Manafort found guilty; Cohen pleads guilty; how presidential coverage is changing
After bang-bang verdicts, newspapers issued historic front pages on Wednesday and reporters rushed to cover a flood of new details about the Trump campaign and presidency.
Here's a brief rundown and look ahead after the conviction of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and the guilty plea of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on campaign finance violations, tax evasion and bank fraud.
- Documents released in Cohen's plea showed Trump’s real estate company authorized paying him $420,000 "in his effort to silence women during the presidential campaign." Then it "relied on 'sham' invoices from Cohen that concealed the nature of the payments," The Washington Post's Carol Leonnig and Michelle Ye Hee Lee reported.
- Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis, says that Cohen is willing to testify that Trump knew of Russia's plans to hack Democratic institutions before they took place, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post reported.
- The New York Times headline for Wednesday: "Pleading Guilty, Cohen Implicates President."
- The Washington Post headline: "Convictions tighten squeeze on Trump."
- The Watergate-themed headline from the New York Daily News: "All The President's Henchmen."
- The New Yorker's Adam Davidson writes that authorities didn't have to be geniuses to find that Trump has been implicated in a criminal conspiracy. "Manafort and Cohen did not commit clever, subtle crimes; they blatantly and crudely lied," Davidson wrote. "In Cohen’s case, it was Trump demanding that a subordinate do the lying."
- Are impeachment or criminal charges against Trump in the offing?
- Reluctant to criticize: House Speaker Paul Ryan said he "needs more information" and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham asserted Tuesday's developments had nothing to do with Russia.
- Blast from the past: Graham in 1999, arguing that impeachment makes sense to cleanse the office. "Impeachment," the South Carolina senator said, referring then to Bill Clinton, "is about restoring honor and integrity to the office."
- On Manafort and Cohen, GOP Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska said: "Neither one of these felons should have been anywhere near the presidency."
In other news
SILENT SAM: When protesters on Monday night toppled Silent Sam, the towering Confederate statue at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, covered the action minute by minute online. Then a lightning strike felled power for the print edition. “We did get the edition out, two hours past deadline, after putting flash drives into things and getting photo editors back in to replace images,” the Tar Heel’s editor in chief, Rachel Jones, tells me. It was the paper’s first deadline of the fall, Jones says, and she was hoping for an earlier closing Wednesday than 2:30 a.m. (h/t Melody Kramer)
FUELING ANTI-IMMIGRANT VIOLENCE: A study suggests Facebook posts stirred hundreds of the 3,335 attacks on immigrants in Germany over two years. “Towns where Facebook use was higher than average … reliably experienced more attacks on refugees,” reported the NYT’s Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, traveling to one such small town.
APPOINTED: Boston Globe business columnist Shirley Leung as the newspaper’s interim editorial editor. She is the first woman of color in the position in the Globe’s 142-year history.
TELL ME SOMETHING GOOD: The Solutions Journalism Network has a list of 4,280 “good news” stories (so far) from various outlets. Google wanted something to give good news to listeners asking for it who have Google Home or Smart Display or the Google Assistant app on their phones. “Tell Me Something Good,” essentially a jukebox of those good stories, rolled out Tuesday.
NO DAILY PAPER IN PITTSBURGH: Starting next week, there will be no Tuesday or Saturday print issues of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the newspaper announced, citing higher operating costs for the switch to five-day-a-week print publication.
LEAD (OR LEDE) OF THE DAY: “Ever since my mom died, I cry in H Mart.” So begins Michelle Zauner’s achingly powerful New Yorker story of dislocation, disappearing tradition and a popular Asian supermarket. It does far beyond tteokguk, peeled garlic and banchan refrigerators. “Am I even Korean anymore,” Zauner asks, “if there’s no one left in my life to call and ask which brand of seaweed we used to buy?” (h/t Theodore Kim)
EXCHANGE: Do you want to win a yearlong fellowship to work on ways to make fact-checking more compelling and shareable? Think alternative story formats. Apply here for the U.S. fellowship in the TrustBuzz program, overseen by the International Center For Journalists. The hosts are the News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and PolitiFact (a partner of the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida).
On Poynter.org
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Not the enemy of the people. By Stacy Brick.
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Help each other: Small things we can do to promote local news. By Kristen Hare.
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How misinformation spreads on this messaging app. By Daniel Funke.
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Have a great Wednesday.
