Giants,” has 1.5 million views on YouTube.

Eventually, Carlson—boyish, tanned, wearing an outdoorsman vest and New Balances—welcomed me into the barn. As I entered, I passed that day’s interviewee: Nick Maynard, an English surgeon who has worked extensively treating Gazan victims of Israeli air strikes.

On his show, Carlson advocates long-held hard-line conservative views, which include total opposition to immigration, abortion, and trans rights. He also takes a strong stand against war: Carlson has vociferously denounced the American and Israeli attacks on Iran—during which over thirteen thousand targets have been bombed and more than three thousand people killed—as well as Israel’s post–October 7 assault on Gaza. Carlson has personally lobbied Trump, whom he’s known at least since both were NBC television personalities, not to attack Iran. He’s an imperfect vessel for the anti-war argument, but his reach and influence may make him America’s most prominent crusader for the cause.

Because of his reputation among American conservatives, Carlson can book guests such as Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, and grill them on their warmongering. In a 2025 interview that went viral, Carlson asked Cruz to tell him the population of Iran; Cruz couldn’t do it. “You’re a senator who’s calling for the overthrow of the government,” Carlson shouted in response, “and you don’t know anything about the country!” It was a rare thing: a complete pantsing of a powerful public figure. “I am always struck by the ignorance of policymakers,” Carlson told me. “I wanted him to feel shame. And he felt no shame.”

Carlson’s relevance is rooted in the fact that he can both book Cruz and embarrass him. It’s also connected to his symbiosis with a subset of Republicans. According to a recent New York Times/Siena poll of self-identified Republicans and Trump voters, nearly 60 percent of those with a “very favorable” view of Carlson say “they want the next Republican presidential nominee to take the party in a new direction.”

What may be most significant about Carlson now is that his campaign against the Iran war and Israel’s influence on the American political system has placed him in strange cultural territory: suddenly, he has fans on the left. Cenk Uygur, the creator of the progressive news show The Young Turks, has cheered Carlson for criticizing Trump’s attacks on Muslims. When Olivia Reingold, a writer for the Free Press, compiled a dossier against Rama Duwaji, the First Lady of New York City, one of Reingold’s ostensibly damning reveals was that Duwaji had liked a Carlson post criticizing AIPAC.

Peter Beinart—the editor-at-large at Jewish Currents and a prominent Israel critic—has pushed back on the left’s support for Carlson, arguing in a recent Substack video that any progressive who is going on Carlson’s show “should not leave your principles at the door. If you’re against bigotry” and “the argument that somehow white Christians are superior to Black and brown immigrants,” then don’t “ignore all of that because you think you’re working with him to try to turn US policy against Israel.” Carlson recently spoke to Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a journalist for the New York Times, who pressed him about his interview with Nick Fuentes, the white-nationalist influencer.

Carlson often starts his podcast episodes with lengthy, showy monologues. He doesn’t write them down, he told me, instead sketching them out in his head during daily sauna sessions. The monologues encapsulate both his appeal and the fear he strikes in people. Whatever the topic—biblical giants, Christian nationalism, Gaza—he is a preternaturally compelling speaker. At one point in our conversation, he fell into a reverie describing all the cigarettes he smoked in Dubai while sitting down with an aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. “I love smoking so much,” Carlson said. These days, though, he mostly gets his fix via his own nicotine-pouch brand, ALP, which stands for American Lip Pillow.

Carlson’s barn, in the town of Woodstock—his family has owned the barn for years, and their summer home is nearby—feels like a GOP-themed chain restaurant. Nearly every spare inch is covered with taxidermy or Republican memorabilia. Carlson took a seat under a big stuffed bear head and torso, near a Nixon/Agnew sign and a Bush ’88 ashtray. He spit out an ALP, popped in a new one—with twelve milligrams of nicotine, he made sure to point out, making it one of the most potent pouches on the market—and we began talking. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

AB: Fox fired you in 2023. Did you anticipate any of what would come next?

TC: No! I don’t anticipate where I’m going to be after dinner tonight. I’m not a planner. I never have been. A lot of our producers got fired with me. We immediately pivoted from television to the internet. It was actually a lot easier than I thought. We had the Fox studio in the other part of the barn: they came and took all their cameras and the lighting rig and the soundproofing.

I certainly did not anticipate talking about Israel. I had been on TV for thirty years. I don’t think I had ever really talked about Israel. From my perspective, I got pushed into it.

How so?

I felt I had no choice. Early in 2025, Netanyahu showed up at the White House right after Trump’s inauguration, and I thought, “This is a little early to be siphoning off the energy from this campaign and this election for the benefit of another country.” And I resented it. I very quickly began to understand the point of these visits was a regime-change effort in Iran. And that’s something that I talked to Trump about many times over ten years. Fifty times! More! In public, but mostly in private.

The breaking point and the huge change in my life came in June of 2025, with the Twelve-Day War—which was not about Iran’s nuclear program. It was the first salvo in a regime-change effort led by Israel. And that’s just antithetical to everything Trump ran on.

I’ve been to Israel several times, both for work and as a visitor. I love Jerusalem—amazing city—but I’m not interested in Israel. I don’t think it’s significant as a country from an American perspective. It’s not in our hemisphere. It’s got no resources. So I just don’t care. But once you start taking over my political system and destroying my country, then I have a right to care. So now I do care.

When you’re trying to dissuade Trump from going to war, what do you see as your role? Are you speaking as a concerned American or as a journalist?

What category do I occupy? I haven’t the faintest idea. I’m not interested at all in defining it. I’m not a politician, that’s for sure. I’m not a rival to Trump for power. I have no power. I’m someone who knows Trump, and I know him well, and I’ve known him for a long time. I can call him. He often calls me.

Do you still speak to Trump?

I haven’t spoken to him since the regime-change war began. I’m not interested in talking to him. I feel sorry for him. He’s not a man in charge of his own life at this point. I feel sorry for anybody who’s enslaved, including him. I mean, I visited him three times at the White House in the month before the Twelve-Day War, and I told him the same thing all three times: “You’re not gonna see the rise of a democratic, pro-Western government in Tehran. The best you’re gonna see there is just this suppurating wound.” And he said, “I know.”

What is it really about, in Trump’s mind? Why did he destroy himself? His administration? His legacy? The Republican Party and America? I don’t know, but maybe someone at CJR should get on this and find out.

Okay, so, three years after leaving Fox, you’re suddenly one of the most prominent anti-war voices in America—

It’s not hard, because no one else is against it! Where is everybody?

Are you surprised to find yourself in this position?

Well, no. I’ve been against war since December of 2003, when I was in Iraq and I was highly distressed by it. So I’ve had the same views for twenty-three years now, more or less. But I just stayed away from Israel because—and I would say this to people who worked for me at Fox—it’s not worth it. It’s too personal. The unwritten rule is that criticism of Israel is criticism of all Jews, and because I am not against Jews, it’s not worth it.

I’ve been to Israel a lot, so I’m fully aware of the apartheid situation in Israel. I’ve been offended by it going back twenty years. But I would always say to myself, “Okay, I’ve been in a lot of places with injustice.” I’ve seen Nigerians treat Liberians like animals, firsthand, in West Africa, and I was offended by it. But I didn’t organize my life around defending oppressed Liberians.

Occasionally, something would happen and my staff at Fox would bring me a story about Israel. I’d be like, “Nope, I don’t want to do it.” Now, that was probably cowardice on my part, but also the truth was I had mixed feelings about it. I’m not defending this. I’m just telling you the way I thought. I would sublimate it. “Is it really worth it? I don’t want to think about it, and I’ve got all these children, and I want America to be a decent place.” But the Iran war, that was too far.

