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But the appeal of Hitler-at-home stories went beyond curiosity about how the other half lives. In fact, their representation of the German leader as a “good man,” whose simple tastes and joys were not that different from ordinary men’s and women’s, reassured readers at a politically unsettled time, when another global war seemed to be approaching. The gracious host depicted in these puff pieces was never interrupted with rude questions about concentration camps. Nazi propagandists insisted that Hitler’s homes existed outside the sphere of politics, and the journalists that covered them largely obliged this view.

When the war ended, the fascination with Hitler’s homes continued.

Another car bomb killed Ukrainian military intelligence officer Col Maxim Shapoval in June 2017 in what the Ukrainian authorities called a terrorist act. In March of the same year, former Russian MP Denis Voronenkov was shot dead outside a hotel in Kiev.

We’d be better off, instead, if our battered-but-still-powerful media establishment did more to lean into the Internet era, which for all its challenges offers opportunities as well — the chance to multiply perspectives, to promote a diverse (and, yes, sometimes competing) array of causes and to pursue a wider variety of journalistic ideals.

We’d be better off, instead, if our battered-but-still-powerful media establishment did more to lean into the Internet era, which for all its challenges offers opportunities as well — the chance to multiply perspectives, to promote a diverse (and, yes, sometimes competing) array of causes and to pursue a wider variety of journalistic ideals.

To Eisenhower it seemed that the press, at once credulous and cynical, was building up McCarthy. In a speech to newspaper publishers, he accused journalists of cheap sensationalism, of presenting “clichés and slogans” instead of facts

How could a responsible press not report what McCarthy said? The same quandary attends the media today, as they figure out how to handle “fake news” and the president’s intemperate tweets. Now, as then, no good solution exists.

Those who covered McCarthy’s every move inevitably became his “co-conspirators,” as one of them, Murray Kempton, later said. “In the end, I did not feel any cleaner than he was

Then as now, the press could achieve only so much, and for a reason that hasn’t changed. McCarthy was a political problem, not a journalistic one—a problem that could be solved in the end only by politics, by Eisenhower himself, who fooled almost everyone in deftly outmaneuvering McCarthy.

The journalist Theodore H. White, traveling through Texas in 1954 to interview conservatives in “the land of wealth and fear,” including the new cast of oil billionaires, discovered articles of faith not recognized much in newsrooms or by broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow. One was that “Joe McCarthy is the senior patriot of the nation.” Another was that “both older American parties are legitimate objects of deep suspicion.” These conservatives were nominally Republican but were enrolled in “a nameless Third Party, obsessed with hate, fear, and suspicion—one of whose central tenets is that ‘if America is ever destroyed it will be from within.’ ”

They figured out that “Joe never plans a damn thing … [and] doesn’t know from one week to the next, not even from one day to the next, what he’s going to be doing,” as William Rogers, the deputy attorney general, said. “He just hits out in any direction.” Leading him into self-destructive blundering was easy enough to do, but it couldn’t be rushed.

Eisenhower himself equated politics with war, both zero-sum games in which “it’s win or lose,” with nothing in between, and no points won for rectitude or grand displays of valor.

Privately, he had assessed McCarthy’s “demagogic skills,” Nichols notes, and shrewdly decided against “saying or doing anything that would make himself, not McCarthy, the issue.”

Stevenson had been right when he said the GOP was splitting in two. Eisenhower represented its doomed moderate East Coast faction—the party of Thomas E. Dewey, the New York governor who lost to Roosevelt in 1944 and Truman in 1948. Its voice was the editorial page of The New York Herald Tribune, with cheerleading from Henry Luce’s magazines.

McCarthy spoke to a newer constituency, based in the Midwest and, increasingly, the Sun Belt.

Eisenhower defeated McCarthy through stealth.

Eisenhower versus McCarthy looked in its moment to be “one of the great constitutional crises of our history,” in Lippmann’s words. Perhaps. But more practically, it was a war within the Republican Party, and the battle was as much cultural as ideological.

