Brooke Gladstone: Hey there, friends on the precipice of 2024. This is our last chance to invite you, encourage you, or entreat you who find yourself relying on the show to enable us with a tax-deductible end of the year donation. It hasn't been a banner year for joyful celebration, but we can make the next year better politically and psychologically with some positive action by treating ourselves better and our communities too.

We fall in the latter category obviously. Close listeners already know that our producing station, WNYC, was hit with some pretty big deficits this year and some terrifically talented people are now looking for new jobs in a very anemic journalism market. We're still here and we need your help. Just text OTM to 70101 and send whatever you can comfortably manage.

There's only a few days left till 2023 is just a bad memory. Help us make sure this show is going strong into 2024. Text OTM to 70101 or go to onthemedia.org, and thanks so much. 2023 has just about wrapped up, and we decided to look back at what this year has wrought for the press, for the courts, and for democracy.

Speaker 2: This year has been among the most deadly for journalists.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: On social media, what you heard was somebody who has completely unhinged, but then the articles said things like, "Trump defends himself and attacks judge."

Speaker 4: We have a tradition of one person, one vote. The most grievous assault and undoing of that battle has been the work of Clarence Thomas.

Brooke Gladstone: That a court that by design has neither the power of the purse nor the sword. Power it has is the public's willingness to suspend disbelief and say this is not a partisan political institution?

Speaker 5: I don't think it's a coincidence that it's that moment when conspiracy culture just goes supernova. It's about what we can't bear to look at.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this.

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone with On the Media's Year in Review. Well, not really. Since it was such a bummer, instead we're going to mine 2023 for a few stories that have the potential to help us gird our loins, if you will, for what's coming around in 2024. First, a quick look on the bright side because it's going to get dark pretty fast.

For instance, did you know that 2023 was chock-a-block with medical breakthroughs? The UN says there's a clear pathway to ending AIDS transmission by 2030. A powerful new malaria vaccine has been approved, there are new treatments for Alzheimer's and some cancers, and, of course, Ozempic, an effective treatment for diabetes, and heart disease, and now most notably obesity, really took off.

On the climate, China's emissions are forecast to fall in 2024 because of the rapid rollout of renewables, and Ecuadorians voted to stop drilling in the Amazon. Deforestation rates there dropped 55.8% from last year. Nuclear fusion, man. The US National Ignition Facility this year produced fusion reactions that released more energy than they consumed many times since they first pulled it off a year ago.

The ability to do that repeatedly marks a huge step towards producing a new source of limitless clean energy. As for fears of runaway technology, this month the EU agreed on a landmark deal to regulate artificial intelligence and we in the US inched closer to controlling our own data when California Governor, Gavin Newsom, signed California's Delete Act, which will make it easier for residents to request their personal information be deleted by all data brokers in the state at the same time.

On the economy, did you know US inflation has cooled sooner and more quickly than in other advanced economies? Just saying. As for the bad news, you know all about the dysfunction in Congress, the war in Ukraine, and Gaza, and Israel, and disorder in the High Court. We'll get to some of those. We start with one of the scariest stories convulsing America's media terrain from below like the sand worms in Dune, the threat to democracy spearheaded by Donald J. Trump.

Here he is on the threat from within.

Sean Hannity: You are promising America tonight you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?

President Donald J. Trump: Except for day one.

Crowd: Yes.

Sean Hannity: Meaning?

President Donald J. Trump: I want to close the border, and I want to drill, drill, drill--

Sean: That's not--

President Donald J. Trump: We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.

Brooke Gladstone: The threat from without.

President Donald J. Trump: It is only common sense that when I'm reelected we will begin, and we have no choice, the largest deportation operation in America.

[crowd applauds]

President Donald J. Trump: They're poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison--

Brooke Gladstone: He is not going away.

Laura Ingraham: Trump is leading in every major poll by margins once thought impossible. In the new Monmouth University poll, Biden's approval rating's at a dismal 34%. That's another new low and that's--

Speaker 10: The lead story in today's New York Times, the question asked, "Who do you think would do a better job on the Israel-Palestine conflict?" 46% picking Donald Trump, 38% picking Joe Biden.

Speaker 11: You look at the states that really matter, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Biden keeps falling every week. Trump keeps gaining every week.

Brooke Gladstone: The rise of Trump has long been a puzzle for political scientists, historians, and Democrats. He has never paid a price, quite the contrary, for the incitements that defy not just American norms, but its founding principles, and given license to his party and supporters to do likewise. He has never paid a price for his bare face lies. He challenges journalistic conventions of polite interrogation with pyrotechnical defiance.

To such an irreconcilable electorate, how should the media cover Trump in 2024? In May, CNN hosted a Trump Town Hall in New Hampshire with an audience of loudly enthusiastic Trump supporters, an election denier as a post-show guest, and lone moderator Kaitlan Collins, trying to quench the great Chicago fire with a water pistol.

