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Why some newsroom leaders get massive scrutiny, like at WashPost, and others don't, like at ABC News

June 20, 2024

Dateline: One week before…a presidential general election debate, somehow?!

Watching this week…

— Kim Godwin’s ABC, and controversy at her alma mater

— The WashPost Will Lewis scandal embarrassing everyone

— Backlash against NYT editor for normal comments

— Trusting the experts, and anonymous sources

— Great Moments in Racism Apology Journalism

The curious connection between former ABC News president Kim Godwin and Florida A&M

It was a juicy and intriguing story last month that I was shocked didn’t get more media coverage — that the Associated Press finally dug into in a big way last week. “Florida A&M, a dubious donor and $237M: The transformative HBCU gift that wasn’t what it seemed,” was the headline, which looked into the strange circumstances behind a massive donation last month at the Tallahassee HBCU. The gift was from Gregory Gerami, a 30-year-old, Texas-based, hemp industry entrepreneur, whose $237 million donation was the largest ever at an HBCU and bigger than the entire university endowment. It’s no surprise then he was a featured speaker at the commencement ceremony, celebrated in a massive way, and even photographed with one of those giant checks with $237,750,000 literally written on it.

Almost immediately after the ceremony, the whole charade fell apart. The donation was in stock in this dubious hemp company, and potentially worth zero. Shawnta Friday-Stroud, vice president for University Advancement and executive director of the FAMU Foundation, resigned from her position and the school announced an independent investigation, which the Florida board of governors is now overseeing. The whole thing is an absolute embarrassment.

A few local outlets covered the story at the time, as well as some college and philanthropic-focused media outlets. But the AP story was the first to really give it its due, and is worth reading in full — including bizarre quotes from Gerami who is holding strong despite his website, Batterton Farm Corp, being made no longer accessible. But two important words never appear in the AP deep dive, or any of the local reports about the donation snafu: “Kim Godwin.”

Kim Godwin is the now-former president of ABC News, who abruptly “retired” last month. How abruptly? The day before her retirement, in response to some fairly mild reports about tension between her and ABC News employees as well as her newly-appointed boss at Disney, the National Association of Black Journalists released a fiery statement defending her. “We are concerned over recent media reports that seem to be written with the intention of undermining the leadership of the first Black woman to take the helm of a global news organization,” they wrote. They criticized “the use of derogatory or stereotypical terms to describe her” and “racially motivated,” and “racially insensitive language” in the reporting. NABJ, they write, will not “stand idly by and watch the violation of basic journalism principles used to diminish such a historic moment for Black women in news leadership. We will be meeting with ABC News and Disney executives to talk about a path forward.”

The very next day she announced her retirement. But the story was really just beginning — or at least if a curious and courageous media existed, it would be. You see, Godwin’s alma mater is Florida A&M, a point that will become very important here. The day before she “retired,” on the day of the NABJ support letter, Godwin was, according to Puck’s Dylan Byers, directing “two camera crews to Tallahassee to cover the commencement ceremony at Florida A&M University. Godwin’s allocation of not just one but two camera crews to the event, ostensibly to cover the reveal of a record-high $237 million donation to the school, struck some producers and assignment editors as, frankly, ridiculous.” The editorial act may have been Godwin’s final one as the leader of ABC News. In the end, from what I can tell, no piece ever ended up running about the commencement and the massive donation at ABC — a blessing for the journalistic integrity of the network, knowing how the whole ordeal unfolded almost instantly. But it highlights a major issue that few have covered when it comes to Godwin’s tenure at the network.

Godwin is not just an alumna of Florida A&M — she’s a massive booster of the Rattlers, and has been for years. For the commencement before Gerami took the stage, in the Fall of 2023, it was Godwin herself who was delivering the graduation address. Which of course is all fine, except for how the boosterism would often weave itself into her work at the news network. A year earlier, in October 2022, Florida A&M announced a $1 million grant to the journalism school from The Walt Disney Company. And there Godwin was, standing next to the now pushed-aside head of the FAMU Foundation Friday-Stroud, holding another of those giant checks.

During her time running ABC News, the outsized editorial focus on Florida A&M was notable. A June 2022 Good Morning America report on the marching band going to Paris. A January 2023 GMA segment on a Florida A&M professor who went “viral on TikTok.” An entire October 2022 GMA show called “Homecoming” where they broadcast, yes, from the Florida A&M campus during Homecoming weekend. A lot of attention for U.S. News’ #170 ranked college, which has an enrollment of 7,700.

