John Cusack has an excellent point. #News organizations shouldn't place FOIA-based reporting behind a paywall: "Paywalls don’t just limit readership, they create kind of a tiered citizenry, where one group can afford to know what the government is doing in their name and the other can’t."
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Via the #ColumbiaJournalismReview on Jan 7, 2026

#John Cusack Wants to Talk About #Paywalls

#FOIA

https://www.cjr.org/the-interview/john-cusack-foia-paywalls.php

The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review

The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate

As Paramount prepares for a merger, the Freedom of the Press Foundation stands to challenge the company for capitulating to Trump. Will it work?

July 25, 2025, By Kyle Paoletta

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Early this month, as soon as the news broke of Paramount’s decision to pay President Donald Trump’s foundation sixteen million dollars to settle a lawsuit against CBS News, the Freedom of the Press Foundation moved to take legal action. The FPF, as it’s known, tracks and resists government infringement on the news media. It’s also a Paramount shareholder, prepared to push for those interests with corporate muscle. Trump’s case, and the response of Paramount’s board, immediately set off alarm bells, as the company was in the midst of pursuing an eight-billion-dollar merger with Skydance, a Hollywood studio, that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission. “They’re essentially making a handshake deal with Donald Trump,” Seth Stern, the FPF’s advocacy director, told me. He and the FPF’s legal team believed that such a deal could be a violation of federal bribery laws. And, he noted, Shari Redstone, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, stands to make two billion dollars from the merger. “I would think that, regardless of what Shari has to offer the rest of the board,” Stern said, “the prospect of potential prosecution for bribery would be something they would think quite hard about.”

Now it’s clear that Paramount’s board has decided the risk of prosecution is well worth a multibillion-dollar payday. On Thursday, the FCC signed off on the Skydance merger, clearing a path for its completion. “Americans no longer trust the legacy national news media to report fully, accurately, and fairly. It is time for a change,” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, announced, praising the deal for its commitment to “unbiased journalism” and assurances that “discriminatory DEI policies” will end. But when I spoke to Brenna Frey, a lawyer for the FPF, in the wake of the settlement announcement, she was incensed. “This is an affront to the shareholders of Paramount, but it’s also an affront to CBS’s reporters and to the First Amendment,” she said. 

In Stern’s view, Paramount’s willingness to settle had been a calculated surrender. The premise of Trump’s lawsuit—that 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with Kamala Harris last fall represented “fraudulent interference with an election”—was unlikely to hold up to legal scrutiny. “The lawsuit was laughable,” David Snyder, the executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, said. “What they were trying to attack here was CBS News’s choices about how they edited footage from an interview. That sort of editorial judgment is at the core of First Amendment protections, generally, but especially if it’s about public figures right in the middle of an election.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Fight for Free Speech Goes Corporate – Columbia Journalism Review

#2025 #America #Books #ColumbiaJournalismReview #DonaldTrump #FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech #History #Journalism #Libraries #Library #LibraryOfCongress #Politics #Reading #Resistance #Science #Technology #Trump #TrumpAdministration #UnitedStates

CJR Reports: VOA’s Quiet Broadcast to North Korea Ends Without Explanation

https://swling.com/blog/2025/07/cjr-reports-voas-quiet-broadcast-to-north-korea-ends-without-explanation/

#ColumbiaJournalismReview #DPRK #NorthKorea #VoiceOfAmerica

#ConvictedFelon #DonaldTrump #Threatens to #Sue #Penguin, #RandomHouse, and More for 10 #billion #dollars.

#ColumbiaJournalismReview noted that this #lawsuit #threat “was part of a larger #effort from the #Trump camp to accuse #media outlets including #CBSNews, #theDailyBeast, and the #WashingtonPost of #bias in #reporting or other #alleged #actions

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Conservatives #Extremism #Fascism #Censorship #RepublicanParty #ThePartyOfHate

https://bookriot.com/trump-sues-penguin-random-house/

#ColumbiaJournalismReview 12 January 2021

What Covering #HeavyMetal Taught Me about Spotting #Nazis

by #KimKelly
https://www.cjr.org/first_person/heavy-metal-capitol-spotting-nazis.php

#NoToFascists #GegenNazis #NoNazis #music #musicians

From Deadspins’s Ashes: The Story Of Defector

I think more publications like Deadspin would be a net positive. Back in the day only Gawker reliably called out startup bullshit.

‘The last good website’

Deadspin, the influential sports and culture blog that all but imploded a few years ago, made its name by savaging those it deemed “assh

https://www.masonpelt.com/from-deadspinss-ashes-the-story-of-defector/

#ColumbiaJournalismReview #DannyFunt #Deadspin #Defector #GawkerMedia

"She maintains that being hacked is not just a possibility but a likelihood; she fears that most people are too naively comfortable when it comes to their digital communications."

Maddy Crowell speaks to @runasand for #ColumbiaJournalismReview: https://www.cjr.org/the_feature/runa-sandvik.php

#Longreads #Cybersecurity #Privacy #Hackers #Journalism

Great article on #mediabias by #journalist #DuncanCampbell about #TheNation and how they went all #Tankie #ProPutin after #Trump won in 2016.

Even more:

#ColumbiaJournalismReview commissioned the story and then killed it two days before publication. That's relevant because #CJR just published a truly awful piece arguing #Russiagate fake. @DavidCorn wrote about that.

Is CJR #biased?

https://bylinetimes.com/2023/02/04/russia-and-the-us-press-the-article-the-cjr-didnt-publish/