McCarthy wasn’t appreciably more or less anti-Communist than many others, Republicans or Democrats. He had no program to speak of and little interest in economics or in exploiting racial and religious fears. His enemy was what would soon be called the establishment—the policy elite in Beltway institutions. He attacked the CIA, the State Department, and overseas enterprises like the Voice of America.

What finished McCarthy was his rash decision to resume his attack on the executive branch with a popular Republican in office. Had Eisenhower not been so well liked, a national hero, McCarthy might have won. Demagogues sometimes do.

His genius was for disruption. He was one of those “men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs,” who, as James Madison warned in the Federalist Papers, “may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people.”

Eisenhower seemed a savior from central casting.

Given that he covers policing and criminal justice, “I’m probably more deferential to police than your typical reporter,” Queally said. “I have no problem writing critical stories about them, but I’m going to follow instructions.”

Just two minutes later, LAPD put out a statement on its Twitter account: “As a reminder, members of the media are also to obey the dispersal orders. Members of the media are to use the designated media viewing area.”

“It’s a risk when you’re covering a crowd-control situation that you’re going to be among the people police are going after,” he said, but arrests and police violence toward journalists could make some reporters think twice about covering future unrest.

Earlier this month, Republican commissioners in one Ohio county sought to block the county election board's purchase of new Dominion equipment. A Dominion employee who was forced into hiding due to death threats has sued Giuliani, Powell and the Trump campaign. Another voting systems company, Smartmatic, has also filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News.

Some see these legal fights as another way to take on viral misinformation, one that's already starting to show some results although some journalists are uneasy that a news organization could be targeted.

Skarnulis hopes that in addition to helping Coomer clear his name and return to a normal life, the suits will also serve as a warning.

The number of defamation lawsuits and the large damage claims associated with them is novel, said journalism and public policy professor Bill Adair, head of the journalism program at Duke University.

He does worry that using defamation suits to combat untruths spread by media outlets could become a weapon against journalists just doing their jobs. "As a journalist, I'm a little bit nervous. The idea of using defamation lawsuits makes us a little bit concerned."But even with that discomfort, Adair has come to believe the lawsuits do have a role to play.

The defamation suits already do appear to be having an effect. An anchor for Newsmax walked out on a live interview with My Pillow CEO Lindell when he started making unsubstantiated claims about Dominion voting machines. Fox News, the Fox Business Network and Newsmax also aired segments that contradicted the disinformation their own hosts had amplified.

Last month, Fox Business also cancelled a show hosted by Trump ally Lou Dobbs, who had amplified the conspiracy theories and interviewed Powell and Giuliani about them.

One challenge for the plaintiffs is that defamation lawsuits are difficult to win. They need to show the person they're suing knew a statement was false when she made it, or had serious doubts about its truthfulness.

Media organizations have a First Amendment right to report the news, and that includes repeating what important people say, even if those statements are false, said George Freeman, the former in-house counsel for The New York Times, who now heads the Medial Law Resource Center.

Pro-Trump outlets are likely to claim that constitutional protection for their defense but Freeman believes they may have crossed a legal line in their presentation of election fraud claims and in some instances applauding obvious falsehoods.

Still Freeman said he thinks the strongest defamation cases aren't against the media companies, but against one of the people they gave a lot of airtime to, Rudy Giuliani.

In a January call announcing the lawsuit against Giuliani, Dominion's attorney, Tom Clare, said that the court can consider circumstantial evidence too. The complaint includes a detailed timeline that shows Giuliani continued to make his claims in the face of public assurances from election security experts, hand recounts, and numerous court rulings rejecting fraud cases.

While the current lawsuits could have an impact in this instance, experts on misinformation say there are several reasons why defamation cases aren't a central tool in the fight against falsehoods.

Many conspiracy theories don't target a specific person or company, so there's no one to file a lawsuit against. Legal action is also expensive. Coomer's legal team expects his bills will exceed $2 million. And when a victim does sue, a case can take years.

The parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting have filed multiple defamation lawsuits against Alex Jones of the conspiracy site, InfoWars. But after numerous challenges and delays, the cases are all still in the pre-trial phase. With Dominion and Smartmatic vowing not to settle before they get their day in court, this approach to fighting election misinformation may still be grinding forward even as the country enters the next presidential election. But for Adair and others, any effort to discourage future misinformation campaigns is worth pursuing.

Reporters have learned to spend more time focusing on victims, rather than perpetrators. It was a shift that played out vocally on social media, as readers on Twitter implored news organizations to focus more on the people who were killed in the Atlanta shootings, as well as the uptick in crimes against Asian-Americans, rather than the gunman’s supposed motive.

ournalists are usually expected to set their feelings aside as they gather disinterested facts about a tragic event. But it’s not always possible, and Mr. Holt said that it was important to “report these things as unusual, as not normal.”

“I think it’s OK to be a little pissed off,” Mr. Holt, of “NBC Nightly News,” said. “As a journalist, it’s not an editorial position to be upset or angry at mass murder, of people going about their day, shopping, getting cut down by a stranger. It’s OK to be upset about that.”

“Every journalist goes through tough stories,” he said. “We are not alone with it. It’s just unfortunate that we’ve had in Colorado, a number of these, that have given us, for lack of a better term, training in how to try to deal with these things. But it’s still going to be awful.”

Mr. O’Leary said some of the passengers may have been agents of the Belarusian intelligence service, which is still known by its Soviet-era initials.

The Lithuanian government called for Belarusian airspace to be closed to international flights in response to what it called a hijacking “by military force.”

The Lithuanian police said they had opened a criminal investigation, on suspicion of hijacking and kidnapping. Of 126 passengers who took off from Athens, 121 arrived in Vilnius, the police said. (Officials had earlier said there were about 170 passengers on the plane, and that six had stayed behind in Minsk.)

The Lithuanian police spoke to the pilots after they landed in Vilnius on Sunday evening, Renatas Pozela, the Lithuanian police commissioner general, said in a telephone interview.

swiftly denounce the actions and demand the release of Protasevich.

This further complicates relations between Russia and the U

Russia is a key ally of Belarus, and the arrest comes at a time when President Biden is trying to stabilize relations with Moscow.

"There will come a huge round of pressure to do something really severe on Belarus," English says. "And that will include a lot of people calling for severe actions and more sanctions against Russia, just when Biden is trying to turn the corner with Russia."

The effective barring of Roth from entering Hong Kong is not an isolated incident, happening days after a U.S. photographer covering the pro-democracy protests was also banned from entering the financial hub.

“I think it’s worth stressing that what happened to me pales in comparison to what is happening to the pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Hong Kong. They’re the ones who are facing tear gas, beatings and arrest, and I just had another 16 hour flight [back to New York],” Roth says. “But what it does reflect is a real worsening of the human rights situation in Hong Kong.”

At a press briefing on Monday after the incident involving Roth, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said that “allowing or not allowing someone’s entry is China’s sovereign right,” adding that foreign NGOs were supporting “Hong Kong independence separatist activities.”

“The justification they put forward was laughable, and insulting to the people of Hong Kong,” says Roth. “They don’t need me to tell them to take to the streets — they are looking to defend their own human rights, their own political freedoms and their own rule of law.”

Roth says Beijing’s explanation for barring him shows how fearful the authorities are of demonstrations in the city, and is an attempt to persuade those in the mainland not to emulate the pro-democracy protests. “They simply cannot admit to people on the mainland that hundreds of thousands Chinese citizens would take to the street in opposition to the increasingly dictatorial rule that is coming from Beijing.”

The Chinese government has attempted to deter, track and deport journalists and foreign investigators from reporting on forced indoctrination and detention of at least a million Uighur Muslims in internment camps in China’s western province of Xinjiang, highlighted in Roth’s lead essay in the HRW report.