Kaitlan Collins: That's the question that investigators have, I think, is why you held onto those documents when you knew the federal government was seeking them and then had given you a subpoena to return them.

President Donald J. Trump: Are you ready? Are you ready? Can I talk?

Kaitlan Collins: Yes, what's the answer?

President Donald J. Trump: Do you mind? Do you mind?

Kaitlan Collins: I would like for you to answer the question.

President Donald J. Trump: Okay. It's very simple to answer.

Kaitlan Collins: That's why I asked it.

President Donald J. Trump: It's very simple. You're a nasty person. I'll tell you that.

[crowd laughs]

Brian Stelter: I think other cable and broadcast networks watched and learned from CNN's handling of Trump in the town hall and are going to do things differently as a result.

Brooke Gladstone: I spoke to former host of CNN's Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter, fired last year by then CEO, Chris Licht, who was responsible for the disastrous Trump Town Hall.

Brian Stelter: All the interviews Trump is doing on Fox, even the friendly chitchats with Sean Hannity, those are being pre-taped. They are not happening live. Fox presumably is doing so because of the fallout from Dominion and Smartmatic, and they are afraid of Trump defaming those companies or others live on the air.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, there's a cautionary tale.

Brian Stelter: 100%.

Brooke Gladstone: The fallout from the Dominion voting machine case cost Fox nearly $800 million. It didn't cost Trump, who made hay by defaming the voting machines, a nickel. We all know about those 91 felony charges Trump is fending off. Falsifying business records in connection with hush money paid to a porn star, committing fraud by lying to lenders and insurers about the value of his family's properties, filching highly classified government documents, trying to steal an election. In May, though, there was a rare moment of accountability.

Speaker 13: A jury today found former President Donald Trump liable for sexual abuse and defaming Writer E. Jean Carroll.

Writer E. Jean Carroll: I'm overwhelmed with joy for the women in this country. I want to tell the people who are about to watch CNN tonight, Donald Trump did it. Donald Trump did it.

Brooke Gladstone: That may be the exception that proves the rule. Meanwhile, Trump's been in and out of court in Florida, in Georgia, and New York. For a view of the coverage of the New York case for fraud, Micah spoke to Press Critic Dan Frumkin about how the coverage was going.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: If you follow it in the live blogs on social media, what you heard was the astonishing story of somebody who was completely unhinged, who was completely delusional, who was smirking, who was making faces, who was taunting the judge. Then the articles all came out and they said things like, "Trump defends himself and attacks judge." My take right now is that people are less interested in covering his unhinged statements because they're afraid that they'll be helping him spread disinformation and misinformation.

Micah Loewinger: That was one of the lessons from the Trump era, right? Don't just cover everything he says.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: Amplifying him does reward him and does risk even further radicalizing his supporters, but you can't ignore it when this guy who could be the president is saying things that are just nuts. I have a proposal here, which is that when he's unhinged, yes, you report what he said, that you go talk to the Republican leaders and to his base and the people who support him and say, "Do you agree with what he just said? Is there no limit to what he could say and you'd still support him?" The news value to me of an incremental, unhinged statement by Donald Trump is he said this and the Republican party still supports him.

Micah Loewinger: I agree that we could do it better, but it's also the case that facts don't seem to change minds like they used to. There have been warnings of his dangers to our democracy. You could argue there aren't enough, but perhaps they are just not sticking.

Press Critic Dan Frumkin: The press critics have been saying stuff like this for years now and they've not been heard, but I think that at some point it may sink in. We may have to wait until the next generation of editors, the leaders of our newsrooms have just gotten used to still covering what is basically an asymmetrical political climate, as if there are two equal parties involved in the discussion.

At some point, one of these editors is going to wake up, look in the mirror and say, wait a minute, we're not doing this right. We need to reset because we are not successfully informing the American electorate.

Brooke Gladstone: Author Jeff Sharlet says, journalists should be less squeamish and more precise in their word choices. For instance, to choose the word fascism to describe the movement Trump fueled in road to power. I asked what's wrong with the more often used phrase, crisis of democracy.

Jeff Sharlet: I'm actually against the term, the crisis of democracy. Crisis is narratively a word that supposes this is a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That's not the nature of the situation we face. Some things were lost.

Fascism is understood in the press as a kind of F word, as opposed to describing a political movement, the cult of personality, the idea that a strong man leader alone can fix it, that he transcends the normal rule of law, a persecuted ingroup, a mysterious outgroup that can take any form, but most importantly, not just a rhetoric of violence, but of pleasure and violence.

That's a key part of fascism, and I think in as much as we resist it, and I'm sympathetic to that resistance, but what if we don't see it as a crisis, as a final battle, but say, hey, that's the condition. How do we get through this?