There’s been speculation that hawks like Marc Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist, have played a part in convincing Trump to continue the Iran war. Do we, meaning the public, have a good understanding of how people in the media influence Trump?

I don’t know if people have a good understanding of it. I don’t know if I always have a good understanding of it. But I don’t believe that Trump is substantially influenced by Marc Thiessen. I doubt Marc Thiessen influences his wife, assuming he has one. I think that Marc Thiessen and others like that are just a sideshow designed to divert your attention away from the people who are influencing the president. And those would include his donors. Those would include John Paulson and Miriam Adelson and Rupert Murdoch, who’s had a huge effect on Trump. Rupert Murdoch would call Trump three or four times a day to encourage him to attack Iran. And I know that because I’ve talked to Trump about it many times.

You and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of war, were both on Fox. Do you have any thoughts about his fitness for the job?

I feel sad about the whole thing. I think it’s disgusting to brag about killing people. It’s totally unchristian and immoral. We should treat death with reverence, period. You can certainly make the case that some people should be killed, but I don’t think anyone should ever celebrate the death of another human being. And by the way, you’re gonna be punished for that.

What do you make of Trump’s lurching attempts to end the war in Iran with the memorandum of understanding?

It’s a humiliating defeat for the United States, but it’s still an improvement over what would happen if we kept going, so I’m grateful for it. Israel is the victim in this. Israel got so far over its skis. Imagine it from Israel’s perspective: you think you’re gonna be the regional hegemon, and then, three months later, Iran becomes a global power. It’s a freaking nightmare!

But there’s no meaningful diplomatic effort; Israel doesn’t even have the capacity for diplomacy. “We’re just gonna explode your pagers.” You can talk yourself into thinking you’re far more powerful than you are, and when you do that, you get hurt. I learned that at twenty-five in a bar fight. And I never punched anyone again, because last time I did, I got the snot knocked out of me, and I had to go on TV with a black eye. I was married. With kids. I was actually thirty-two, now that I’m thinking about it. And my wife was not impressed at all, and my kids were confused. Everything about it was bad. But I realized I’m better at talking my way out of problems than fighting my way out of problems.

I don’t think I’m making complicated points, and I don’t think I’m saying anything radical. Like in that interview with the New York Times. Midway through it she gets kind of emotional and treats me like I’m a dangerous figure. I don’t see myself that way at all. I see myself as thoroughly moderate, and more so as I get older, and I don’t think I have any weird sacred cows that I’m not admitting in public.

The Times reporter, Garcia-Navarro, asked repeatedly about your interview with Nick Fuentes, which seemed to surprise you.

I’m happy to answer questions about Nick Fuentes, but if you’re asking me your eleventh question on Nick Fuentes, I’m gonna have to call it out for what it is, which is a diversion tactic.

I feel like the thing that people are really mad about is the fact that they can’t get jobs that are well-paying enough to build an independent life. Young people are threatened by the promise of AI, which is taking away their futures. And she wants to talk about Nick Fuentes? It is so perfectly representative of the way a certain class of people in America thinks, which is small and narrow. We’re supposed to be running the world! Not with people like you, man.

You did express regret in that Times interview about interviewing Fuentes, at least on the basis that it created too much blowback for you. If you are going to continue to be a prominent anti-war voice and Israel critic, are you thinking about calibrating your approach in any way?

No. I’m not an anti-Semite; if I was an anti-Semite, I would just say so: “I’m against the Jews, here’s why.” I don’t have an employer. I don’t have investors. I don’t even have any creditors, so I can say whatever I think is true, and I plan to.

I find it so interesting that people are unwilling to accept my word. I always say, “Well, why wouldn’t I just say it? What am I going to get? Canceled? I’ve already been fired.” I had the highest-rated show in the history of Fox, and they fired me anyway. So it’s like, what are you going to take from me now?

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan recently reported that JD Vance pitched having you interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison as part of the Trump administration’s pushback to negative coverage around the Epstein files. Were you involved in this idea?

I was one of the very first, maybe the first person to attack the administration in public last summer for hiding the Epstein materials. Not only was I not involved in a cover-up, I was publicly attacking them. I’ll be happy to interview Ghislaine Maxwell or anybody else. That’s my job. But no, I was not involved in a plot to cover it up.

In an interview recently, Sebastian Gorka, the White House counterterrorism “czar,” name-checked you after being asked about right-wing terror threats.

Sebastian Gorka—he’s not even American. My family’s been here for like four hundred years. And I’m the terror threat because I would like democracy and free speech. I texted him immediately and said, “Let’s have a conversation.” He never responded. He used to invite me over for dinner to his house, and I got such a creepy vibe. I just knew, I’m gonna get over there and he’s going to have me put on a costume.

Sorry, a costume? What kind of a costume?

I don’t know. I’m just guessing. If there’s anybody that has a costume room, it’s Gorka.

Speaking of free speech crackdowns—one of the most famous recent examples when it comes to Israel/Palestine is Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia student-protest leader detained by ICE.

Even then, I didn’t say anything. So determined was I to stay out of this that I made the—in retrospect, probably foolish and maybe even cowardly—decision to not say anything when they started revoking people’s visas for their political views.

Now, I’m for less immigration. In fact, I’m for ending all immigration today. I don’t know how you can justify immigration when half of all white-collar jobs are going away because of AI. What are people going to do for a living? There’s no economic justification for any immigration in the United States because we can’t even figure out what we’re going to do with all these unemployed people. So it’s crazy. Social-services spending, healthcare, education—who’s going to pay for that? So I’m opposed. And in the case of Sebastian Gorka—like, I would deport him immediately.

Legacy media is in constant flux. Do you see the old-school press being able to navigate this era? Or is it slowly just withering away?

Do I see NBC News making a comeback? No! I don’t know David Ellison, but he’s not a genius, I’ll tell you that. He’s buying CBS. Are you gonna buy RCA Records next? I wouldn’t take CBS News for free. I wouldn’t take CNN for free—maybe CNN International. But, like, Paramount Pictures? This is not the future. It’s not even the recent past. It’s the distant past.

I’m not exactly sure where young people are getting their information, but wherever they’re getting it is the right place, because they are so well-informed. For years, I thought that weed and porn and SSRIs and benzodiazepines have totally disabled young people. But I don’t think that anymore. I employ a lot of them, and they’re the sharpest, hardest-working people. They give me a lot of hope. And boy, they don’t believe anything. And they’re very well-informed. So much better-informed than I was when I was twenty-seven. I thought the CIA was a force for good! I literally thought that!

I think Trump is the last Fox News viewer. I’m so grateful every single day that I got fired. I probably wouldn’t have left, knowing me. I’d just be increasingly unhappy.

And here, you feel like you’ve found your—

I feel totally happy. I mean, I think my influence is overstated. I don’t seem to have influence at all. I couldn’t stop Trump from attacking Iran. And my wife, who is hilarious, literally laughed at me after the war started: “So I guess you weren’t very good at that, Mr. Powerful Influential Guy!” What matters is the ability to affect outcomes. And I have no demonstrated ability to do that. None.

Some have referred to the current divide on the right as being a split between Fox News Republicans and YouTube Republicans. Are you strategically positioning yourself as counterprogramming?

I’m not strategic in any way. I make almost all decisions on the basis of smell and instinct. I have no real idea who watches our show. I’m sure there are people who work here who have, or claim to have, a better sense of who the audience is. I really don’t. I make all decisions about what we air myself, usually without consulting anybody. I have a short attention span. That’s been a huge advantage for me over the years.