On Monday, Chinese state media reported that the semi-autonomous region of Tibet would introduce forthcoming regulations to “strengthen ethnic unity;” echoing language used in regulations introduced in Xinjiang four years ago.

Beyond the worrying crackdown within China’s own borders, HRW’s report highlights Beijing’s efforts to deter the international community from scrutinizing its human rights abuses, taking “full advantage of the corporate quest for profit to extend its censorship to critics abroad.”

And at the individual level, the export of censorship is reaching dissidents and even universities in Australia, Canada, the U.K. and the U.S.; the report notes that students from China who wanted to join campus debates felt unable to do so for fear of being monitored or reported to Chinese authorities.

The export of the Chinese censorship system also permeates governments and international institutions, and has “transformed into an active assault on the international human rights system,”

China has also consistently worked with Russia at the U.N. Security Council to block efforts to investigate human rights abuses in Syria, Myanmar and Venezuela. “China worries that even enforcement of human rights standards someplace else will have a boomerang effect that will come back to haunt it,” says Roth.

Aside from China, the report also looks at several other concerning situations around around the world, including civilians at risk from indiscriminate bombing in Idlib province in Syria, the desperate humanitarian crisis resulting from Saudi-led coalition’s actions in Yemen, the refugee crisis emerging from Maduro’s grip on power in Venezuela, and Myanmar’s denial of the genocide of the Rohingya at the International Court of Justice. And while Roth is encouraged by a growing international response to China’s actions in Xinjiang, particularly from Muslim majority nations, there remains much more to be done. From a U.S. perspective, the report notes that strong rhetoric from officials condemning human rights violations in China is “often undercut by Trump’s praise of Xi Jinping and other friendly autocrats,” as well as the Trump-administration’s own policies in violation of human rights, including forced separation at the U.S.-Mexican border.

Earlier this year, Mr. Bolsonaro lashed out at two reporters who asked about a corruption case against one of his sons. He told one he had a “terribly homosexual face” and said to another that he was tempted to smash his face in.

Mr. Cuenca saw his criticism as comparatively high-minded. He said he disdains the Universal Church, which has grown into a transnational behemoth since its founding in the 1970s, because he believes it fueled Mr. Bolsonaro’s rise to the presidency, enabling ecological destruction, reckless handling of the coronavirus pandemic and institutional chaos.“I was totally bored, distracted, procrastinating and angry over politics,” Mr. Cuenca said. “What I wrote was satire.”

Taís Gasparian, a lawyer in São Paulo who has defended several people who faced similar bursts of almost-identical, simultaneous lawsuits, said plaintiffs like the Universal Church abuse a legal mechanism that was created in the 1990s to make the justice system accessible and affordable to ordinary people.

The type of action filed against Mr. Cuenca doesn’t require that a plaintiff hire a lawyer, but defendants who don’t show up in person or send a lawyer often lose by default. Universal Church pastors began a similar wave of suits against the journalist Elvira Lobato after she published an article in December 2007 documenting links between the church and companies based in tax havens.The timing and the striking similarities among the lawsuits filed against Ms. Lobato and Mr. Cuenca make it clear they were copy-paste jobs, Ms. Gasparian said.

The protests marked the end of a tense week that saw two major police violence cases just as the law was being reviewed by France's lower chamber, the National Assembly.

Police cleared a migrant camp in central Paris on Monday, brutalizing in the process several journalists, including "Brut" reporter Remy Buisine. The images of the violence went viral on social media, raising scrutiny of the government's plans to make those images illegal.

Yet nothing in French law requires journalists to seek the permission of the police before covering a protest.

On Thursday night, online media site Loopsider published footage showing the beating of a Black music producer, Michel Zecler, in and outside his studio by several police officers.The video has been watched over 13 million times on Twitter, with many public figures, including international soccer players Antoine Griezmann and Kylian Mbappe, calling out the police violence.

