Is there a constitutional case on Trump's Truth Social posts sale?

 I'm talking about Trump selling faster access to his dementia-laced addled comments.

The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation claim their is, in a new suit. Here's their case: 

The Intercept and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation alleged that the Truth Social offering runs afoul of the First Amendment's guarantee of equal public access to the president's statements and also violates the Fifth Amendment by granting preferential access for "unreasonable sums." The suit asks a federal court in New York to block the president from posting official government information exclusively on Truth Social.

Let's look at both, starting with the Fifth Amendment angle, because I pulled it up first. We normally think about "Pleading the Fifth," but the amendment has more than that, being kind of a grab-bag in a sense. Here it is; note the end:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

OK.

Is it the second-last clause, the due-process clause, or the private property clause, that's being cited?

If the last clause had reverse wording, the case would be a slam dunk. But it doesn't.

Beyond that, if the last clause is the claim, the litigants shut themselves in the foot, IMO, with the "unreasonable sums" claim. They're essentially saying they WOULD pay, but only if "reasonable."

OK, now the famous First:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The only way I see even a possible shot here is if Trump charges some media more than others for the same expedited speed, or grants that to some outlets for free. 

Otherwise, like lawsuits over cutoffs in Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding (ironic because my story link is from NPR) I see no, NO constitutional angle at play. 

NM News bails out Roswell Daily News

Here's the story. NM News, also styled CTRL+P (obviously a PC guy) by its owner and founder, which is best known by me for New Mexico Political Report, decided to "rescue" it.

First, it's no longer daily, in print. 

Second, NM News is not the only people to fellate the NOT A UFO story. Publishers Auxiliary did so a year ago and got called out by me. 

Here's the details.

Per the "about" on its website, it's like Jill Stein trying to pretend to not be an antivaxxer while actually being one. In this case, it's trying to pretend not to push 1947 UFO conspiracy theory while actually doing so.

In July 1947, something streaked out of the sky, hitting the ground outside of Roswell, New Mexico, beginning years of ongoing speculation as to what the object was. According to initial information provided to the Roswell Daily Record by the Roswell Army Air Field, the startling headlines claimed that the military had recovered a flying saucer from a nearby ranch.

Overnight, the story changed from a flying saucer to a weather balloon, and over the ensuing years, that explanation morphed into a military high-altitude surveillance program. Over decades of conspiracy theories that the U.S. government has covered up the possibility that an alien spacecraft and its otherworldly crew were responsible for the 1947 crash. Through it all, and continuing to this day, the Roswell Daily Record was there to report the news and to spark the public interest and fascination with this story.

Wrong. 

The publisher, and owner, is the daughter of a long-term owner who died in 2018. AFAIK, it's the only paper they own.

And, Beck daughter has a reason to peddle this, as did daddy, assuming he did, too.

The paper owns its own UFO store.

Of course, here's the reality.

And, I knew that reality long ago. I also know that, 25 years ago, Roswell boosters were talking about when the city would hit 50,000. Never happened. Population's been basically flat since 1990 and Farmington has just about caught it, while the Farmington metro area is much bigger.

Basically, it's a High Plains/edge of desert community, that has, or it was when built, the largest mozzarella cheese plant in the US if not the world.  But climate change and water owed to Texas on the Pecos and no aquifer of note in the area will ding that. There's some oil there, but not like in the Permian. New Mexico Military Institute is the only other major or semi-major business driver.

And, I wasn't impressed with the Beck daughter's takeover, as also noted in the post from which the above is quoted.

Anyway, here's what I told Pat Davis:

It's bad enough that the Daily Record has peddled that BS with its "on the one hand, then on the other hand" comments on its "about" page. 

It's worse that it has a "merch" page part of the company's website, and that most of the merch being sold is company owned. I'm unaware of the RDN selling any coffee mugs that say "Project Mogul" on them. 

Beyond Project Mogul, I don't think Mack Brazel ever actually called what he claimed had crashed a "flying saucer," either. 

As for the paper, really? The Oily Harvey Yates (his actual name) didn't buy it, and/or isn't starting a Roswell branch of the Artesia paper? 

Best of luck, but seriously, for journalistic integrity, you all need to spin off the merch sales, and also clean up the about page.

Yep, a bushel basket of snark. But also a bushel basket of seriousness.

Craphouse/Gannett/USA Today hop in bed with Palantir?