One thing I always loved about Rachel Maddow, and I often told her this, is that she just existed in her own universe. She’s off in the Berkshires alone, thinking. She was disconnected from the herd. I’ve always wanted to be that. I haven’t always succeeded. It’s shameful the number of times I’ve covered something because everyone else was talking about it. But I really try not to be that way. And increasingly, especially as I age, I am cut off.

I’ve never posted in my life. I don’t have my password on social media. I don’t read anything. I get almost all my information by text message or phone call. That’s it. It could be every bit as wrong. But I just don’t trust anybody at all, and I don’t want it in my head. I’ve never listened to a podcast. I have some form of intense dyslexia, and something about podcasts and movies and television puts me to sleep almost immediately. I still read books every day.

Are you interested in aligning yourself with other anti-war voices?

I do know what really matters is war and finance. Where does the money come from? Where does it go? And who gets killed? And on those questions, the parties are in lockstep solidarity with each other. That’s not a democracy. That’s a one-party state posing as a democracy, and it needs to be broken, and there’s going to be a third party, and I’m going to do everything I can to bring that about.

And that’s the lesson of the last two and a half months, to me. If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war—if Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy, which he is—then we need options, or else let’s just give up and be ruled by the most unscrupulous people. And I’m just too young to accept that. We need a third party.

And when you say do everything you can—

I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. I mean, if you make sixty thousand dollars a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care. It’s not even a factor. “What about Hamas?” I officially don’t care about Hamas. The US government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people.

Would you be a candidate for this third party?

I don’t want to be a candidate. Before I did the Times interview, someone said to me, “They’re going to ask you if you’re running for president.” I was very tempted to say “I am running—on the pro-patriarchy ticket.” Just to make sure I gain no new fans.

What’s your goal in speaking to outlets like CJR or the Times—people who are presumably outside of your direct audience?

It’s the only power I have. I don’t have any tricky plan to win Times readers to my campaign for some office. I don’t have any institutional power. I don’t control a military. So all I have is the power to talk and be heard. And though it’s borne no fruit so far, I remain hopeful.

The headline of that Times interview was “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe?” The Atlantic used an almost identical headline for a 2019 profile.

So weird. Like I’m using some kind of verbal magic trick to hide something. From my perspective, I am the least mysterious person who’s ever lived. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything in public that’s complicated or hard to understand. I have a commitment to not doing that. I believe if you can’t explain something clearly, either you don’t understand it, or you’re trying to hide something.

What do I really believe? What do you think I’m hiding? I could talk for twenty-four hours! I’ll tell you everything I believe! I can’t stop talking!

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WHO COUNTS?

The Committee to Protect Journalists’ role documenting members of the press killed in the Israel-Gaza war has made it a target.

Mourners carry the body of Abd Shaat, a Palestinian journalist killed in an Israeli strike. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana, File)

BY JEM BARTHOLOMEW

At 12:37pm EST on June 25, Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), announced that the organization was reexamining the names in its database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war. “CPJ condemns in no uncertain terms the misrepresentation of combatants as journalists or media workers—or the misuse of ‘Press’ insignia. Such actions endanger every single individual journalist legitimately trying to report,” she said in a statement. “We are conducting a full review of the names on our lists to confirm that no one who was actively engaged in combat is listed in our data.” Ginsberg also pointed out that “in-person verification by researchers from outside Gaza has been impossible” because, as Gerry Shih wrote for CJR’s recent Access Issue, since the war began, Israel has barred international correspondents and press advocates from reporting independently in the territory.

Four hours later, at 4:47pm, Jacob Weisberg—the chair of CPJ’s board of directors and a cofounder of Pushkin Industries—emailed the board with an update on a parallel but distinct plan to reconsider who counts as a member of the press. He wrote, according to emails I have reviewed, that he’d established a “special task force to reexamine the question of ‘Who is a Journalist?’” He told board members: “This inquiry is not limited to Gaza, and will address questions about our protection of journalists affiliated with the non-military wings of identified terrorist organizations as well as journalists engaged in official propaganda or disinformation.” He said that nine people had already agreed to work on the task force, and that they would share their recommendation with the board at the next scheduled meeting, in October. (In response to interview requests, Weisberg referred to public statements and said that he was “not going to comment on the board’s internal discussions or processes.”)

The pair of announcements, one public and the other intended to be private, quickly set off a widespread debate about whether one of the world’s most influential press advocacy groups was caving to political pressure. Since the Israel-Gaza war began, in October of 2023, CPJ—a nonprofit headquartered in New York that promotes global press freedom, provides safety support to reporters, and produces research about attacks on the press—has kept a well-sourced and widely cited count of journalists killed. CPJ says the database records people’s names only after its researchers, based around the world, have confirmed via “at least two independent sources of information, desk-based research, and in-person research where possible” that each person is a journalist who has been killed in relation to their work. (Supporting evidence can include information from “family, colleagues, media reports, civil society, and government or independent investigations,” according to CPJ’s methodology.) The tally, at present, documents two hundred and sixty-three journalists and media workers killed in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen, the vast majority of them by the Israeli military, which routinely targets journalists and accuses them, without evidence, of being terrorists. CPJ’s research puts Israel’s war on Gaza down as the deadliest conflict for journalists on record. This has made the CPJ database, and the methodology behind it, a target for attacks by those seeking to discredit critics of the Benjamin Netanyahu administration.

These attacks have grown louder in recent weeks, in the wake of an article by Nicholas Kristof, published on May 11 in the New York Times’ opinion section, that reported on allegations of sexual violence perpetrated by the Israeli military, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.” A right-wing news site called the Washington Free Beacon—which once ran a piece with the headline “January 6: An Anniversary Worth Celebrating”—has since published a string of articles seeking to discredit Kristof, his sources, his family members, and the organizations he cited, including CPJ. On May 23, the Free Beacon ran a story saying that CPJ had removed some names from its database of killed journalists. (The same Beacon article quoted a spokesman for Honest Reporting—an organization that Reporters Without Borders has said “constantly defames journalists and media outlets that take a critical view of Israel”—who made the absurd allegation that news organizations citing CPJ data were “amplifying Hamas propaganda.”) On May 27, the Free Beacon published another article, this one accusing CPJ of anti-Israel bias and attacking its board members for, among other things, describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide.

Behind the scenes at CPJ, meanwhile, a related, though very different, conversation was taking shape. Throughout the spring, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad published obituaries or statements claiming that a number of people in CPJ’s database of journalists killed in the Israel-Gaza war were, in fact, active combatants. After further research, CPJ removed several names. That meant that, since October 7, 2023, a total of twenty people had been removed from the list once new information emerged indicating that they did not meet CPJ’s criteria—including eight people who were found to be active combatants. On May 27, CPJ updated its site to provide details on why the recent changes had been made. At the beginning of June, the organization quietly started “a comprehensive review” of its database, according to Sara Qudah, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa regional director, who requested it. The goal was to check that everyone in the database fit the organization’s existing definition by verifying each individual’s status with at least two new independent sources; the undertaking also aims to uncover potential problems with the existing verification process. The review, which is ongoing, has been “led by a small team within the Middle East and North Africa program,” Qudah explained in an article for the New Arab, and is “entirely independent.”

Around the same time, a separate process got underway, under the auspices of CPJ’s board, which comprises almost thirty senior journalists, media executives, and leaders from related professions. (The board is not involved in the day-to-day running of the organization.) At a board meeting in early June, members discussed the recent Free Beacon coverage, and one member, Jonathan Klein, the former chief executive of Getty Images, told me that he proposed revisiting how CPJ defines a journalist. That proposal was taken up by Weisberg. “We are working on a process for the board to engage in that will allow us to consider the current definition and to assess what changes we might make,” he told the board on June 9, according to emails I have reviewed, promising “more details in the coming weeks.”