President Emmanuel Macron denounced "images that bring shame upon us," while asking his government to "quickly make proposals" to "fight more effectively against all forms of discrimination."

"On one hand, citizens are asked to accept the possibility of being filmed under the pretext that they have nothing to fear if they have done nothing wrong. And at the same time the police refuse to be filmed, which is a right in every democracy in the world."

How did this happen? How did cultural globalization in the twentieth century travel along such a one-way path?

For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. The delegation wanted to extend into the international sphere the classic liberal notion of press freedom, which would prohibit governments from censoring the news and enshrine the rights of journalists to access sources and to dispatch the news across borders.

Carlos Romulo, the legendary Philippine diplomat and journalist who had uncovered Japanese atrocities in his country, went so far as to call freedom of information the “touchstone of all the freedoms to which the UN is consecrated.” World War II had been horrifying in scale and severity; information barriers were believed to have played a part. Japan’s and Germany’s bids for autarky had insulated their citizens from global currents, incubated aggressive nationalism, and, from the perspective of American policymakers, driven the world into war.

The answer, Sam Lebovic’s new book, A Righteous Smokescreen: Postwar America and the Politics of Cultural Globalization, convincingly argues, largely comes down to American policy in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

But when 600 or so journalists, media magnates, and diplomats arrived in Geneva in 1948 to draft the press freedom clauses for both the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, definitional difficulties abounded. Between what the U.S. meant by “freedom of information” and what the rest of the world needed lay a vast expanse.

By 1949, American films made up around half of the European and Asian markets, 62 percent of the African market, 64 percent of the South American market, and three-quarters of the Central American and Pacific markets.

Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. S.A. Brelvi of India called for the wealthier nations to equitably allocate the “supplies of physical facilities and technical equipment for the dissemination of information between all countries.” But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press

The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.

The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.

But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns. The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63 percent of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year. A materials shortage would hamper newspaper production across much of the world into at least the 1950s (though this did provide the fringe benefit of enabling political interference with the press: The CIA supplied Italian anti-Communist newspapers with newsprint in the lead-up to the 1948 election, while the U.S. occupation administration in Japan cut the allocation of newsprint to local Communist newspapers). The war had also laid low foreign news agencies—Germany’s Wolff and France’s Havas had disappeared entirely—and not a single news agency called the global south home. At the same time, America’s Associated Press and United Press International both had plans for global expansion,

The focus of A Righteous Smokescreen is broader. It is a study of both sides of the globalization ledger: As the U.S. exported its culture in astonishing amounts, it imported very little

it remained surprisingly cut off from the rest of the world. A parochial empire, but with a global reach.

Containment, Lebovic shows, wasn’t just a territorial strategy committed to holding back Soviet expansion into Europe and Asia. Rather, it began at the American border and it involved policing the flow of people and ideas that were potentially inimical to the American status quo

An Iron Curtain, to rejig Churchill’s famous speech about Soviet policies in Eastern Europe, had descended around the U.S.

can be seen in the American national security state’s efforts to block out “propaganda.”

Throughout most of the second half of the twentieth century, Americans had to seek government approval to purchase magazines, books, and even stamps from China, North Korea, Cambodia, Cuba, and Vietnam.

An untold number of parcels—untold because for several years of the program they didn’t have to notify would-be recipients that the government had decided to destroy their mail—never arrived at their American destination.

even without direct state interference, American culture had inward-looking tendencies

Few of the films shown in American cinemas were foreign (largely a result of the Motion Picture Production Code, which the industry began imposing on itself in 1934; code authorities prudishly disapproved of the sexual mores of European films)

Few television programs came from abroad (about 1 percent, in fact, in the early 1970s—compared to 12 percent in Britain and 84 percent in Guatemala)

Few newspapers subscribed to foreign news agencies. Even fewer had foreign correspondents. And very few pages in those papers were devoted to foreign affairs.