Brooke Gladstone: Back in September 2016, Salena Zito offered in the Atlantic perhaps the best description of the press's dilemma when she observed that Trump's supporters took him seriously, but not literally while the press took him literally, but not seriously. That was a crucial mistake. Trump means what he says, so report we must, but how? New York University journalism prof and press critic Jay Rosen.

Jay Rosen: It would help if journalists shifted their energy and their attention from the odds of who's going to win and the whole horse race discourse to the stakes, meaning what are the consequences for daily life? What's going to change in this country depending on the results of the 2024 election?

Brooke Gladstone: That's probably the oldest piece of advice one can give for election coverage. It is less about the horse race, more about the issues, the stakes, the consequences, but now more than ever?

Jay Rosen: This time, the stakes are huge.

Brooke Gladstone: Odds versus stakes in the coming year boils down to horse race coverage versus everything else. CJR recently published a review of the research into the impact of horse race coverage and found nothing good. In one study, domestic policy analysis amounted to just 2% of front-page coverage, diminishing our understanding of the real issues, engendering distrust in the whole system, and normalizing the abnormal candidacy of Donald Trump.

They're all just horses after all. In her book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein said that our political culture isn't just divided. The left and right are distorted mirror images of one another.

Naomi Klein: We became very, whatever they are, we are not. A classic example of this is the lab leak theory. Early on that was seen as a conspiratorial take on the origins of the COVID virus rather than something that was worthy of exploration.

In recent months, we've seen some serious investigations of the lab leak theory, which deserved real journalism. I think we mistakenly sometimes think our job is just to do the opposite of what they're doing, and that's okay, but not if it's at the expense of engaged debate about what else we might do.

Brooke Gladstone: Dwelling on the split identities in our politics, she described how implicated each of us are in all the systems our world runs on, both the ones we like and the ones we don't, and how we participate from within the comfort of our own bespoke bubbles.

Naomi Klein: If we are fortunate enough to be in wealthier parts of wealthier countries, fortunate enough during COVID to be part of the lockdown class, we knew our comforts were only because of other people's risks and, frankly, other people's exploitation. I don't think it's a coincidence that it's that moment when conspiracy culture just goes supernova.

I don't think it is just about the technology. I think it's about what we can't bear to look at, but part of the reason why we look away is because we are so conditioned to see ourselves first as individual consumers, that we forget that we actually have the ability to join with other humans and build collective power, that kind of collective power that would make it bearable to really look at our implication in these systems so that we can make our systems more just.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Not a bad theory for why we see so few ways forward. If as staunch American individualists, we presume to be the masters of our own fates, and blindly ignore the systems that decide who among us will be lucky, we won't see the potential in uniting to confront the coming storm. Our reflex will be to assess our separate strengths against an incomprehensible opposition and ultimately decide that we're going to lose.

Micah Loewinger: 2023 was also the year of Twitter, X, whatever.

Speaker 20: A year ago, Elon Musk famously, infamously walked into Twitter holding a sink, "Let that sink in," he quipped, before firing huge sways of its staff.

Micah Loewinger: We spoke to Zoe Schiffer, who had the scoop from workers inside the company, and industry watchers like Avi Asher-Schapiro who helped us understand the significance of Musk's withdrawal of staff from Twitter's offices around the globe. We tried on Mastodon for size, got some Bluesky invite codes, and plotted up on Threads.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk got the hero treatment in a giant biography by Walter Isaacson and the stories about him and his exploits never let up. Maybe we couldn't look away because everyone loves a train wreck, or maybe it's because we journalists were just a little bit sad that our favorite website for finding sources and sharing gossip was gone. In its place, an embarrassing sideshow. By way of a kind of obit, we decided to let the journey of the website from Twitter to X speak for itself. Cue the tape.

Zoe Schiffer: How's this for a first message from your new boss? A staff-wide email that was sent in the middle of the night, Elon Musk suggested the company could go into bankruptcy as executives are resigning, advertisers are fleeing, and trolls are running rampant on the platform since he took over.

Speaker 22: Breaking political news overnight, Elon Musk reinstating former President Trump's Twitter account.

Speaker 23: Elon Musk said people must pay $8 a month for the platform's "Twitter Blue Subscription Service." As a result, journalists, politicians, celebrities, city and government organizations who would not pay have been stripped of their verified status.

Speaker 24: Wall Street is watching pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly today. Its stock plummeted last week after someone impersonated the company on Twitter, said it would make insulin free.

Speaker 25: Maybe all of these verified real fake people on Twitter chaos is actually part of Elon's plan. Sure, no one will know a real account from a fake account and then he'll be like, "Guys, did you see someone impersonated me and spent $44 billion on Twitter? That was crazy. [laughter] Well, I'm just going to take my money and be on my way. Bye-bye now. Bye-bye.

