Orlando Weekly Press Club

Orlando Weekly publisher Graham Jarrett on supporting a free press: ‘We are the eyes and ears of your community, but we cannot do it for free’

I seem to have so much to say, and so

little room to say it in … Where do I start? Maybe with the fact that the business model of simply selling ads to support and give away high-quality journalism is broken.

It’s been broken for a while. At Orlando Weekly, we have been working our butts off throwing three-ring circuses (read: elaborate events) to pay for this journalism we give away at no cost to readers because we think information is important and should be available to everyone.

The subscription and paywall model is broken, too. One only needs to look at the carcass of the Orlando Sentinel’s once-sprawling downtown campus to understand that.

Or maybe I should start with the fact that the institution of journalism is under attack and the ideals of a free press are being eroded.

Protection of press was the very first amendment ever to our great constitution because it was deemed vital to protect the citizenry against tyranny. Power breeds corruption, and the institution of the free press was established to peer through the talking points and report truth to the people. In 2019, the U.S. – the originator of this once new, necessary “free press” movement – saw its ranking in the world’s press freedom barometer slip from “acceptable” to “problematic.”

We take our press for granted, but think about it – reporters go unarmed into war zones, or into hostile protests like Charlottesville where people are killed, just to bring us the news. Journalists venture into Wuhan, a city 30 percent larger than New York in the interior of communist China, and live in lockdown just to bring us the story of a mysterious deadly new virus. Newspeople stand outside during the hurricane, so the rest of us can stay a safe distance away.

This is the information we use to make decisions about our lives, our elections, the companies we support, the foods we eat, the places we live, the countries we visit, the airlines we fly, the cruise ships we travel on and on and on. Imagine just being a normal person, and walking into White House press briefings to do your job, and being called names on national TV by the President of the United States, the leader of the free world, the most powerful, highest profile and most influential person in the world. Would you come back for a second day on that job?

And think about how that translates to his followers’ treatment of you when you’re off-duty, walking down the street with your friends and family. Imagine how that feels when, by comparison, he seems to have plenty of respect for the very fine people who chant “Jews will not replace us” and the ruthless, murderous dictators of communist North Korea and Russia. In fact, his neverending attacks and the untrue moniker he’s attached to the “failing New York Times” is exactly the type of propaganda dictators and powerful governments use to discredit detractors – which is exactly what our forefathers established a “free press” to protect against. How often do we show appreciation for the folks that do this? At the very least, the person in the highest office of the birthplace of free press should be its strongest advocate. But times have changed.

So imagine what it would be like without professional reporters and news outlets. Imagine if the only information we had on COVID-19 was coming straight from our government – no stories filed from hospitals or meatpacking plants or Italy; no stories interviewing victims or survivors or first responders. Imagine if no one were there to broadcast live during 9/11 or if it were up to BP to tell us about their oil spill and Boeing to report on its plane defects.

Imagine someone barging into your workplace, angry, targeting you for what you do. It happens. Has it slipped your mind that five journalists lost their lives at The

Capital in Annapolis, Maryland? You may think that’s an extreme case and it doesn’t relate to our local media, but at Orlando Weekly we were forced to change our security protocol after a couple too many angry readers barged in, shouting profanities, searching for particular writers, even threatening to find their families.

Were you outraged and sickened when Jamal Khashoggi was brutally butchered in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, and the U.S., the supposed protector of free press, did absolutely nothing? How would you feel if you were just a normal person, living in Orlando, doing your job and you were featured on hate-group websites targeting people in your profession? Orlando Weekly journalists have firsthand experience of that.

Journalists aren’t perfect. No one is. But we do what we do because we believe in our mission. We believe journalism is necessary for a healthy society. We believe government and the powerful must be held accountable.

And we do it despite retaliation, and Orlando Weekly

has had its fair share of retaliation. Were you in Orlando, or do you remember when OW staff was arrested in front of the local news cameras? You’d probably be surprised at some of Orlando’s most “progressive” and powerful who pulled their advertising in an attempt to censor us.

It’s not all bad, though. In fact, it’s pretty freaking good a lot of the time. We also get to be in the heart of the community we love. We believe in our culture, in our arts, our music, our dining and nightlife. We love experiencing and writing about it and sharing it so as many people as possible will know about it. I cannot tell you how often people say when they moved to Orlando they had a certain perception of it and then they found the Weekly and their eyes were opened to what an incredible place this is to live.

We do get some appreciation, but seldom in the form of financial patronage that helps sustain us, like most businesses get from those whom they serve. So if you appreciate us, I hope you will consider joining our Press Club and showing that you care about local journalism and that you not only want to see it survive, but see it thrive. 100 percent of the proceeds will go toward our editorial efforts (not to events or promotions or whatever else). That’s it. It will keep the writers writing, bringing Orlando as much information as we possibly can – the good, the bad, the ugly; the news, the culture and the Disney.

Yeah, this COVID-thing is tough. It’s really tough. Ad revenues are down 75 percent, and event revenues are gone completely for now. But even when it’s over, we’re going to need your help, just like the restaurants and bars and retail establishments. We all need the support of the people we serve.

Our model’s been broken for a long time, and it’s time to create a new one. We’re hoping you will join us in creating a reader-supported model. Join our club. Commit to a recurring donation so we have adequate resources for editorial even after this moment has passed. Even for our relatively small operation, it is incredibly expensive to produce this amount of free content week in and week out. It’s a funny thing but people who work expect to get paid! (And well, we agree.) Go to orlandoweekly.com/support and be part of this new free-press movement.