But when Weisberg sent his “Who is a Journalist?” email, on June 25, it came as a surprise to Nika Soon-Shiong, the publisher of Drop Site News and a CPJ board member since June of 2021. Though she was aware of Weisberg’s interest in the question, there had been no vote or discussion of whether to act on the proposal to reevaluate CPJ’s definition. “This was an effort led by a handful of board members to narrow the definition of who is a journalist and exclude Palestinian and Lebanese colleagues,” Soon-Shiong told me in a statement. On June 28, she sent an email to Weisberg and the rest of the board—which she later posted on X—voicing concerns. “I request that the Board vote on whether to proceed with this effort, given the absence of a clear objective, defined scope of work, or assessment of the potential institutional risks,” she wrote. Reevaluating the criteria for who counts as a journalist in a way that might exclude Palestinian and Lebanese reporters at state-backed outlets would cause “permanent reputational damage” to CPJ and would represent bowing to “political pressure,” she wrote. (Soon-Shiong also told me that, following her email, she was informed that her term on the board had expired; the set terms last five years. Weisberg declined to comment.)

The same day, Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian writer and poet who serves as the Palestine correspondent at The Nation, claimed on X that CPJ’s board of directors “will formally change its definition of who qualifies as a journalist, to broadly exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese journalists who worked for government-funded media outlets.” The move, he wrote, “makes a mockery of the purported mission of the organization.” The post sparked an immediate backlash on social media, including accusations that CPJ was acquiescing to political pressure—not entirely unheard of among media and tech organizations that have, for instance, been seen bending the knee to the Trump administration as it attacks the press.

On Wednesday, July 1, as controversy and confusion mounted over the operational review and the board’s plans, CPJ’s board held an emergency meeting and voted to affirm its existing definition of a journalist. The vote was seventeen to one, according to the Free Beacon, with “Fox News’s representative casting the lone no vote,” thereby halting the chair’s proposal. (The Beacon seemed to be referring to Katherine Meeks, the general counsel of Fox News Media, who did not respond to my request for an interview.) “It is not true that CPJ planned to change our definition of who is a journalist to exclude slain Palestinian and Lebanese press killed in the Israel-Gaza war,” Weisberg said in a statement after the vote, calling reports to the contrary “unsubstantiated allegations” that “undermine” CPJ’s work and “endanger” Palestinian and Lebanese journalists.

Some media coverage confused two discrete processes—the ongoing CPJ review of its data, on the one hand, and an unsuccessful push to reevaluate the broader definition of a journalist, on the other. The board of the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association (AMEJA) requested an urgent meeting with Ginsberg, held on June 30. They came away reassured. As they wrote afterward to members, Ginsberg told them, “There has been no board decision to change the definition. And if they change the definition to exclude Palestinian journalists, they can take my resignation with it.” One person in the meeting, Aymann Ismail—the AMEJA board president and a senior writer at Slate, who spoke to me in a personal capacity—said Ginsberg made a clear distinction “between the daily operations of CPJ, and the board.” According to Ismail, Ginsberg told AMEJA that CPJ’s database review was “something that they would have been doing regardless of what the board was discussing, because they care very deeply about their rigorous processes of verification.”

CPJ had, in fact, undergone a recent stress-testing of its methodology, in 2025. In the spring of that year, staff representing all parts and regions of CPJ met four times to discuss who counted as a journalist. The meetings, according to emails I reviewed, involved “kicking the tires” of the organization’s definition and figuring out “where we most often get tripped up.” Where, exactly, is the point at which someone becomes a propagandist, an activist, an influencer, a foreign agent? CPJ staff agreed that “accuracy” and publishing “fact-based” material was crucial to inclusion as a journalist; that the medium or platform in question did not matter; that for someone to be considered a journalist, their witnessing should not be a one-off; and that CPJ should look at the individual journalist, not the organization to which they were affiliated, when determining their status. The process led to a slight tweak in CPJ’s public definition: “CPJ defines journalists as people who regularly cover news or comment on public affairs through any medium to report or share fact-based information with an audience.” (Changes in italics.) In June of 2025, the board of directors voted to adopt that definition.

CPJ’s long-standing inclusion of reporters affiliated with state-backed media or militant or armed groups has made it a target of bad-faith organizations like Honest Reporting. But it’s worth emphasizing that CPJ researchers evaluate whether people killed were genuinely engaged in regular journalistic activity, and that anyone they judge to be actively engaged in combat or inciting imminent violence is automatically excluded from the data. This is in line with how many human rights organizations define journalists. The UN Human Rights Office, for instance, has said that journalists are people “documenting events, analyzing issues, gathering facts, and processing data, to inform society on matters of public interest.” Notice: not people who work for journalistic institutions, but people doing journalism. This rubric could include journalists at Al-Aqsa TV in Gaza (affiliated with Hamas, the militant group that runs the government); Xinhua News Agency in China (owned by the one-party state); or, for that matter, Stars and Stripes (owned by the US Department of Defense) or Voice of America (overseen by the US Agency for Global Media). “We recognize that across the world, individuals working for these outlets are essential in providing information to communities,” Ginsberg has said.

Some human rights professionals argue that making the test of who is a journalist about one’s function, not the politics or affiliations of their employer, is important because witnesses who work for one political group or another are more likely to be found in places where ordinary reporting is suppressed or access is denied. Amos Barshad has documented for CJR how international journalists have been trying to get into Gaza for years. Does that not make any bona fide journalistic work on the ground there a public service? A vital way of recording a war that would otherwise go unseen? And if someone is killed for doing that journalistic work—for performing the role of witness, even if they report for a state-owned media organization affiliated with a group whose politics we may find grotesque—why should they be excluded from a tally of journalists slain for doing their jobs?

Ismail, of AMEJA, told me that, following his meeting with Ginsberg, it became clear that the two separate reviews were being conflated in some reports and on social media. He added, though, that he understood why the misunderstanding had elicited such a fierce response. “This is emotional for so many people, for obvious reasons. This is a matter of life and death,” he said. “We’ve seen so many examples of the Israeli military justifying the killing of journalists who no one would question their status as journalists.” He noted the grim emergence of a new term used by the Israel Defense Forces: “They were calling these people ‘combat propagandists.’ It’s not a thing. And even if that were the case—where somebody was on someone’s bankroll—that does not make them a military target.”

Other Notable Stories …
By Jem Bartholomew

On Tuesday, NPR published—then quickly retracted—an article by Nina Totenberg, NPR’s Supreme Court correspondent, stating, incorrectly, that Samuel Alito, a Supreme Court Justice, had retired. Totenberg, who is eighty-two and has been a well-sourced reporter on that beat for decades, apologized to Alito and called it her “worst professional mistake of my more than fifty years in journalism.”

Totenberg explained that the error grew out of her having misheard the answer to a question: “I asked somebody what was going on inside, to which the answer was, ‘Retirement announcements.’ I didn’t hear the s on ‘announcements,’ and I assumed—something no reporter should ever do—that” Alito was retiring, she said, according to CNN. (The announcements referred to court staff retirements.) One NPR host told Brian Stelter of CNN that the retraction was “a worst-case scenario for us.”A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Pentagon to temporarily halt its requirement for journalists to be accompanied by an official escort while inside the building, the New York Times reported. The ruling came in response to the second of two lawsuits the paper has filed in recent months seeking to overturn restrictions imposed on journalists by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary. The latest lawsuit, filed in May, targeted the escort requirement, calling it “retaliatory.” Judge Paul L. Friedman, of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, said in a preliminary ruling that the escort policy violated the First Amendment. For more on the Pentagon’s effort to muzzle critical national security reporting, see Ivan L. Nagy’s recent timeline for CJR.