Gee, what could go wrong with this? Plenty, starting with the "why" of the opening graf:

USA Today Co., the largest newspaper chain in the country, announced Thursday that it is partnering with technology company Palantir to better monetize its customer data.

Assuming Craphouse has little to no restrictions on what Palantir can and will do with that data, including using it outside of the bounds of the deal, shit.

Now, supposedly, all data remains Craphouse's:

[CEO Mike] Reed said that though the company will use Palantir’s tools on its data, the data will remain the property of USA Today Co. 

“All of our data remains our data,” Reed said. “It’s our data. The actions and the intelligence that we utilize takes place on our platform. It’s our (intellectual property). It’s our outcomes.”

Not mentioned? Analytics, metadata, etc.

The story goes on to note that both Fox and Politico parent Axel Springer have already partnered with Palantir. More reason to read them less, too. 

Per the bottom of the piece, it's a conscious decision to, in our AI world, chase AI "clicks" that aren't even real:

The advent of AI has meant that USA Today Co. is essentially serving two audiences — human readers and the AI platforms that surface content to those readers — Reed said. 

“We recognize that we have to create and format content for humans and for machines,” Reed said. “And while we see a change in search-driven behavior, we also see entirely new ways to license, distribute, and monetize the trusted content we produce every day.”

I've long said that "digital dimes" turned into "mobile nickels" with smartphones. To continue the alliteration, I guess it's now "Palantir pennies" coming up. 

More critical thinking, Corey Hutchins, on Colorado new media?

Especially about a hasbara-lying Zionist sack of shit? 

I have followed Hutchins' Substack, Inside the News in Colorado, for about three years. I came across it when noticing all the Berliner-like newspapers on the west side of the Rockies on the I-70 corridor out to the Western Slope, and learned more via him.

Anyway, he's fairly solid fairly often, but sometimes a bit of a miss.

Take his Aug. 8 issue, Five New Colorado Niche Publications. One of them is "The Shomer," on Beehiv. Purports to hunt out antisemitism, but the "about" makes it pretty clear that David Flomberg deliberately swings a big butterfly net to catch anti-Zionism in his antisemitic net.

Flomberg first denies that Israel is committing genocide. And, while he doesn't repeat the mass rape allegations against Hamas (why not?) he does overblow other issues related to Oct. 7, 2023. He of course doesn't tell you that the government of Israel helped create Hamas. 

He DOES, and did at his previous stop, the Colorado Times Reporter, in his last piece, repeat Eretz Israel bullshit:

“Anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitism!” they [liberals, versus traditional right-wing antisemites] proclaim loudly and proudly, reminding everyone within earshot how many Jewish friends they have who “also” hate the State of Israel, just like they do! “We denounce antisemitism in all its forms!” they’ll remind us in the same breath as they educate us on why Jews have no right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

There you are. 

And correct the strikethrough above. In a previous piece at the CTR, he repeats the mass rape bullshit too, from August 2025, after they'd been refuted:

I had a close friend, a woman who had been the victim of sexual violence on multiple occasions. She’s a fierce and outspoken feminist who I admired for her courage and willingness to share her personal stories. And yet, when there was a tidal wave of propaganda flooding social media denying the accounts of women who came forward after the attack, she didn’t bat an eye. She rushed to defend Hamas, embracing the lies; she demand I personally provide her with video evidence of these “so-called rapes.” I was stunned. And it was far from an anomalous experience. It took nearly two years for the United Nations to acknowledge sexual violence was wielded in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and has been inflicted on many hostages since. And in that time, the prevailing sentiment I witnessed in the pro-Palestine movement and its associated Leftist spaces was: “Believe all women. Unless they’re Jews.”

Lying sack of shit. Indeed, just two months after he wrote that piece, Mondoweiss demolished the claims behind it, including the UN work. Indeed, just TWO MONTHS after the Hamas insurgency, Mondoweiss said there was no evidence for this claim.

Sadly, per his editorial tagline there:

David Flomberg is a 7-Time Society of Professional Journalists Award Winner for his editorial and feature writing over the 20+ years he’s been covering Colorado and beyond. His credits include Yellow Scene Magazine, Westword, Boulder Weekly, Downbeat Jazz Magazine, and the Rocky Mountain News, where he was a columnist for the final 7 years of its run.

He has a journalism history and presumably people willing to not research the facts. 