Behind the scenes, Florida A&M was getting outsized, almost laughable, love too. I obtained a screenshot of the summer interns for ABC News last year, and they included 33 students in various positions at the network. A whooping 17 of those students were currently at Florida A&M.

And look, diversity is important. But I have to be honest, when I looked at the list and saw the only white guy out of the 33 was someone named Daniel Dana, I wondered who his parents might be to get him this gig. But after a bit of digging, it turns out Dana was an LGBT influencer.

In another screenshot I obtained of ABC News’ spring intern program that just concluded, no Florida A&M students made up the 17 students. But, well, no white guys made the cut either…

The point here is not that white male students seemed to not have much opportunity to be an intern at ABC News. They didn’t — but who cares, really. What this does illustrate, perhaps, is an element of Godwin’s time running the network that immunized her from scrutiny and criticism by her colleagues in the press. She was protected from critical reporting thanks to statements like the NABJ’s warning shot at the media — and at the Disney bosses — and due to decision-making like the partnership with her HBCU alma mater, which played out in the internship program, and in the editorial decision-making at the network.

At the same time, while identity was a key factor in the discussion about Godwin more broadly (the NABJ statement beginning with “the first Black woman” to run a news network), it wasn’t the only important element — there was ideology too. In February this year, she took the extraordinary step for a newsroom leader of a legacy media outlet to call out former President Donald Trump. Regarding Trump’s comments about why black people like him after his unfair indictments, Godwin wrote the comments were “as racist as they come,” and were “mind blowing” and “shocking.”

There was some reporting on tension at ABC News during Godwin’s time at the helm, but it was mostly muted — and it has disappeared since her exit six weeks ago. Which is noteworthy, since her exit coincided to the exact day with perhaps the biggest collegiate donation scandal in years.

I asked ABC News multiple times whether the Florida A&M donation debacle had anything to do with Godwin’s exit at the network — they didn’t respond. But did it? What did Godwin know about Gerami and the donation? What was she planning with two crews to cover this historic moment? How was she, as a journalist, not the one to stop and ask questions about the legitimacy of this donation in the first place?

Was Godwin running ABC News as a recruitment operation for her alma mater for years, and the Gerami ordeal finally exposed it? I don’t know — but it’s something a hungry journalist (that isn’t currently doing media reporting as a hobby) may be interested in digging into further.

For their part, FAMU sent out a produced video on their X account on the day after Godwin’s retirement announcement. “The FAMUly is so proud of you Mrs. Kim Godwin. Congratulations and Happy Retirement as the first Black woman President of ABC,” they wrote.

And that’s the end of the story — until it isn’t…

The media meltdown over the Washington Post’s new CEO has everyone involved looking terrible

Contrast the relative silence about Godwin’s bumpy ABC run and curiously quick exit with the barrage of reporting this month about Will Lewis, The Washington Post’s CEO and publisher has been under massive scrutiny since he forced the resignation of editor Sally Buzbee late Sunday night June 2. The next day, Lewis addressed an angry newsroom, which, according to Vanity Fair, was particularly mad because Buzbee was gone and “we now have four white men running three newsrooms” — which was the criticism from one reporter, but the general vibe of a lot of the pushback to the decision-making at the top by Lewis.

So a laser focus on identity was what started the ball rolling against Lewis — but he didn’t do himself any favors, either. In the same Vanity Fair report, Lewis is quoted castigating the newsroom, or applying some tough love, depending on your point of view, saying in part, “your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.” This tactic is a leadership failure for someone who has been in the building for six months, even if he hasn’t gotten to truly execute his vision yet. It’s not “your audience” and “your stuff” — it’s “our audience” and “our stuff.”

Meanwhile Lewis continued the descent into alienating his staff following a report by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, that included details about how Lewis and his reps tried to entice Folkenflik to drop his reporting about a past phone hacking scandal involving Lewis among others in exchange for an exclusive interview last month. Lewis responded to that accusation by telling his own reporters in their story about the whole fiasco that Folkenflik is “an activist, not a journalist,” who broke an off the record rule. Folkenflik is not an activist — he’s a journalist, and one of the few good ones reporting on the media these days in the mainstream.