On Monday, a reporter and a photographer for CBS News Chicago were attacked during a shoot by three men, the news organization reported. One of the men reportedly shouted a racial slur at one of the journalists, who is Black, and ordered a German shepherd to attack (it did not obey); the assailants also cracked the windshield of a CBS News van with a traffic cone and smashed a camera. “They just were trying to do anything they could to scare them unnecessarily,” a witness said. Chicago police later arrested the three men, who face felony charges including committing a hate crime, criminal damage to property, and aggravated battery of a police officer. Lisa Nandy, the UK’s secretary of state for culture, media, and sport, said last week that she was likely to ask the country’s competition watchdog to scrutinize Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, which will significantly grow the Ellison family’s media empire and give it control over CNN. Nandy has given Paramount until July 6 to respond. “We are confident that our proposed transaction does not pose any media plurality issues in the UK and remain confident in our stated transaction timeline,” a spokesperson for Paramount said. In other news, Sky has announced a deal worth 1.6 billion pounds (2.1 billion dollars) to buy the broadcasting and streaming arm of ITV.For Vanity Fair, Margaux MacColl interviewed Goli Sheikholeslami, the chief executive of Politico, about, among other things, the outlet’s drive into AI. “While some media leaders have erred on the side of caution, enforcing policies that prevent or severely limit the use of AI tools, Sheikholeslami has leaned into experimentation, launching multiple public-facing AI tools and chalking up now-defunct products” as useful means of data collection, MacColl writes. One AI tool—which was still in beta and was later shut down—was asked by employees during testing to produce feature reports on fictitious lobbying groups, which it did, hallucinating false information and attributing it to Politico articles. “If you don’t participate, you don’t learn,”

 Sheikholeslami told MacColl.Three men were found not guilty on Friday of murdering Lyra McKee, a journalist from Belfast who died after being struck by a bullet in Derry, Northern Ireland, in April of 2019, at the age of twenty-nine. McKee was reporting on rioting at the time; the New IRA claimed responsibility for her killing. The three men had been on trial at Belfast Crown Court since May of 2024. Judge Patricia Smyth said “M​​cKee’s murder was an act of senseless violence” but added: “The gunman has never been brought to the court, and the evidence against those accused of assisting or encouraging has fallen short of that required for conviction.” Reporters Without Borders urged authorities to continue pursuing all legal avenues to secure justice for McKee. And Charles H. Townsend—who was chief executive of Condé Nast from 2004 to 2015, during the media industry’s transition from print to digital—died on June 11 in Florida, aged eighty-two. His daughter told the Times that his death, in a hospital, was from sepsis. Townsend “might have been an ideal steward for Condé” in an earlier era, Michael Grynbaum, a Times journalist, wrote in Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America. But he “had the misfortune to reach the summit just as the mountain began to melt.”

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‘America Knows Less About Itself At The Very Moment It Needs To Know The Truth’

John Duprey / 1963 Birmingham photograph from NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images

BY SUSIE BANIKARIM

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the Kerner Commission in response to widespread demonstrations over the treatment of Black Americans. The following year, the panel released a report, outlining systemic white racism across society—and sharply criticizing the press’s failure to cover the subject of race. “Along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and white perspective,” the report concluded, calling on newsrooms to hire and promote more Black journalists. A decade later, the American Society of News Editors (ASNE) started a recurring survey to track the news industry’s progress toward inclusion, setting an ambitious goal: that the demographics of newsrooms would mirror those of the broader US population by the year 2000. The survey, which for years served as one of the industry’s primary benchmarks for tracking newsroom representation, was last conducted in 2019. ASNE, later known as the News Leaders Association (NLA), disbanded in 2024.

It’s hard to imagine a more apt metaphor for the state of Black representation in media today. At a time when the Trump administration is aggressively dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and targeting communities of color, many newsrooms have all but abandoned promises they made during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 to increase racial diversity in coverage and staffing. As CJR reported last month, 76 percent of journalists identified as white in a 2022 Pew Research Center survey, compared with roughly 58 percent of Americans who identified as white in the most recent census. “You saw the industry making all these promises, but we are in a moment where we’ve got this backlash that is really exposing which of those promises were values and which ones were window dressing or branding,” Errin Haines, the president of the National Association of Black Journalists and editor at large of The 19th, told me.

In the past year, NBC News has shut down all of its verticals dedicated to reporting on Black, Latino, queer, and other underrepresented groups. CBS eliminated its Race and Culture team. Bloomberg and Politico wound down their newsletters about race, according to Nieman Lab. In February, the Washington Post laid off 45 percent of unionized Black staffers amid widespread reductions, but journalists at the Post told my colleague Riddhi Setty that leadership had given up on diverse coverage long before that.

These are a few suggestive examples—but what we know about the bigger picture of representation in journalism is largely anecdotal. There is no comprehensive or current data on reductions of race coverage or diverse staffing across the industry. In 2025, the American Press Institute (API) announced that it had “acquired the survey” from the NLA so that it could relaunch and expand that research. Robyn Tomlin, the executive director of API, told me in an email that they “are working to identify potential funding to support it in the future.” For now, only historical survey data is available on the institute’s website.

“We’re absolutely in a moment now where Black journalists are being disproportionately affected by choices around whose beats get cut and what kind of teams get dismantled,” Haines said. “And frankly, whose expertise is valued versus whose expertise is considered expendable and whose communities and what kind of audiences are just optional.”

It is particularly troubling to see newsrooms cowed by the administration’s cynical efforts to reframe DEI as discrimination, because these are the institutions on which we rely to tell that story. “The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people,” Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School and this magazine’s publisher, wrote for CJR in 2018. Six years later, many news organizations are still failing to tell the full American story. “You can’t say democracy is under threat and then just eliminate the journalists that are best positioned to explain how that threat is landing in Black communities,” Haines said. “If we get pushed out, America literally knows less about itself at the very moment that it needs to know the truth about itself.”

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois introduced the concept of “second sight” and the ability it gives Black Americans to see the country as it truly is rather than the ideal it is often claimed to be. In A Second Sight: How the Wonder and Vision of Black Mediamakers Push America Toward Freedom, Sarah J. Jackson, an associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, explores how that double consciousness is both a burden and a privilege for Black storytellers, giving them “a profound insight: the ability to see through the veil, to understand the contradictions of American life with a clarity often unavailable to those at the center of power. Second sight is a vision, a tool, a gift.”

The book, out this week, is an alternative history of media in America, an insightful and invaluable examination of how Black journalists, photographers, filmmakers, radio hosts, and podcasters have shaped the nation, even while their contributions have too often been excluded from the official record. Jackson combines deep historical analysis with interviews of contemporary Black media-makers conducted over four years to trace the stories of those “who have used the tools of their time—pen, press, lens, mic—to critique the nation and imagine it otherwise.”

By structuring the book around the founding principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Jackson shows how figures such as Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Mary McLeod Bethune fundamentally reframed our understanding of these concepts. She draws a direct line between their work and journalists of today who continue to interrogate the idea of the American project—including Cobb and Haines, as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Gene Demby, Gabriella Angotti-Jones, and Chenjerai Kumanyika. These journalists, Jackson writes, continue to give us “a more nuanced, evocative, and honest story about our nation. Their belief that the public can hold—and act on—this story is itself an extraordinary act of faith.”