Speaker 26: Musk now also butting heads with NPR, National Public Radio. It comes after the news outlet quit Twitter, upset that it was briefly labeled as "state-affiliated media." In a following tweet, Musk just wrote "defund NPR."

Speaker 27: This morning, the highly anticipated rival platform to Twitter is now live. Facebook and Instagram's parent company Meta launching Threads overnight.

Speaker 28: Mark Zuckerberg looks ready to rumble, showing off some wash cord abs as his feud with Twitter exec, Elon Musk, escalates, including talks of the two Silicon Valley giants wanting to fight one another.

Speaker 29: Tonight, Zuckerberg says it's likely not happening.

Speaker 30: This segment on CNN newsroom is proudly brought to you today by the letter X, as in Xerox, Xbox.

Speaker 31: Industry experts say it's not surprising given Musk's history with the letter X, there is Elon's rocket company commonly known as SpaceX, of course.

Speaker 30: Xfinity Xvideo, Xanax. Just X the new name for Twitter.

Speaker 32: Elon Musk's X sign is now an X sign. In another big setback for Twitter's rebrand, this brightly flashing X has been removed from the company's San Francisco headquarters.

Speaker 33: Elon Musk said on Sunday that the account of right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been reinstated.

Speaker 34: Disney chief executive Bob Iger revealed Disney is pulling its advertising from X, which prompted this from Elon.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: You don't want them to advertise?

Elon Musk: No.

Andrew Ross Sorkin: What do you mean?

Elon Musk: If somebody is going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmailing for money? Go [beep] yourself.

Speaker 37: What happened to the nerdy guy who wanted to go to space, build rockets and electric cars right? Just the smart, quiet, nerdy genius guy has turned into this free-speech absolutist.

Trevor Noah: I'm going to be honest and I'm going to be blunt here, Elon Musk is running Twitter into the ground and it's the best Twitter's ever been. Are you kidding me?

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up. 2023 was the year that journalists shed light in a supremely shady place and exposed serious disorder in the courts.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We continue our year in review with the current state of the nation's courts, especially its highest one. Since our nearly non-functional Congress has done much to hamstring the executive branch that leaves the third branch, the judiciary, with the job of safeguarding our democracy. Here are a few headlines from the last 12 months.

Speaker 39: The US Supreme Court today dealt a major blow to affirmative action in higher education, striking down race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina.

Speaker 40: The court's six justice conservative majority said the schools discriminated against white and Asian American applicants by using race-conscious policies that benefited students from underrepresented backgrounds.

Speaker 41: The Supreme Court by a six to three vote has ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency does not have broad authority to try to set national energy policy. This decision is not only something that will restrict the EPA's authority going forward but also may have implications for other federal agencies.

Speaker 42: Tonight the Supreme Court dealing a major defeat to President Biden striking down his plan to erase more than $400 billion in federal student loan debt.

Speaker 43: The other big ruling that we got this morning the question whether businesses can refuse service to LGBTQ customers because doing so would violate the business owners' First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court rules for a Christian web designer who objected to making wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Speaker 44: That designer has not started her wedding website business yet but says that her Christian faith prevents her from doing work that celebrates same-sex marriage.

Speaker 45: Today in genuinely shocking news, the conservative majority Supreme Court ruled 5:4 in favor of Black voters in a congressional redistricting case in Alabama. It definitely tells you something about the standing of the court when there is shock that they didn't further gut American voting rights.

Brooke Gladstone: While not on the official docket ethical standards for the High Court were certainly on trial by public opinion.

Speaker 46: Well, we've got another eyebrow-raising revelation tonight about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his financial dealings with a billionaire buddy.

Speaker 47: For years, Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly accepted luxury gifts from a GOP megadonor Harlan Crow.

Speaker 48: He took these trips to places like New Zealand, Indonesia, on private yachts, private jets.

Speaker 49: Including a $500,000 trip to Indonesia one year.

Speaker 50: Many of these trips went undisclosed on Thomas's ethics filing despite that being required by law.

Speaker 51: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is facing scrutiny over a new report claiming he accepted a lavish vacation from a conservative billionaire with frequent business before the court.

Speaker 52: With public trust in the Supreme Court wavering, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are moving forward with a bill that would overhaul the High Court's transparency requirements. The bill would require the court to adopt an ethics code as well as impose more rigorous rules for disclosure of gifts, travel, and income.

Speaker 53: On Monday, the Supreme Court stunned Washington by announcing it's adopting a new code of conduct.

Speaker 54: This new code does very little and it provides no new mechanisms for holding justices accountable.

Brooke Gladstone: On the docket in the year ahead is access to abortion drugs, voting rights in South Carolina, the regulation of social media, the gun rights of domestic abusers and more moves to rein in the so-called administrative state by weakening federal agencies. All issues with huge implications and long tails made all the more unsettling because the fantasy of a High Court impervious to partisanship was blasted years ago.

