Poynter:
The local reporter who broke the Nikole Hannah-Jones/UNC story also got her latest exclusive
NC Policy Watch’s Joe Killian said he had seen the story ‘a million times before’ as a politics beat reporter in North Carolina
“And I said, it’s not a secret, it’s literally just I’ve seen this a million times before,” said Killian, who works at the nonprofit newsroom NC Policy Watch.
It’s not a secret, but several things happened with Killian’s coverage of this story that are worth pointing out.
First, his work is built on classic beat reporting. In this case, though, the beat wasn’t higher education, but another Killian had covered for years — politics.
ICYMI, this is Joe Killian at Editorial Board:
The reporter who broke the news about Nikole Hannah-Jones tells the rest of the story
Joe Killian says NHJ was ready for what was coming.
Reporters—including yours truly—employ this in our work all the time. If I find out someone is from the part of eastern North Carolina where I was born, if they have a connection to the military or went to my college, I know we have a common reference.
Reporters notice when it’s done to us—particularly by politicians and public-relations people. A lot of people worked in a newsroom for a year or two before figuring out they could buy things with money. So there’s a lot of, “You know, I was a reporter.”
Walter Hussman can legitimately say that—with a few important asterisks. After journalism and business school, he was briefly a reporter before, at age 27, he was made publisher of a paper in the family media dynasty he would go on to inherit.
When I was 27, I was a beat reporter going to fires, murder scenes, protests and government meetings. I practically slept in the newsroom, which was much nicer than my apartment, and took side gigs to afford to sleep indoors and eat while reporting.
That sort of experience—slowly clawing your way up from smaller to larger newsrooms, being mentored by veteran reporters, slowly earning bigger beats and more responsibility over many years—is what I’m supposed to assume I share with someone who says “I was a reporter.” Those are experiences I share with NHJ.
As a Black woman, she had to work longer and harder than I did to get ahead in newsrooms. With more grit and talent, she’s earned much more success. But we both worked our way up from working-class roots. Neither of us were, in our mid 20s, handed news outlets by our families. Neither of us were allowed to lose enormous amounts of money in years-long, heavily political newspaper wars until we crushed our rivals. Neither of us assumed dominance and expanded our intergenerational empires.
Not only a story in its own right, the NHJ arc is all about the kind of thing conservatives are desperate to prevent the teaching and discussing of. There’s white supremacist thinking all over this.
Just don’t blame UNC faculty and J School, because they wanted her. It was the trustees that screwed up.
Paul Butler/WaPo:
Nikole Hannah-Jones just proved the correctness of critical race theory
Nikole Hannah-Jones, and the epic failure of the University of North Carolina to recruit the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist to its faculty, just proved the correctness of critical race theory. The controversial legal doctrine has been vilified by conservatives but, as this episode illustrates, it also challenges those liberals who worship at the altar of “diversity.”
…
The doctrine was first articulated during the 1980s as a way of understanding why, decades after the civil rights movement, African Americans still experienced discrimination in virtually every aspect of their lives. Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term “critical race theory,” has argued that the law can often be interpreted in a way that benefits the ruling class, no matter what the law actually says.
Or, as Hannah-Jones wrote this week, “We have all seen that you can do everything to make yourself undeniable, and those in power can change the rules and attempt to deny you anyway.”
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Republican Dysfunction Will Be on the 2022 Ballot
Parties usually shed presidential losers before midterm elections. Trump makes this one politically unique.
Republicans could have moved on, during a period where the danger in doing so was as low as it’s likely to be, and they chose not to.
Part of the reason was that Trump didn’t act like Bush, Carter or any other former president. Not only is he whining nonstop about his usual grievances, and adding false claims about fraud in the 2020 election, but he’s pressuring candidates up and down the Republican Party to go along with his increasingly anti-democratic rants.
Among other things, this has meant that Republicans have lost a made-to-order opportunity supplied by the Jan. 6 attack. Mainstream Republicans could have looked good by consistently condemning the attack, thereby distancing themselves from organized hate groups involved in the event. Instead, they’re stuck defending the indefensible and making it a major part of Republican messaging, while allowing their leading voices to be … well, let’s call them the high-profile Republicans least likely to appeal to swing voters.