So Lewis surely has inadvertently welcomed some of the criticism recently, and that’s even without weighing in on the facts of the merits of the behavior from his past. His attempt at cleaning up the mess has apparently been largely unsuccessful. And now we get new reporting from The New York Times that he and his handpicked editor, also from the UK, were involved in reporting that used “stolen records.” (And more reporting from the Washington Post itself about potential shadiness involving that editor, Robert Winnett.)

It’s an all-out assault, that seems to have been largely absent for the first five months of his tenure at the Post — and until the Buzbee move, which has angered the establishment press. Folkenflik’s reporting pointed to Dylan Byers’ profile of Lewis back in May as the path Lewis went after he was denied by NPR. Byers doesn’t bring up the phone hacking in his interview, and I asked him if that was a prerequisite for landing the interview. “Of course not. I’ve never agreed to something like that, and I never would,” he told me over X DM, echoing a comment he’s given to other publications.

(I also checked with Ben Smith of Semafor, who interviewed Lewis in January, and who also didn’t bring up the phone hacking story. Ben texted me “no.”)

But Byers has seemed to spin the story in the most favorable light possible for Lewis this month in his reporting about the Buzbee drama. He wrote what was positioned as “the real and surprising story” behind Buzbee’s departure, which was actually that Buzbee chose to turn down a job that she initially agreed to do — essentially laying out the Lewis version of events. As the alarm bells have grown louder, even Byers’ reporting yesterday on Lewis’ “living wake” has a decidedly pro-Lewis spin, describing Buzbee as “the underachieving editor-turned-martyr” and framing the controversy as “high-pitched gossip.”

Byers appears to be alone in his pro-Lewis posture, unlike when he served as Jeff Zucker’s unofficial publicist during the Chris Licht tenure at CNN — with his #Resistance-signaling buddies in the press cheering it on. That’s why, despite the initial “four white guys” pushback, this goes beyond just immutable characteristics. It’s about a philosophy — and one where another white guy like Zucker can be the hero so long as he holds the “correct” point of view… that journalists are the heroes of the Donald Trump story, fighting to save democracy.

Still, it’s somewhere between funny and pathetic to see Margaret Sullivan, one of the more prominent anti-speech activists in the press today, who went from solid journalist to Trump antagonist during the first term, turn to another white guy to “save” the Washington Post in her Guardian column last week:

Begging a billionaire oligarch to “save the Washington Post” by firing a journalist you don’t like just perfectly encapsulates the institutional rot at the center of the industry these days. It’s not working, either — Bezos sent an email this week from aboard his mega-yacht, assuring staff “the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change,” but also subtly making it clear that Lewis isn’t going anywhere. For now — until the next wave of negative press surely on the way.

New York Times exec editor dares to question whether a journalist’s job is to stop Trump

And speaking of newsroom leaders who will inevitably be facing a wave of scrutiny — let’s imagine a scenario where a reporter is interviewing the head of a journalistic institution, asks the boss whether he plans to abandon his objectivity this electoral cycle, and the leader dismisses the idea that “the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.” He goes on to question why the organization should “become an instrument” of the favored campaign, countering the implication that they should “put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side.” In a reality-based media environment, this would be both entirely uncontroversial and the literal definition of the job of a journalist.

But we no longer exist in a reality-based media environment. Large portions of the industry have either abandoned their principles or lost their mind altogether as a side effect of their Trump Addiction, and fear of social media and ostracization among their peer groups. And so we get the fallout from the recent Semafor interview with New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn, who made the comments above to Ben Smith. How dare he! Democracy is on the line, and journalists must save our republic… by no longer practicing journalism. Reporters at the NYT circulated a draft letter responding to Kahn and his critique of the industry, while other media watchers called him out publicly through blog posts and on X. Get in line, Joe!

Because what the political operatives masquerading as journalists really want is what The New Republic did this month. They just went and mashed up Trump and Hitler’s faces and popped that shit on the cover.

Oh yeah, that hits the spot. That’s the kind of cover that gets Toobin in trouble on the next Zoom. That’s pure, uncut, “journalism in 2024.” Brian Stelter got involved in this issue dedicated to “what it would look like,” writing literal fan fiction about how Trump might enact revenge on the media in 2025. Please click the link, if only for the accompanying graphic of a bloody but hot journalist — surely how the “heroes” see themselves in this purely imagined scenario.