In 2023, we learned that one canny conservative idealogue has definitely played a very long game to place his candidates in key positions across the nation's judiciary, not just on the High Court, but in appellate courts and state courts and state agencies too. His name is Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society, once regarded as Trump's unofficial justice picker, but Leo's long been placing people, sometimes with bare-knuckle threats, as solicitors or attorneys general wherever he can, pulling the law of the land from a perceived leftward tilt to the far right.

Listeners may recall our series with ProPublica about the impact of this relatively low-profile figure, but not so low profile to some, as reporter Ilya Marritz evinced with a telling anecdote from Mike Black, who was working in the office of the Montana Attorney General, when he walked into the office of a co-worker and noticed a bookshelf of notable bobbleheads

Mike Black: There was Scalia for sure and I think probably Alito, there were like, four or five. Then there was this one younger-looking guy, and I said, "Well, who the heck is this?" and he goes, "Well, that's Leonard Leo."

Ilya Marritz: Black looks at his colleague, a man named Lawrence VanDyke, the Montana Solicitor General, he looks at the bobblehead doll, a miniature of someone he used to know.

Mike Black: I think I laughed. I went to law school with Leonard and I can't believe that there's a bobblehead doll of him. It was clear that Lawrence was enamored with Leonard, and it's been borne out that literally was a patron of Lawrence VanDyke. At the time, I just thought it was funny.

Ilya Marritz: Leonard Leo was on that shelf of bobbleheads alongside Supreme Court justices. It's a visible manifestation of the work he's done to shape the court, but if that's all he did, he wouldn't be as influential as he is today because the justices would only be hearing those cases that happened to get to them. Leo has done something maybe more impressive. He's built a system that makes it much more likely that the right cases get to the High Court. The cases he and his ideological brethren believe are most likely to nudge the law in the direction they think it should go.

Brooke Gladstone: Entangled in this story is ProPublica's widely reported exposé of the deep personal and highly remunerative friendship between Clarence Thomas and billionaire Republican donor and Federalist Society backer, Harlan Crow.

Corey Robin: The way corruption often happens is that you have men of wealth and men of power, who are part of a fraternity.

Brooke Gladstone: I spoke with Corey Robin, author of The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, after the ProPublica revelations.

Corey Robin: They exchange words and they exchange ideas, and they gain each other's respect and trust. Thomas is a particularly important person in that fraternity because he really believes in the worthiness and the legitimacy in the standing and in the stature of those men of wealth. He wants those men of wealth to play more of a role in our society, so he takes their words very, very seriously. The problem here is that Thomas not only doesn't really hide from that, he's created an entire jurisprudence that justifies that.

Brooke Gladstone: Thus, the revelations of 2023 revealed an unbridled eagerness to turn away from what was once seen as a fundamental part of the American creed.

Corey Robin: We have a tradition of one person, one vote, and the premise of that tradition is that nobody is worth more than anybody else. That was a long and hard-fought battle, fought through questions of slavery, fought through the question of the denial of the vote to women, and so on, and we won that battle. The most grievous assault and undoing of that battle has been, I would argue, these decisions about the value of the man of money, that he is, in fact, worth more not just in the economic sphere, but in the political sphere. That has been the work of Clarence Thomas. If we hope to have any kind of a democracy, that work has to be undone.

Brooke Gladstone: Why was it left to ProPublica to expose this seize on our founding principles? Dahlia Lithwick, who reports on the courts for Slate says that court reporters and academics underwent a reckoning in 2023.

Dahlia Lithwick: There's a photograph that's been disseminated again in that ProPublica reporting of Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas, Leonard Leo, Marcoleta, all people who are involved in this enterprise of making sure that these millions of dollars that are sloshing around are going to get certain political outcomes at the court whether it's busting unions, circumventing voting, affirmative action, ending-- whatever it is, not connecting the dots the way that portrait connected the dots is what Senator Whitehouse says is a signal failure of the media. Nobody should be hearing this on your show for the first time.

Brooke Gladstone: When I spoke to Dahlia in June, she cited the groundbreaking work of academics Stephen Vladeck and Will Baude, who coined the term, 'The Shadow Docket.'

Dahlia Lithwick: What they were clocking that the rest of us were missing was that in recent years, the US Supreme Court were deciding more and more cases on an emergency basis. We've always had a "shadow docket." We've always had an emergency docket. It was used for executions. Suddenly, in the Trump years, cases were rocketing to the High Court. Instead of being argued in public, instead of having extensive briefing and finding of facts, the Court was deciding seismically important cases on the emergency docket, often at midnight, often with two unsigned paragraphs.