In 1910, nearly 15 percent of the American population had been born overseas, but by 1960, that portion shrank to only 5.4 percent. Similarly, bureaucrats in the burgeoning national security state kept a variety of radicals from entering and leaving the country. Since World War I, foreign anarchists, Communists, and others—ranging from German spies and saboteurs to Black internationalists—found the gate to the U.S. bolt-locked. Likewise, Americans whom the State Department identified as holding so-called “alien” beliefs were barred from the exits.

In-person contact with foreigners was limited, too, thanks to travel controls.

Two exhibitions, one in the U.S., the other in the Soviet Union: Yet neither artist could attend their own exhibition because of American border policies. The State Department had denied Picasso a visa back in 1950 on ideological grounds, and it refused to issue a passport to Kent because of his alleged sympathies for communism.

So-called “area restrictions” forbade all Americans from traveling to countries in the Communist bloc.

in the 1940s and ’50s, hundreds or even thousands of Americans—more precise data from the innards of the national security state is rather difficult to come by—were denied passports and many, many more never thought to apply for one in the first place, out of fear of what a background check might turn up.

(about half of all foreign scientists who sought to enter the U.S. in the early postwar years encountered visa difficulties).

how “actively engaged” was the U.S., really? The answer in Menand’s exploration of culture in the early Cold War is: very. Menand points to the rest of the world’s ravenous consumption of American entertainment as evidence, as well as how Americans “welcomed and adapted art, ideas, and entertainment from other countries”

as Louis Menand notes on the first page of his recent book, The Free World, it was an era in which “the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world.”

in Lebovic’s telling, this was a narrow stream. A lot of its contents were foreign imports that had already been thoroughly Americanized.

The flow of foreign culture and ideas into the U.S. was so limited that building bridges with the rest of the world became an important impulse of the social movements of the 1960s and ’70s,

The city said 95 percent of its adults were vaccinated by July. In the latest wave, it had reported 2,017 confirmed cases by Monday and no deaths.

The tragedies in Xi’an have prompted some Chinese people to question how those enforcing the quarantine rules can behave like this and to ask who holds ultimate responsibility.

“It’s very easy to blame the individuals who committed the banality of evil,” a user called @IWillNotResistIt wrote on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. “If you and I become the screws in this gigantic machine, we might not be able to resist its powerful pull either.”

Chinese intellectuals are struck by how many officials and civilians — often driven by professional ambition or obedience — are willing to be the enablers of authoritarian policies.

When the coronavirus emerged in Wuhan two years ago, it exposed the weaknesses in China’s authoritarian system. Now, with patients dying of non-Covid diseases, residents going hungry and officials pointing fingers, the lockdown in Xi’an has shown how the country’s political apparatus has ossified, bringing a ruthlessness to its single-minded pursuit of a zero-Covid policy.

China’s early success in containing the pandemic through iron-fist, authoritarian policies emboldened its officials, seemingly giving them license to act with conviction and righteousness.

Still, it imposed a very harsh lockdown. Residents were not allowed to leave their compounds. Some buildings were locked up. More than 45,000 people were moved to quarantine facilities.

In Xi’an, there is no author like Fang Fang writing her Wuhan lockdown diary, no citizen journalists Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin or Zhang Zhan posting videos. The four of them have either been silenced, detained, disappeared or left dying in jail — sending a strong message to anyone who might dare to speak out about Xi’an.

“I only cared about whether I had food to eat,” the young man read, according to a widely shared video. “I didn’t take into account the serious consequences my behavior could bring to the community.” The volunteers later apologized, according to The Beijing News, a state media outlet.

Three men were caught while escaping from Xi’an to the countryside, possibly to avoid the high costs of the lockdown. They hiked, biked and swam in wintry days and nights. Two of them were detained by the police, according to local police and media reports. Together they were called the “Xi’an ironmen” on the Chinese internet.

Then there were the hospitals that denied patients access to medical care and deprived their loved ones the chance to say goodbye.

A deputy director-level official at a government agency in Beijing lost his position last week after some social media users reported that an article he wrote about the lockdown in Xi’an contained untruthful information.

