As with other Trump-era catchphrases, the meaning of “election interference” has in many respects grown more elusive as various political actors—not least Trump himself—have co-opted, warped, and weaponized it. But what does the term actually mean? nyer.cm/GEzZrH7

I’m very sad that Mathew Ingram is leaving CJR! He’s always been a generous colleague and an incisive writer at the intersection of media and tech. Read his final reflections on his work for us here: cjr.org/the_media_toda…

So long and thanks for all the fish: My final piece for the Columbia Journalism Review after almost seven years as the chief digital writer there — some thoughts about what has changed and what hasn't cjr.org/the_media_toda…

A plea for proportion as the presidential race enters the home stretch: cjr.org/the_media_toda…

This is out of a Tina Fey sitcom and I won’t hear otherwise

The very worst media cliché, in a very crowded field

The good news is there's someone out there with deep pockets willing to put real money into alternative media and actually pay their talent well. The bad news is that it's the Kremlin.

Excited to be working on a new newsletter collaboration between CJR and our friends at the Tow Center, written every Thursday by the great Sarah Grevy Gotfredsen. You can read her first dispatch here: cjr.org/the_media_toda…

📣Journalists! Join us for our Climate on the Ballot virtual summit, featuring a variety of panels and interactive roundtable discussions for international, national and local journalists covering the 2024 US election. coveringclimatenow.org/event/climate-… 🧵Learn more about the panels below

Hearing he damaged a tissue

Hard to overstate how appalling it is that Republicans are happily sanitizing Trump's most explicit authoritarian threat yet to jail political foes en masse. If GOP elites condemned this stuff it would break through to voters more. Rs are just fine w/authoritarian rule, full stop

I wrote about Parker Molloy's (and others') argument that the media is "sanewashing" Trump, and the perennial problem we seem to have with describing his language plainly: cjr.org/the_media_toda…

Get yourself up to date on what the term "sanewashing" means and why it matters in the debate — now nine years old — about how to cover this man. cjr.org/the_media_toda…

Columbia Journalism Review: "Too often, major outlets clean up Trump’s language—especially in shorter formats, like headlines and ledes—to the point where it barely resembles what he actually said."

I wrote about how ABC deserves credit for fact-checking Trump last night—even if it did only clear a very low bar, and even then far from flawlessly—and how the debate exposed the pathetic hollowness of pro-Trump ref-working: cjr.org/the_media_toda…

It really is this simple. The pathetic blowup we’re witnessing based on a literal handful of fact checks is premised on “our guy should be allowed to spread insane conspiracy theories with no consequences.”