The example that I offer is SB 8, that Texas "vigilante" abortion bill that would have given folks a bounty for turning in someone who aided and abetted an abortion. Even before that term started, the Court on the shadow docket upheld that. Once the Court, in effect, blessed this vigilante law that for one tenth of the childbearing population in the United States overturned Roe v. Wade long before Dobbs did. That's how that term started.

By the way, the Court's approval ratings are the lowest they've ever been since Gallup polling began. The American public almost was ahead of the legacy media in recoiling at the notion that a court whose job is principally to show its work was not showing its work, was just throwing out the law and saying, "Here's what the new law is." When the Dobbs opinion was leaked, that was also seismic at the court.

Brooke Gladstone: Why was that so significant?

Dahlia Lithwick: We've just never had the totality of an opinion leaked to the press in advance of publication. We've never had, in my lifetime, the kind of backbiting amongst the justices that immediately followed Justice Alito saying, "Now our lives are in danger.", Justice Thomas saying, "Stuff like this would never have happened under Chief Justice Rehnquist. He was a much better chief." Just palpable mistrust within the institution and the incandescently stupid probe into who leaked the opinion, which could not have been handled worse.

We had the law clerks subject to deep scrutiny and penalties of criminal sanctions, and the Justices were taken to tea and asked polite questions and offered macaroons to have that result in a statement that, "We did our best, but we can't find the leaker," was just catastrophically bad for the Court's legitimacy. I cannot believe, and this is maybe the most important thing I can say, that a court that by designs has neither the power of the purse nor the sword.

The only power it has is the public's willingness to suspend disbelief and say, "This is not a partisan political institution. This institution is different." For the court to be so far down the road of, "Hey, we're a partisan political institution, but there's more, we'll do more partisan political things." It's actually heartbreaking.

Brooke Gladstone: I asked Dahlia if she had any regrets as a journalist on this speed.

Dahlia Lithwick: Look, I've been doing this for 23 years. I genuinely believed that my job was akin to science reporting, translating complicated doctrines so people can understand it. I have no regrets about years spent doing that. When people say to me, "Wait a minute, you mean we knew that Harlan Crow was giving Thomas gifts and Thomas was not disclosing them since 2011, and you didn't write about that?" I do have regrets.

The fact that Ginni Thomas was intimately involved, not just in texting Mark Meadows about the 2020 election, but in getting in touch with state officials, urging them to set aside election results. We know all this, and I didn't sound the alarm that there is a machine at work that is simmering right under the part of the court that I did cover. We are now sitting atop of this mess of ethics violations in a moment where John Roberts gave a speech in which he more or less was the human shruggy emoji just like, "Nothing to see here. We're fixing it."

Then, by the way, adds that the most heartbreaking moment for him as Chief Justice was the decision to put fencing up around the building last year as though the greatest suffering post-Dobbs was the suffering of the Justices themselves. The level of complete self-delusion in a statement like that is breathtaking. The idea that I didn't think that part of my job was discomforting the comfortable or holding powerful people to account or powerful systems to account and that it wasn't my job to follow the money, it wasn't my job to figure that out, yes, I have regrets.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, 2023 was one of the deadliest years for journalists.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. In 2023, a big advertising downturn continued to chip away at local newspapers, national outlets, beloved podcasts, and even WNYC, home to On the Media. Some threats to journalism are fresh like the replacement of human writers with artificial intelligence. Others are perennial like the tactics used by authoritarian regimes to silence critics or the perils of reporting from an active war zone. In 2023, the work has grown even more difficult.

Jodie Ginsberg: The picture, unfortunately, for journalists is largely getting worse.

Micah Loewinger: Jodie Ginsberg is the President of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that tracks threats to the press across the world. She joined me to help us remember some of the journalists that were imprisoned and killed this year.

Jodie Ginsberg: So far in 2023, as of December the 8th, we have documented 81 journalists and media workers killed worldwide. That compares to 68 killed in 2022.

Micah Loewinger: It is safer to be a journalist in the United States than in many other countries, but this year we saw the killing of a young American journalist, Dylan Lyons, in Orlando, Florida.

Jodie Ginsberg: Dylan was covering a fatal shooting that had occurred that morning.

Speaker 60: Five hours after a woman in her 20s was found shot to death in Pine Hills, two journalists, a reporter, and a videographer from Spectrum News 13 were in their vehicle when the suspected murderer returned to the scene of the crime, approached their vehicle and fired.

Jodie Ginsberg: Dylan was killed while reporting on that earlier shooting.

Micah Loewinger: Your organization followed the murder of Cameroonian reporter Martinez Zogo. Who was Zogo and what do we know about why he was killed?

Jodie Ginsberg: Martinez Zogo was the managing director of a privately owned Cameroonian radio broadcaster called Amplitude FM, and he was found dead in late January. He was followed by four hooded men in a car. He sought help at a nearby police station. As he was going to the police station, the attackers drove into his vehicle, then he was forced into the men's car. Several days later, his body was found naked. It was dumped in a plot of land, and it was clear that he'd been subjected to horrific torture.