In the article, he called the lockdown measures “inhumane” and “cruel.”

Some residents took to the internet to complain that they didn’t have enough food.

The Xi’an lockdown debacle hasn’t seemed to convince many people in China to abandon the country’s no-holds-barred approach to pandemic control.

A former athlete who is disabled and suffering from a series of illnesses cursed Fang Fang for her Wuhan diary in 2020. Last month, he posted on his Weibo account that he couldn’t buy medicine because his compound in Xi’an was locked down. His problems were solved, and now he uses the hashtag #everyoneinpositiveenergy and retweets posts that attack Ms. Zhang, the former journalist.

“A needle size loophole can funnel high wind,” he said.

Her words made me realize that Chernov’s film left me feeling something that was quite the opposite of futility. Morgan, like Chernov, is a journalist committed to going to and staying in the hard places, the painful ones, and telling the stories of the people she finds there. These brave journalists do this work not because they think they can make an immediate difference, but because doing nothing in the face of such cruelty is intolerable. Their work is humbling, inspiring and necessary. It demands and requires our rapt attention.

Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.

“He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.

“His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.

Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.

According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.

On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.

He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.

“I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.

“I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”

A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.

“His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”

“Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.

The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”

Investigating and calling out a magazine and editor for which I felt empathy, and had historic connections to, hearing from its critics and dissidents, and finding whistleblowers and confidential inside sources was a challenge. But hearing responses from all sides was a duty.

I worked on it for six months, settling a first draft of my story to the CJR‘s line editor in the summer 2019. From then on my experience of the CJR was devastating and damaging.

After delivering the story and working through a year-long series of edits and re-edits required by Pope, the story was slow-walked to dismissal. In 2022, after Russian tanks had rolled towards Kyiv, I urged Pope to restore and publish the report, given the new and compelling public interest. He refused.

he trigger for my CJR investigation was a hoax concerning Democratic Party emails hacked and dumped in 2016 by teams from Russia’s GRU intelligence agency.  The GRU officers responsible were identified and their methods described in detail in the 2019 Mueller Report.  

The Russians used the dumped emails decisively – first to leverage an attack on that year’s Democratic National Convention; and then to divert attention from Donald Trump’s gross indiscretions at critical times before his election

In 2017, with Trump in the White House, Russian and Republican denial operations began, challenging the Russian role and further widening divisions in America. A pinnacle of these operations was the publication in The Nation on 9 August 2017 of an article – still online under a new editor – claiming that the stolen emails were leaked from inside the DNC.  

Immediately after the article appeared, Trump-supporting media and his MAGA base were enthralled. They celebrated that a left-liberal magazine had refuted the alleged Russian operations in supporting Trump, and challenged the accuracy of mainstream press reporting on ‘Russiagate’

Nation staff and advisors were aghast to find their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets – Fox News, Breitbart, the Washington Times. Even the President’s son.

When I was shown the Nation article later that year by one of the experts it cited, I concluded that it was technical nonsense, based on nothing.  The White House felt differently and directed the CIA to follow up with the expert, former senior National Security Agency official and whistleblower, William Binney (although nothing happened)

Running the ‘leak’ article positioned the left-wing magazine strongly into serving streams of manufactured distractions pointing away from Russian support for Trump.

I traced the source of the leak claim to a group of mainly American young right-wing activists delivering heavy pro-Russian and pro-Syrian messaging, working with a British collaborator. Their leader, William Craddick, had boasted of creating the ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy story – a fantasy that Hillary Clinton and her election staff ran a child sex and torture ring in the non-existent basement of a pleasant Washington neighbourhood pizzeria. Their enterprise had clear information channels from Moscow. 

We spoke for 31 minutes at 1.29 ET on 12 April 2019. During the conversation, concerning conflicts of interest, Pope asked only about my own issues – such as that former editor Victor Navasky, who would figure in the piece, had moved from running and owning The Nation to being Chair of the CJR board; and that the independent wealth foundation of The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel – the Kat Foundation – periodically donated to Columbia University.