Anyway, Joe Kahn, you idiot — don’t you get it? Journalism in 2024 requires you to bow at the alter of fact-free partisanship. A hit piece is surely already in the works…

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Trusting the experts, and the anonymous sources — reasons to be skeptical

Did President Biden break his promise to be a one-term president by running in 2024? That’s complicated. If you look at what he said publicly, it alluded to it without saying so explicitly — describing himself as a “transition” and “bridge” figure. But if you read what anonymous sources said to prominent journalists at the New York Times and Politico in highly-cited pieces in 2019 and 2020, it was far more explicit, with “prominent advisors” and “people who regularly talk to Biden” granted anonymity to say “it is virtually inconceivable” he’d run again. Astead Herndon of the New York Times concluded recently Biden’s surrogates “gaslit” the public, and “may pay for it” in November.

This was the topic of my TheHill column last week, diving into what was said, what wasn’t, and why it matters now.

And speaking of untrustworthy people, there’s Dr. Fauci, who was back in the news earlier this month testifying before Congress. He gave some new reason to be extraordinarily skeptical of “the experts,” which I tracked in a TheHill column looking specifically into the “six feet” social distancing rule, which was championed loudly and without hesitation or curiosity in the Acela media.

One more self-promo link — chatting on NewsNation about what the Trump New York business records conviction will mean for 2024, where I do what you’re not supposed to as a “pundit” and conclude “I don’t know, and anyone who says they do is lying.”

(Today’s column previewed the four potential outcomes of the debate next week.)

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WATCH IT… When a newsletter is long overdue, you get slightly old links. So why not take this time to go way back into the archives, with this brilliant SNL sketch from 2015 that recirculated again recently, for obvious reasons — about a dad dropping her daughter off after her high school graduation, to… join ISIS. Would this sketch air today? A different, and funnier, time… (Or, fast-forward to this week, and enjoy this incomprehensible but hilarious Daily Show interview with Fani Willis paramour Nathan Wade.)

HEAR IT… My friend Will Cain has been using his podcast for more debates in recent months — from a nuanced back-and-forth with the digital content creator Destiny (that ended up taking an interesting turn on marriage), to a smart conversation about America and Ukraine with David Sacks of the All-In Podcast.

READ IT… It’s so rare when you encounter a piece of content that truly surprises these days, so I had to highlight this fantastic look at the anti-natalist movement in the New Yorker from Jay Caspian Kang — a deep dive on the alarming way “liberals talk about children,” and specifically how elite liberals turn off most of the country by framing parenthood as burdensome rather than fulfilling.

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QUICK HITS

• Good look at the latest example of anti-speech activism happening at CNN relating to Tucker Carlson’s upcoming live tour — which you can see in action here.

• Are writers in Hollywood facing a true “existential threat” in 2024 — and what are the circumstances that led to this point? Fascinating Harper’s long-read.

• Interesting story about Mehdi Hasan and his new Zeteo independent media promise, and whether he’s really as interested in intellectually honest debate as he claims.

• The New York Times’ self-investigation into its Israel-Gaza reporting has ended in a way that will surely satisfy no one.

• Are Harvard’s graduates ready to sell out when they enter the workforce? A worthwhile NYT read on Gen Z more broadly.

• Great deep dive by Canadian journalist Tara Henley on the “trust spiral” in the media today.

⏪ REWIND // FAST FORWARD: CNN Debate Edition ⏩

⏪ It was just over a month ago that the Biden and Trump campaigns went around the Commission on Presidential Debates and came up with their own rules for the general election debates they wanted —including one that will be much earlier in the cycle, next week, on CNN.

⏩ What should we expect on Thursday June 27 at 9pm? No audience, “mic muting” when the other candidate is speaking, podiums… we’ll see how it shakes out, but it surely will be a monumental moment in the campaign.

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MORE TK…

Readers of Fourth Watch know I believe UAPs are a massively undercovered topic in the broader media — and so it’ll be one I dive into again in the near future. The story is back in the news this month, with a study out of Harvard positing “aliens” could be living among us here on Earth. But I also like Tyler Cowen’s latest Bloomberg column, where he reframes the “government conspiracy” about UFOs and UAPs, writing, “Officials aren’t suppressing evidence that alien life forms exist, they’re just embarrassed to admit that they don't know.” Doesn’t 2024 feel like the bizarre and unprecedented year this UAP story gets blown wide open?

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GREAT MOMENTS IN JOURNALISM

Yes, this has been sitting in my emails to myself while I gathered content for a long-overdue newsletter for close to two months. Still, enjoy this evergreen 12-minute read…

Thanks for reading, back next week, really…

—Steve