In the book’s coda, Jackson reminds us that, as the country prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, “one measure of the integrity” of the flood of expected media coverage will be how it treats the stories of Americans on the margins. “Are the stories and contributions to democracy of countless unnamed Americans—whose lives and futures are tied to these histories—considered worthy of remembrance and celebration?” Jackson asks. “Whose freedom is celebrated? Whose life and liberty? Whose happiness protected? What futures imagined?”

One morning in the fall of 2022, Juliana Pache was solving the New York Times’ “Mini” crossword, as she did every day, when she came across something that stumped her. “I don’t remember the clues from that day, but there was something about one of the clues in particular from that Mini that I was like, ‘This feels like a white person would know this and I probably wouldn’t,’” Pache recalled.

The experience prompted Pache, a first-generation Afro-Caribbean American, to look for puzzles centered on Black history and culture. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she decided to make it herself. “That day, I bought a bunch of domain names, because I wasn’t sure what to name it yet. And I had never made a crossword puzzle before. I was like, ‘How hard could it be?’” She laughed. “It turns out it’s way harder than it looks.”

Pache taught herself how to construct puzzles by watching YouTube videos and found support on a Discord channel. Three months later, she debuted Black Crossword with her first mini. She has published a new puzzle every day since. The site’s tagline: “If you know, you know.” Clues this week included “‘There’s Always This ___: On Basketball and Ascension’ (2024 book by Hanif Abdurraqib),” “Radical Puerto Rican civil rights organization, The Young ___,” and “Dancer and choreographer ___ Ninja.” (The answers: Year, Lords, Willi.)

For Pache, it’s important that Black Crossword not present Black culture as a monolith. “A really big part of my goal is to connect people across the diaspora culturally,” she told me. “Language is such a huge part of how black folks across the diaspora communicate with each other. We have these kinds of shared languages.”

She has also published two puzzle books: Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Celebrating the African Diaspora in 2024 and Black Crossword: 100 Midi Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora last year. She is currently brainstorming for her third book, which will include a wider variety of puzzles, including word searches and logic games. “There are so many ways to challenge hatred and systemic erasure,” she told me. With Black Crossword, she has found a way to do that by centering Black culture. “My primary feeling,” she said, “was this would be a joy to have.”

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Figueroa Street And The Ethical Duty Of Care

Looking back at a New York Times magazine story to examine what responsible coverage of sex trafficking looks like—and what it doesn’t.

BY NINA ALVAREZ

Last fall, the New York Times magazine published a story by Emily Baumgaertner Nunn, a national health reporter, about the commercial sexual exploitation of children on a fifty-block stretch of Figueroa Street in South Los Angeles known as the Blade. To report the piece, Baumgaertner Nunn embedded with vice investigators for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) as they carried out undercover operations. She also interviewed dozens of people—trafficking survivors, aid workers, experts, officials. Accompanying the text were photographs by Katy Grannan, an art photographer who contributes frequently to the Times, depicting Black and brown women and girls, baring skin, in platform heels, most in police custody, some in handcuffs. The headline asked, “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of LA’s Figueroa Street?”

The piece quickly received praise from many journalists. This spring, it was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in feature writing. But Alia Azariah, a survivor advocate, said that, when a girl depicted in the story came across a post promoting it, she reached out to her, saying she was scared that she would be identifiable—including to the people who trafficked her. And as it turned out, this was not the only negative response the piece received. Advocacy organizations contacted the Times privately over several weeks post-publication, expressing concern about the reporting and photographs, wanting to know how consent was obtained, and asking Baumgaertner Nunn to reconsider elements of the story.

Five weeks after publication, no changes had been made. Twenty-two organizations that work on survivor and foster care sent a joint letter to Jessica Dimson, the director of photography at the Times magazine, citing the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics. The groups focused on the pictures, which, they wrote, “do real and lasting damage” and should be removed from the internet. Though the subjects were generally shot from behind or in profile, they could very well be recognizable to anyone familiar with the Blade. “Using identifiable images of young people who are being detained, pursued, or exploited, particularly when minors may be involved, is not responsible journalism or simply news reporting in the public interest,” the letter read. “It is re-exploitation.” The captions on the images were concerning, too—referring to “a stable of a dozen girls,” echoing the dehumanizing language of traffickers.

The magazine declined to take the images down. Dimson’s position was that the photographs had been published with care and that readers needed to see what was happening, noting in her reply to the organizations that their mission was different from that of advocates. The response did not address the matter of consent. When CJR followed up to ask about the photography process, Dimson responded by email: “We applied scrupulous editorial judgment,” she wrote. “We considered and discussed the circumstances in which each photograph was taken, and all of the platforms on which they were published. We weighed matters related to consent—which we ensured was given for every photograph we published—as well as privacy, safety and long-term impact. These are questions we always ask, but when a story involves vulnerable populations we take them especially seriously.”

Margaret Sullivan, a columnist who writes on media, politics, and culture for The Guardian US and a former Times public editor, said that it was “unusual to have that many groups with a common base of understanding, to get together and protest so strongly and so vehemently. I think it’s certainly noteworthy.” Had Sullivan still been the public editor, she said, she would have made the joint letter public and written about it; the role no longer exists.

I can recognize some of my own instincts in the Times’ choices. Almost twenty years ago, I reported and filmed Very Young Girls, a documentary about children in the process of exiting sexual exploitation in New York City. It has since been used for policy work and law enforcement training, and still circulates around the anti-trafficking field. I am proud of what it accomplished. But I would not make the film the same way today. When I worked on the documentary, the girls I filmed were criminalized. They are now recognized as victims. New science has documented the lasting impact of chronic sexual violence on brain development, on decision-making, on the capacity for genuine consent. New legal protections exist. And new journalistic standards have been built—specifically to ensure that a survivor can say yes only when she is truly ready.

That change has been visible, in many ways, through the coverage of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. Julie K. Brown’s 2018 Miami Herald investigation did more than expose a decades-long trafficking operation and the prosecutors who let it go unpunished; it shifted the framing dramatically. Our field has come a long way in managing the undeniable tension between the need to cover the story of commercial sexual exploitation of children and the risk such coverage can pose to people living in a dangerous situation.

Even so, the attention surrounding Epstein also reveals a persistent gap in public perception and understanding. The story inspired global outrage in large part because it involved extraordinarily powerful men, elite institutions, private jets, a private island, and mostly white victims who, years later, were able to come forward publicly, be believed, and seek justice. Barely heard in the national conversation are the thousands of children who are being trafficked right now—today, tonight—in cities, suburbs, rural communities, and tribal lands across the United States. This scourge falls most heavily, as violence generally does, on children of color, LGBTQI+ youth, and children from lower-income communities. Many of them cannot safely tell their stories. They may not know they have a story to tell—they might just think this is normal.

The Times piece about Figueroa Street entered that realm; as Baumgaertner Nunn reported, the Blade is “one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.” But the story was built largely on a ride-along with police, outdated tropes, and images that risk causing harm. There are alternatives that operate through a framework of care. “I hope journalists covering trafficking or any story involving people who’ve been deeply harmed really sit with the potential impact of their reporting,” Kay Buck, the chief executive officer of the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST), said. “Behind every award, accolade, or spike in website traffic is a real person reliving one of the worst moments of their life.”

Access

In 2023, Baumgaertner Nunn received a tip about a surge in sex trafficking of minors on the Blade. According to the Times, she spent the next two years reporting the story. The result is a narrative shaped almost entirely by four sources: two LAPD vice officers; Shannon Forsythe, the founder of Run 2 Rescue, a faith-based nonprofit; and a trafficked nineteen-year-old named Ana. The police played a crucial role, by providing access. “It took years of building trust and getting officers to agree to a ride-along,” Baumgaertner Nunn told KTLA, the local LA TV station, in an interview promoting the article. In an email (later shared with CJR) to Kristen Caloca, a media consultant who works with CAST, which has a long history of working in Los Angeles, Baumgaertner Nunn wrote, “It was eye-opening for me to discover through my reporting that law enforcement was the group on the front lines of the rescue efforts here.”