Speaker 61: His mutilated body was found just outside the capital Yaoundé. Zogo was the host of the popular Embouteillage talk show in which he would brazenly tackle stories that touched on corruption and alleged embezzlement.

Speaker 62: Zogo's disappearance came shortly after presenting a program critical of government corruption.

Jodie Ginsberg: He'd criticized the payment of tens of billions of francs from the Cameroonian Treasury that benefited a prominent Cameroonian businessman, for example, and that businessman was actually arrested in February, but to date, no one's actually been charged or held accountable for his killing. The thing that's important about someone like Martinez is that when we think about the killings of journalists, we often think about a war setting or a conflict setting. Actually, in recent years, the majority of journalists have not been killed in war zones. They are local journalists often reporting on corruption or collusion between criminal gangs, for example, or criminal businesses and politicians, and he is emblematic of that.

Micah Loewinger: I want to talk about the crackdowns on freedom of press in Russia. I know that was a big story in 2022 at the outset of the war. How do things stand now?

Jodie Ginsberg: Russia has been successful in wiping out local journalism or certainly Russian journalism that can operate from inside Russia openly.

Micah Loewinger: In just the past couple of months, more journalists and activists were labeled as foreign agents including a stalwart of independent news, The Moscow Times. Russian police have put the award-winning Russian American journalist Masha Gessen on a wanted list after opening a criminal case against them for their reporting. Putin has already put restrictions on media coverage of next year's presidential race when he'll be seeking another six years in office.

Jodie Ginsberg: While we do continue to get reports about what Russia is doing, much of that is being conducted by Russian journalists who have been forced into exile.

Micah Loewinger: One such exile is Nikita Kondratyev. Brooke spoke to him in March.

Brooke Gladstone: What sorts of stories are you reporting and for whom are you reporting them?

Nikita Kondratyev: For Russian citizens, obviously.

Micah Loewinger: They spoke outside a coffee shop in Berlin where he worked for the European reboot of a banned Russian outlet, Novaya Gazeta. When they met up for the interview, Nikita was visibly tense.

Brooke Gladstone: When you hang out with other exiled journalists, what's the most common cause of distress?

Nikita Kondratyev: There are three main topics, of course. The first one is depression. Everyone is depressed and struggling with it. The second one is German authorities, German immigration laws.

Brooke Gladstone: What's the third thing?

Nikita Kondratyev: The third thing is how to work.

Brooke Gladstone: How sustainable is this for you? Can I be frank? You seem a little bit stressed out.

Nikita Kondratyev: My country has waged war. Why wouldn't I be stressed out? I don't know.

Brooke Gladstone: How long do you think you can do this?

Nikita Kondratyev: I don't know. No idea. I cannot foresee future. I can plan my life for next 10 hours, I guess. I don't know what will happen next month.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you intend on going back to Russia at some point?

Nikita Kondratyev: Of course. I do not know what will happen next, but even if our regime will collapse, it won't be peaceful, democratic Russia. At once, there will be some tough period and I do not know if I want to partake, so yes, lots of militant groups. They are not connected to government in any way. They can conduct their own violent policy.

Micah Loewinger: Meanwhile, this year also saw an exodus of foreign reporters from Russia.

Jodie Ginsberg: Since the arrest this year of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, which really put a lot of international organizations on notice that they might be next.

Speaker 64: Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, spending more than 250 days in a Russian prison on spying charges.

Jodie Ginsberg: I think every single day is probably incredibly psychologically and emotionally difficult.

Micah Loewinger: Reporter Valerie Hopkins had been based in Moscow before Evan was locked up. She spoke with OTM producer, Molly Rosen, in April.

Speaker 65: Valerie Hopkins of The New York Times knew it was risky to be working as a journalist in Russia, but she told me that Evan's arrest partly came as such a shock because of the espionage charges. Foreign correspondents have to get their accreditation extended by the Russian government every three months.

Valerie Hopkins: If they really believed that Evan posed a risk, they could have chosen to not extend his accreditation, which effectively would have ended his ability to report from inside Russia. Instead, they chose to do this escalation, which I think probably had the chilling effects that it intended.

Gordon Fairclough: We withdrew our bureau chief.

Speaker 67: Evan's boss, Gordon Fairclough.

Gordon Fairclough: I'm not sure when I would consider it safe for us to have someone back on the ground in Russia. That, of course, makes it harder for American audiences to know what's happening in Russia, particularly at a time of pretty significant diplomatic tension between Washington and Moscow, having fewer avenues for mutual understanding is not a good thing.

Micah Loewinger: I asked Jodie Ginsberg of CPJ how rates of injury and death among journalists in Ukraine and Russia compare to 2022.