This is most important in its effect on readying the party to govern when it next gets a chance at the national level, and to some extent it’s making governing at the state level more and more difficult. The Republican agenda right now is a combination of three things: Opposition to whatever President Joe Biden and the Democrats propose; support for whatever Fox News Channel’s product of the month happens to be; support for whatever incoherent and self-serving whims come out of Trump’s mouth.
This is barely a formula for making the strongest supporters happy. It’s certainly no way to build a policy agenda. What has been a problem for the party for several years, especially at the national level, is only getting worse.
Crooked:
Voters Across Parties Support The Infrastructure Bill
After weeks of negotiation, Congress has reached a bipartisan agreement on an infrastructure bill. If passed, the proposed legislation would make long overdue investments to rebuild our infrastructure, create jobs, and help to close the country’s digital divide.
In a new survey of 1,137 likely voters from June 30th to July 1st, Data for Progress examined likely voter support towards the components of the infrastructure bill. Voters support each individual component of the proposed bill, with notable support across parties.
PRRI:
The 2020 Census of American Religion
Over the last few decades, the proportion of the U.S. population that is white Christian has declined by nearly one-third. As recently as 1996, almost two-thirds of Americans (65%) identified as white and Christian. By 2006, that had declined to 54%, and by 2017 it was down to 43%[4]. The proportion of white Christians hit a low point in 2018, at 42%, and rebounded slightly in 2019 and 2020, to 44%. That tick upward indicates the decline is slowing from its pace of losing roughly 11% per decade.
Zoe Tillman/Buzzfeed:
Trump’s Social Media Lawsuits Feature A Mashup Of Arguments Courts Have Already Rejected
Former president Donald Trump’s latest attempt at getting back on mainstream social media platforms came in the form of lawsuits on Wednesday against Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — each featuring a series of claims that multiple courts, including the US Supreme Court, have rebuffed.
Trump was suspended from Facebook and Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 riots at the US Capitol and blocked from YouTube a few days later; all three companies cited posts that encouraged or supported the violence. He’d previously had messages that promoted baseless claims of voter fraud flagged as misleading or in violation of platform rules. He remains banned from posting on all three sites for now.
NY Times:
Texas Republicans Reveal Bills of Far-Reaching Voting Restrictions
In their second attempt to pass a sweeping elections overhaul, Republican lawmakers followed the broad outlines of the first, including a wide range of measures to limit voting access.
Among many new changes and restrictions to the state’s electoral process, both bills would ban 24-hour voting and drive-through voting; prohibit election officials from proactively sending out absentee ballots to voters who have not requested them; add new voter identification requirements for voting by mail; limit third-party ballot collection; increase the criminal penalties for election workers who run afoul of regulations; limit what assistance can be provided to voters; and greatly expand the authority and autonomy of partisan poll watchers.
But the new bills do not include two of the most contentious provisions from the previous iteration. There is no longer a limitation on Sunday voting (it can now begin at 9 a.m.) and there is no provision making it easier to overturn an election.
Bill Scher/Washington Monthly:
What New York City Taught Us About Ranked Choice Voting and the Democratic Party
The Eric Adams victory has lessons for how candidates can win under the system. Hint: Running in tandem with others is overrated.
As always, the media attention lavished on New York City is often annoyingly disproportionate. But this outcome has relevance to those of us who do not live there. As America’s most populous city with an economy that has national and global reach, we all have a stake in its management and prosperity. The city’s Democratic electorate is economically and racially diverse, so its primaries provide insight into what the party’s base is thinking and feeling. And as I wrote here previously, this year’s primary was the biggest test yet for Ranked Choice Voting—the voting method in which voters can rank multiple candidates and secondary choices get counted if primary choices get eliminated.
For now we can only hope that Adams can deftly steer the New York City ship. But we can more readily assess what his success says about the Democrats and RCV.