In the story’s climactic scene, on a Saturday night in January of 2025, Forsythe, riding with an undercover vice unit, spots Ana. She bolts from the car and chases her down the street while traffickers jump out of their cars, yelling. Ana is described calling out, “I can’t do this right now. Leave me alone. You’re going to get me in trouble.” Forsythe grabs her by the wrists and does not let go. They wind up at the police station, where Elizabeth Armendariz, an LAPD officer, refers to Ana as a cooperative “suspect” while another officer makes sure she counts as “a rescue.” At 2:18am, in a fluorescent-lighted interview room, Armendariz offers Ana an ice cream sandwich, then presses her for information on her traffickers.

The word “rescue” here is not neutral. “Rescue” is a law enforcement term—one that positions police as saviors, young women and girls as objects of intervention, and arrest-based operations as a necessary response to trafficking. Survivors and advocates have spent two decades pushing back against this language and approach. The general consensus in the field is that it fails those it claims to help: according to Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services, three out of four people picked up on juvenile rescue operations return to their traffickers—a number the story reports, appended with a note from Brandon Nichols, the director of the county’s DCFS, saying that “our social workers do everything possible, as many times as necessary, to help these young people safely leave their captors and begin healing on their own terms.”

Stephanie Richard—the director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School, who has been working on anti-trafficking in LA County for twenty years—wrote to Baumgaertner Nunn a few days after the story was published. “Your piece raises urgent questions about trafficking in Los Angeles,” she said, in an email shared with CJR. “But it also reinforces carceral myths that many survivors and advocates have spent years working to dismantle.”

When CJR asked Baumgaertner Nunn about the rescue framing, she replied, “We explain in our piece that investigators refer to juvenile pickups as ‘rescue ops,’ and much of our article is dedicated to showcasing why these operations do not lead to lasting escapes. The piece’s headline is not a declaration but a question. Many people who read the full story recognized an underlying truth in response to that question: When a girl permanently escapes the Blade, it is never because law enforcement or an aid organization ‘rescues’ her. It is because she has been given the necessary tools to choose a new path without fear of retribution, and she has drawn on her own strength to believe that she can and should do it.”

Access in and of itself can have news value. When, in April, Poynter gave the story the Deborah Howell Award for Writing Excellence, the judges praised Baumgaertner Nunn for spending “years gaining trust and embedded with investigators on undercover operations.” Yet it is worth noting that she was not the first journalist to visit Figueroa Street: six months before her piece was published, the Times of London ran its own—same ride-along, same organizations, same cast of characters, including a survivor whose circumstances were strikingly similar to Ana’s. Samuel Lovett, the reporter, told me that he was introduced to Run 2 Rescue, and Forsythe, by the LAPD. The article followed the same rescue narrative. The access was not, apparently, hard to obtain. In the wake of a change in California law—the repeal of an anti-loitering rule disproportionately used to arrest Black, brown, and trans women based on appearance—this story was being offered. (The LAPD did not comment.) Its frame is one that journalists would be wise to identify and scrutinize.

Meaningful Consent

Baumgaertner Nunn writes that Ana was thirteen the first time she was trafficked. When Ana was nineteen—and had been trafficked a second time—Forsythe asked if she wanted to come back home. “I waited to meet a subject like Ana,” Baumgaertner Nunn told CJR, “who presented an extremely rare opportunity: an adult survivor who, by all ethical guidelines, could fully and knowingly consent to participating, had a rich support system, and had specific protections in place.” Baumgaertner Nunn described waiting months before approaching Ana about being profiled, ensuring that she had “surpassed an array of clinical markers that protect against re-trafficking.” When asked to identify those markers, and how they were assessed, Baumgaertner Nunn declined. “Ana is not publicly disclosing personal details about her life after the article’s closing scene,” she replied, “so we are not at liberty to discuss them either.”

The phrase “clinical markers” carries weight in the fields of social work and trauma psychology; Baumgaertner Nunn has a master’s degree in public health, and that is her beat. But experts who study trauma caused by chronic sexual abuse say there is no standardized list and that the process of assessing when a survivor is truly ready to tell their story publicly isn’t straightforward. Several studies document how trauma causes lasting changes to the parts of the brain that are central to informed, autonomous decision-making; a longitudinal study conducted at Duke University in 2014 found that only 22 percent of those who had been chronically abused or neglected “achieved resiliency” by the time they reached young adulthood. The central factors on which most survivor advocates rely to determine readiness for journalistic coverage are time and independence, including an absence of reliance on an organization that has been providing support.

I learned about the challenge of meeting this standard through my work on Very Young Girls. When I made the film, I had every permission in place, from judges, lawyers, even parents. My colleague and I were embedded in a court-mandated program in which the subjects were enrolled, and they said yes to being in the documentary. Nevertheless, I got it wrong because, as it turned out, some of the girls were not done—they were still at risk, still vulnerable to their traffickers, still living through trauma. They were in their program, still dependent on the organization whose implicit message—however unintentional—was that participation was part of recovery.

Trafficking survivors are groomed to be people pleasers as a survival mechanism. Caloca, of CAST, often works with survivors and the providers who support them in preparing to tell their stories. Consent, she said, is “about whether they can say yes and make that choice freely and understand the long-term consequences of that choice.” Baumgaertner Nunn said that she did not rely on Run 2 Rescue for access: “I object to the practice of using advocacy groups as proxies for consent,” she told CJR. “I believe there are no shortcuts to building trust, particularly with vulnerable groups.” She added, “I am still in touch with Ana, and she has repeatedly conveyed that she considers her participation in this project to be an empowering part of her own healing journey.”

Barbara Friedman, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media, serves as the director of the Irina Project, which monitors media representations of sex trafficking. A recent study she coauthored with colleagues at Kent State University and CAST showed that, of forty-nine trafficking survivors surveyed, 53 percent felt pressured to share private details, 50 percent said their story was misrepresented, and 38 percent said their story was shared without their consent. “There is little doubt that these trafficking victims are recognizable to others, including their traffickers,” Friedman said. The study recommends that journalists use power-sharing models when reporting on survivors, such that sources are given meaningful agency over how their stories are told. “People think that when you share your experience, that it’s somehow life-giving, or that there are no repercussions outside of the emotional toll of telling it in the moment,” Azariah, the survivor advocate, said. “But it’s not the case at all.”

The Most Vulnerable

Typically, journalists discuss with their sources the terms of identification. Different outlets maintain different approaches to naming survivors of sexual abuse. Many news organizations grant anonymity in such cases, particularly when the individuals who have been abused are not available to speak about their experience. The Times does not allow pseudonyms, but in past coverage it has protected sources, including by identifying survivors of childhood sexual exploitation using just their initials. In the Figueroa Street story, Baumgaertner Nunn writes that “Ana’s full name, as well as those of other trafficking victims in this article, are being withheld for their safety.” But as Leslie Heimov, the executive director of the Children’s Law Center, an organization that represents dependency clients in LA County, put it, “How many Anas with no front teeth and a colostomy bag do we think there are on the Blade? I’m going with one.”