Jodie Ginsberg: In 2022, we documented the deaths of 15 journalists and media workers. It's just two, that's two too many, but it's just two in 2023. The thing about war reporting is, we think of war reporters often as these international journalists who parachute in wearing their helmets and their flak jackets and standing at the front of tanks. In actual fact, much of war reporting is local journalists who are having to become war reporters because war has come to their countries.

Adnan El-Bursh: This is my local hospital. Inside are my friends, my neighbors. This is my community. Today has been one of the most difficult days in my career.

Micah Loewinger: Adnan El-Bursh, a journalist with BBC Arabic, filed this report in October after visiting Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital.

Adnan El-Bursh: Among the dead and wounded, my cameraman, Mahmoud, has seen his friend Malik. Malik has managed to survive, but his family have not.

Micah Loewinger: In the first couple of weeks of the war, I called up Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator with the Committee to Protect Journalists. He told me about reporters in Gaza who've continued to work despite food and water shortages, bombing, and electricity blackouts.

Sherif Mansour: Those journalists are choosing to continue to do the best they can. Otherwise, we end up with misinformation and disinformation that fuels the conflict.

Micah Loewinger: You mentioned that there were three Israeli journalists killed by Hamas on October 7th. One was former AP video journalist, Yaniv Zohar, who was killed at his home. Then there were two young journalists, 122 and 125, who were murdered at the Supernova Music Festival. Do we know if any of these journalists were working at the time they were killed or were they just caught in the attack?

Sherif Mansour: We have talked to a few of the editors who were working with them. One of them have said that, yes, it was Saturday, a holiday, but he heard that there were attacks, and he actually went out of his house in order to work undocumented. When he came to his house, he found that Hamas fighters already were zoning in on his home. We are trying to be inclusive in terms of who we can consider a journalist working at the time.

Jodie Ginsberg: The Israel-Gaza war is the deadliest conflict for journalists that the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever documented in the more than three decades that we've been doing this work.

Micah Loewinger: Jodie Ginsberg of the CPJ, which has found that the Israeli military is likely responsible for the vast majority of these deaths.

Jodie Ginsberg: Never have so many journalists and media workers been killed in such a short space of time. That's really what's driven these higher numbers this year in 2023. One of the deaths that we were particularly saddened by was the death of Belal Jadallah, who was a previous contributor to the work of CPJ. Jadallah was the director of Press House - Palestine, a press freedom organization, a non-profit organization that supported the development of independent Palestinian media.

Jadallah was killed by an Israeli airstrike that hit his car in Gaza. Jadallah, among other things, provided absolutely indispensable research for a report that CPJ published in May of this year called Deadly Pattern, that found a complete lack of accountability in Israeli military killings of journalists over the past 22 years. He helped us locate families of journalists killed in Gaza, helped us acquire their photos for our reports, and his killing really leaves an enormous gap in the media landscape in Gaza, and we pay tribute to him.

We are raising the cases of journalists who are killed to the international community to make sure that those deaths are investigated, to try and find ways to ensure that journalists can report safely. By having access to personal protective equipment, that's not been possible in this war because it's not possible to get such equipment in.

Micah Loewinger: It's also worth noting, though, that many of the slain journalists were wearing clear press garb and protective clothing.

Jodie Ginsberg: Well, personal protective equipment can only go so far. A journalist from Reuters, Issam Abdallah, was killed on October the 13th by an Israeli strike, and a number of colleagues from other news outlets were injured. They were all wearing press insignia and clearly visible as press. If journalists are targeted as they appear to have been in this case, then the only way to protect journalists in that scenario is for those attacks in which civilians have been swept up to stop.

Micah Loewinger: In addition to this staggering death toll this year, CPJ has also been tracking threats to press freedom around the world, ranging from threats of violence, imprisonment, legal threats, and other intimidation aimed at reporters.

Jodie Ginsberg: We continue to see escalating threats in Central and South America. It continues to be extraordinarily dangerous to be a journalist in Mexico, for example. We've seen a continued outflow of journalists from places like Nicaragua and Venezuela. Journalists going to exile from Iran, for example. As democracies decline, and they are on the decline, among the first people to be targeted are journalists. They're like the canaries in the coal mine. All of our freedoms are at stake when so much violence is directed against journalists. Press freedom is our freedom. We rely on journalists to bring us the information that we need to live freely and safely, and without journalists, we cannot do so.

Micah Loewinger: Jodie, thank you very much.

Jodie Ginsberg: You are so welcome.

Micah Loewinger: Jodie Ginsberg is the President of the Committee to Protect Journalists. That's it for this week's show and for 2023. On the Media is produced by Eloise Blondiau, Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, and Candice Wang with help from Shaan Merchant.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical directors, Jennifer Munson, Katya Rogers is our Executive Producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: From On the Media, here's to a wonderful 2024. You never know. It could happen.

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