And while you’re at it, think about subscribing to the New York Times or even the Orlando Sentinel. We aren’t just “businesses” that need support to survive – we are your eyes and ears to your community and to the world, and we cannot do it for free. And no news is really bad news.

Our small but mighty team is working tirelessly to bring you hyperlocal news every day. Please consider supporting this free publication by joining the Orlando Weekly Press Club at orlandoweekly.com/ supportlocaljournalism. Every little bit helps.

OFFICIAL WHITE HOUSE PHOTO BY SHEALAH CRAIGHEAD

UNMASKED ‘Obamagate’ is 2020’s version of birtherism-meets-Hillary’s-emails

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

Michael Flynn is neither the hero nor the victim in this story.

Rather, like so many in President Trump’s orbit, he’s a means to an end – in this case, the White House’s attempt to rewrite its history of failure.

Flynn was Trump’s first national security adviser for 24 days before being fired. He later pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian ambassador. Last year, however, he began claiming that he’d been set up by the deep state, and he found a sympathetic ear in new attorney general and Trump sycophant William Barr.

On May 7, the Department of Justice moved to dismiss charges against Flynn, claiming that the government could not prove he lied (though he admitted it), and even if he did, his lies weren’t “material.” More than that, the DOJ’s filing was a searing attack on both the FBI and the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation itself. The two were connected, after all.

The day after Trump fired Flynn, he pressured thenFBI director James Comey to drop the case against him. Comey refused, and Trump’s later decision to fire him led to Mueller’s appointment and an investigation that consumed two years of Trump’s term.

No sooner had DOJ brass intervened in the Flynn case than Trump promised recriminations: “I hope a lot of people are going to pay a big price because they’re dishonest, crooked people. They’re scum – and I say it a lot, they’re scum, they’re human scum.”

He didn’t identify the “scum,” but within days, the hashtag #Obamagate began trending, promoted by Trump himself. In Trump’s words, it was the “biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the USA, by FAR,” though he never articulated what that crime was. No matter. The overarching idea is that the Obama administration engaged in an elaborate anti-Trump conspiracy, beginning with an investigation into Russian interference during the 2016 campaign.

The proof, Trump and his allies say, lies in Flynn’s “unmasking,” a term opaque enough to sound sinister.

Unmasking works like this: The U.S. government can’t spy on citizens without a warrant. But when it surveils foreign targets, it records their conversations with Americans. In intelligence reports, Americans’ names are replaced by “a U.S. person.” Administration officials can seek to “unmask” the name if they think it’s important; this happens thousands of times a year.

Last week, three Republican senators released a list of 30 officials who had unmasked Flynn between the 2016 election and the inauguration. Some were lower-level intelligence agents or individuals attached to NATO. Other requests came from the administration’s upper echelon, including the CIA and FBI directors, Obama’s chief of staff, and Vice President Joe Biden. These seem tied to conversations Flynn had with Sergei Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S., on Dec. 29, 2016.

That day, Obama had expelled 35 Russian agents in retaliation for election interference. In five calls with Kislyak, Flynn assured him that the next administration would ease sanctions and urged Russia not to retaliate in kind. Intelligence officials requested that the U.S. person be unmasked. These requests went through the proper channels. There was nothing illegal or improper about them.

The crime, such as it is, was that someone leaked news of Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak to the Washington Post. Leaks happen every day, and this wasn’t exactly the Pentagon Papers. But it set things in motion. Vice President Mike Pence and press secretary Sean Spicer said that Flynn denied speaking to Kislyak about sanctions. Intelligence officials knew that wasn’t true.

At this point, the FBI was about to close its counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Flynn’s calls, however, opened a new line of inquiry. And if Flynn was freelancing, they thought he might be vulnerable to blackmail. When they questioned him, he lied.

The DOJ now says his lies are irrelevant because the entire investigation was illegitimate.

So committed is Barr to Trump’s exoneration that he handpicked a U.S. attorney, John Durham, to investigate the investigators, undercut Mueller’s findings, and – fingers crossed – charge some of those who handled the investigation. (Barr said Monday that Durham was unlikely to go after Obama or Biden, but he’s proven pusillanimous in the face of Trump’s tantrums.)

If you don’t think this a conclusion in search of evidence, consider what a DOJ spokesperson told Fox News about unmasking: “I can tell you that [Durham’s] team is working diligently to get to the bottom of what happened. Because, Martha, what happened to candidate Trump and then President Trump was one of the greatest political injustices in American history and should never happen again.”

Trump wants vindication – and vengeance. It’s not just that his election carries the asterisk of Russian interference. It’s that Obama has been renting space in his head since his 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner mockery. Try as Trump might to erase his predecessor’s legacy and diminish his record, Obama is still the most popular politician in the country.

Trump is already running the most vicious campaign in modern history: pushing conspiracy theories, calling Biden senile, attacking whistleblowers, threatening tech companies, attacking journalists. This week, two of Trump’s sons insinuated that Biden was a pedophile. (FWIW, unlike Trump, Biden has never been sued for allegedly raping a child.)

By associating Obama with an opaque but ominous-sounding pseudo-scandal, Trump probably hopes to bring Joe Biden’s best surrogate down a notch or two. The ginned-up indignation over Hillary Clinton’s email server showed how effective these attacks can be, and how willing much of the media is to play along.

But the martyrdom of Michael Flynn is about more than that. It’s fuel for the white grievance that Trump believes will animate his base, a way to stoke resentment against the African American president whom he blames for his problems.

This is Trump’s comfort zone. With more than 90,000 Americans dead and 36 million out of work, it’s also the only card he has to play. feedback@orlandoweekly.com