This spring in the CTR, he had a gaslighting definition, full column version of Zionism and anti-Zionism. While he doesn't engage in pseudo-etymology about the name "Palestinian" in that piece, he does use other Zionist tropes about shoving them to the back of the bus.

Here, he claims anti-Zionists try to impose collective guilt on all Jews for actions of the state of Israel. Bullshit in two ways. First, that's what Israel does with Palestinians, so it's projectionism. Section, I certainly don't. And anti-Zionist Jews, nowhere mentioned by him, certainly don't. 

Scratch that, too, as he does mention them in another piece, complete with more gaslighting and strawmanning:

[I]t’s further exacerbated by Jews who are all-too willing to tokenize themselves as “anti-Zionist” and then are trotted out by pro-Palestinian organizations as a “gotcha!” in their anti-Zionism campaigns. And while the numbers of these self-tokenizing Jews are a fraction of the world’s Jewish population, they are highly visible, distorting the perception of uneducated onlookers and making anti-Zionists feel as though their position must be valid because some Jews support it.

Ye fucking gads. "Tokenize" is of course "othering."

Elsewhere, he accuses Palestinians of culturally appropriating the sudra into the keffiyeh. Actually, per Wiki's piece on it, the keffiyeh only largely replaced the fez in the 20th century. As for the sudra itself? Wiki reminds us that the name comes from the Koine Greek "σουδάριον" which in turn comes from the classical Latin "sūdārium." Oops. It adds that the Mishnaic and early-Talmudic era sudra was not worn the same way as a keffiyah, and also that headdresses are attested in the greater Middle East as far back as 2600 BCE. I await Flonberg claiming modern Iraq, as successor to ancient Babylon, is actually part of Eretz Israel.

Circulation "fraud" by Hearst?

 I put the "fraud" in scare quotes because:

First, even in the old Audit Bureau of Circulation days, newspapers cheated and;

Second, annual postal statements aren't notified and have only a requirement to certify that, if you're not a free throw, and are on a second class not third class permit, at least 50 percent of your copies have some charge.

With that said ...

I have heard, secondhand, that Hearst is inserting print copies of its weekly Jasper (Texas) News-Boy in the Beaumont Enterprise and using Beaumont's circ to count for Jasper's.

I do know Jasper does not have a separate website now and instead rolls to a webpage on the Enterprise. 

I'm surprised Cox didn't think about this with Pflugerville and other regional outposts off the Austin Stateless; I do know it did what Hearst did and folded it, Round Rock and Bastrop's websites, and social media sites, into the Stateless even before selling to Craphouse. Maybe they WERE doing this as well. Since Hearst now owns the Stateless, it would have gotten the idea from there.

Plus ça change? 

In any case, since Chris Tomlinson is no longer on Shitter, I don't have to worry about him running flak for Hearst any more. (Surprisingly, the person who told me this didn't know Hearst had bought the Snooze.) 

Robert Wilonsky is back in the journalism saddle

 I knew he had been battling kidney cancer, but didn't realize he had recovered so well as to have returned to the Snooze a full year ago. The Texas Observer reports, as of mid-June.

Personally, I wish he were back at the Dallas Observer. They could surely use another older presence. 

Don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining when you cut pages

About six weeks ago, I noted here that the Gainesville (non-Daily, change your masthead) Register was smarter than the Denton Record-Chronicle by ditching running daily comics, puzzles, advice columns, etc. for three of the six non-Sunday days each week in its two print editions.

Well, now, on to that headline.

In a house editorial in its June 16 issue, the paper says "we miss the comics, too."

Fine.

Then, we get a line of PR bullshit that I assume is CNHI-wide. (Teh Google confirms.)

They said getting rid of them meant more local news.

Bullshit.

What it means is that it LOOKS like more local news because the same amount of local news is part of a newspaper with two fewer pages.

On the front page of the Register, in the same issue, for example? A groundbreaking for a NEW SIDEWALK, a Gainesville City Council story about ongoing discussion of review of the city charter and possible amendments, and ...

A Texas Tribune story about how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality was in the process of setting standards for uses of fracking wastewater. Given that there's no fracking done in the moderate amount of oil and gas drilling in the area, that's irrelevant. They had a state Extension Service story about summer foods, on an inside page, that would have been more appropriate up front.

Oh, other than Reader's Choice "vote for us" ads, the normal almost-nothing on local ads. And, most of those were only 2x3. One one-quarter page, a back page of all 2x3 and that was it.