In the series, writer Jeff Gerth condemns multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on Russian interference operations by US mainstream newspapers. Echoing words used in 2020 by vanden Heuvel, he cited as more important “RealClearInvestigations, a non-profit online news site that has featured articles critical of the Russia coverage by writers of varying political orientation, including Aaron Maté”.

On the day we spoke, I now know, Pope was working with vanden Heuvel and The Nation to launch – 18 days later – a major new international joint journalism project ‘Covering Climate Now!‘

Soon after we spoke, the CJR tweeted that “CJR and @thenation are gathering some of the world’s top journalists, scientists, and climate experts” for the event. I did not see the tweet. Pope and the CJR staff said nothing of this to me. 

Any editor must know without doubt in such a situation, that every journalist has a duty of candour and a clear duty to recuse themselves from editorial authority if any hint of conflict of interest arises. Pope did not take these steps. From then until August 2020, through his deputy, he sent me a stream of directions that had the effect of removing adverse material about vanden Heuvel and its replacement with lists of her ‘achievements’. Then he killed the story

Working on my own story for the CJR, I did not look behind or around – or think I needed to. I was working for the self-proclaimed ‘watchdog of journalism’. I forgot the ancient saw: who watches the watchdog?

This week, Kyle Pope failed to reply to questions from Byline Times about conflicts of interest in linking up with the subjects of the report he had commissioned.

During the period I was preparing the report about The Nation and its editor, he wrote for The Nation on nine occasions. He has admitted being remunerated by the publication. While I was working for the CJR, he said nothing. He did not recuse himself, and actively intervened to change content for a further 18 months.

On April 16 2019, I was informed that Katrina vanden Heuvel had written to Pope to ask about my report. “We’re going to say thanks for her thoughts and that we’ll make sure the piece is properly vetted and fact-checked,” I was told

A month later, I interviewed her for the CJR. Over the course of our 100 minutes discussion, it must have slipped her mind to mention that she and Kyle Pope had just jointly celebrated being given more than $1 million from the Rockefeller Family and other foundations to support their climate project.

Pope then asked me to identify my confidential sources from inside The Nation, describing this as a matter of “policy”

Pope asked several times that the article be amended to state that there were general tie-ups between the US left and Putin. I responded that I could find no evidence to suggest that was true, save that the Daily Beast had uncovered RT attempting cultivation of the US left. 

Pope then wanted the 6,000-word and fully edited report cut by 1,000 words, mainly to remove material about the errors in The Nation article. Among sections cut down were passages showing how, from 2014 onwards, vanden Heuvel had hired a series of pro-Russian correspondents after they had praised her husband. Among the new intake was a Russian and Syrian Government supporting broadcaster, Aaron Maté, taken on in 2017 after he had platformed Cohen on his show The Real News. 

On 30 January 2023, the CJR published an immense four-part 23,000-word series on Trump, Russia and the US media. The CJR‘s writers found their magazine praised lavishly by normally rabid outlets. Fox News rejoiced that The New York Times had been “skewered by the liberal media watchdog the Columbia Journalism Review” over Russiagate”. WorldNetDaily called it a “win for Trump”.

Pope agreed. Trump had “hailed our report as proof of the media assault on Trump that they’ve been hyping all along,” he wrote. “Trump cheered that view on Truth Social, his own, struggling social-media platform

She and her late husband, Professor Stephen Cohen, were at the heart of my reporting on the support The Nation gave to Putin’s Russia. Sixteen months later, as Pope killed my report, he revealed that he had throughout been involved in an ambitious and lucratively funded partnership between the CJR and The Nation, and between himself and vanden Heuvel. 

As with The Nation in 2017, the CJR is seeing a storm of derisive and critical evaluations of the series by senior American journalists. More assessments are said to be in the pipeline. “We’re taking the critiques seriously,” Pope said this week. The Columbia Journalism Review may now have a Russia Problem.