Baumgaertner Nunn identifies girls by their legal first names and their ages. Two are fifteen; another is seventeen; Ana’s younger sister, who is a minor, is woven into Ana’s story. (The Times also produced a supplementary video with original footage depicting a fourteen-year-old, who had been contacted via the internet, being detained through a sting operation and taken to a police station.) These are children who are experiencing chronic rape. Baumgaertner Nunn reports that more than half of the girls pulled from the area were in the foster care system—framed as a systemic problem, in effect a pipeline to trafficking. LA County has spent years building infrastructure to address this concern, through an anti-trafficking task force, a First Responder Protocol, and contracted service providers vetted by DCFS. Effective or not, none of that infrastructure is examined in the piece—and the story neglects to note that Run 2 Rescue was neither vetted to engage minors nor part of the protocol.

The foster system is referenced as context for vulnerability. It is also a fact with legal implications. In California, foster youth don’t simply lack adult guardians. They have an appointed network with legal standing: lawyers, social workers, judges, probation officers—all of whom are responsible for protecting children’s interests. In addition, according to California’s Local Rule 7.3(c), a journalist who will likely encounter foster youth during coverage of LA County is required to petition the juvenile court before proceeding. A petition triggers notifications to DCFS, the dependency lawyers for the county, county counsel, and parents’ counsel; they may make objections, then a judge decides and, if approved, compels all parties to cooperate. There is no indication in the story—nor any record with DCFS—that this standard was met for any of the three girls mentioned.

It may be right for journalists to be skeptical of meeting a court standard, and if Baumgaertner Nunn otherwise obtained reporting materials directly from the police, she would be well within her First Amendment rights to use them. The Times position, communicated to advocacy organizations and to CJR, was that consent had been obtained—for the reporting and for every photograph published. Even so, the journalism ethics question at hand is how material should be used. “Consent while people were being detained, pursued, and in crisis—it would be challenging to obtain meaningful consent,” Caloca said. Consider a scene in which Baumgaertner Nunn describes a seventeen-year-old meeting with an officer at the police station, “curled up with a Cup Noodles and a new teddy bear.” At one point, the officer leaves the room, as does a support volunteer who was accompanying them, Baumgaertner Nunn writes; then “the video camera kept rolling, and the girl sat quietly alone.”

Michael Nash, who served as presiding judge of the LA County Juvenile Court for fourteen years, told CJR, “A juvenile interview—recorded or not—is a juvenile record.” That typically means it cannot be shared. Over the course of his career, he worked to create a process that would allow openness to the press because, he said, “confidentiality does more to protect the system, which is far from perfect, than it does to protect the children.” As Heimov put it, “I don’t want a world where reporters think they can’t talk to kids in foster care because they’re in foster care.” The key is informed consent and consideration of potential long-term impact. It’s notable that, apart from traffickers and buyers, the LAPD sergeant who connected Ana with Forsythe is the only figure in the story who is granted anonymity.

Who Is Seen, How

The photography access offers an explanation. Grannan arrived on Figueroa Street with no prior relationship with the subjects, more than a year after Baumgaertner Nunn began her reporting. When reached to discuss the assignment, Grannan described visiting the Blade and asking several women if she could photograph them. “Some agreed and others declined,” she said. Then she went out on a ride-along, staying in a police car during stops until officers verified the ages of potential subjects and confirmed she could photograph them. “Officers assured each person they would remain anonymous and their faces would never be revealed,” Grannan said. She noted that she was assured by officers that all of her subjects were eighteen or older. But people with direct knowledge of individuals portrayed in the story say otherwise, and survivor advocates note that on-the-spot age verification checks by police cannot reliably determine a person’s status, since girls on Figueroa Street often use fake IDs to avoid being taken into the station. As Baumgaertner Nunn writes in the story, the recent change in California law has meant that, in order to bring anyone into the station, “officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage—but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell.”

Legally, on a public street, a photographer would be entitled to snap away. But Tara Pixley—a visual journalist and the director of the master’s in journalism program at Temple University, who has published extensively on journalism ethics—believes that in telling stories about vulnerable and traumatized people, especially minors, journalists need to employ an ethics-of-care framework. The way Grannan’s photographs depict girls on the Blade—including an arrest, shown first as a wide shot, and then as a close-up of handcuffs and painted nails against a girl’s barely covered behind—is problematic not just because of the content, but also its cumulative effect. “An ethics of care would push against that narrowing, asking how images might instead interrupt voyeuristic looking and expand the viewer’s moral imagination,” Pixley said. More than that, “an ethics-of-care framework in photojournalism asks us to consider how images function in the lives of real people, not only how effectively they illustrate a story. It prioritizes minimizing harm across the entire visual process: how sources are approached, how photographs are made, how images are edited, and how they ultimately circulate in public.”

That the ride-along images were almost entirely of Black and brown girls and women reflects an important reality. The story makes no mention of it, however, nor does it ask about the underlying reasons. “There was not even a mention of the systemic factors that create vulnerabilities,” Rhonelle Bruder—a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, currently a teaching fellow at Harvard, focused on gender-based violence and human trafficking—said. “Black girls and girls of color are disproportionately sex-trafficked. We’re not talking about why. It’s just about them girls.” Dom, someone I met making Very Young Girls, was twelve when she was first trafficked. When I showed her the Figueroa Street story, she smirked, then chuckled. Then she pointed to the pictures, and yelled: “I hate these! They can’t do something else?”

When asked about the images in the Figueroa Street story, Grannan said, “My mission here was to visually document the reality of the young women who are visible in plain sight.” She noted that this was her first police ride-along, said that she does not consider herself a photojournalist, and described “conflicted feelings about the process, since prior to this story, I have always photographed and filmed people who gave explicit consent.” In a subsequent email, she wrote, “The magazine applied extraordinary support and care to this story—more than any other I’ve worked on with them in over twenty years” and said that she sought guidance from an experienced photojournalist, spoke with the reporter, and consulted with the LAPD vice unit sergeant and Forsythe.

Together, the images echo tropes that have long been used to justify the policing of trafficked people, particularly young women and girls of color. “It is always the bodies of young Black women that are plastered all over the internet so that legislators can pass more laws that increase policing of these same communities,” Leigh LaChapelle, the director of policy and advocacy at CAST, said. “It is a vicious cycle.”

Alternatives

In 2020, when Karen de Sá became the executive editor of The Imprint, a nonprofit digital publication, she brought more than two decades of experience leading investigative reporting on child welfare for the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. At The Imprint, before any story involving a child currently in the system is published, at least one member of that child’s legal-protection network—a lawyer, social worker, judge, probation officer—is contacted and their involvement confirmed. For adults, she set another standard: even willing subjects who were abused as children cannot be named without editorial discussion. And crucially, The Imprint practices a “no surprises” policy, requiring reporters and editors to walk story subjects through every passage describing them before publication. Subjects also have the right to change their minds about their participation.

Cathy Otten, a British journalist who spent years in Iraqi Kurdistan reporting on Yezidi women enslaved by ISIS, has worked through questions of consent and duty of care in her teaching and her reporting. Consent, she said, is an “ongoing conversation”—not a “yes” in the moment when approached by an officer, fixer, NGO, or authority figure. In practice, for her, consent means being explicit at the outset that she is a journalist and making clear where exactly the work will appear, in what language, on what platforms, and what she cannot promise in return. It includes a frank discussion on risks, contemporary and long-term. She uses pseudonyms as a blanket policy and asks survivors to choose their own.

Otten acknowledged that it isn’t easy to execute any of this in the field, on deadline. Even the most careful reporters, she said, can “get pulled along” by the trauma narrative or the rescue arc. “We’ve all fallen for that,” she said, “as filmmakers, photographers, writers.” Otten believes that “do no harm” might be too lofty a goal, because “human interactions are fraught.” The standard isn’t perfection, but rather a discipline not to make life worse for the people trusting you with their stories.

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