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Illinois lawmakers consider bill to limit volume for ads on streaming services

22 hours 44 minutes ago
SPRINGFIELD, Ill.(WCIA) — Illinois lawmakers said they’re hearing complaints from residents who report that commercials on streaming services can be louder than the shows or movies they’re watching. Now, a proposal in the Illinois Senate aims to address that issue. Illinois Senate Bill 3222 (SB3222), sponsored by State Sen. Doris Turner (D-Springfield), would require streaming [...]
Joshua Hightower

Southwest Airlines to discontinue service to O’Hare Airport

22 hours 56 minutes ago
CHICAGO — Southwest Airlines has announced that it will discontinue service to O’Hare Airport this year. Southwest announced Friday that it would be discontinuing service to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on June 4. A spokesperson for the airline said that the decision was made as part of its ongoing efforts to refine its network. According to Southwest, [...]
Gabriel Castillo

Ed Martin probe isn’t enough. Attorney discipline boards must step up

23 hours 16 minutes ago

Last June, Washington’s D.C. Bar members said “not on our watch.” They overwhelmingly rejected Brad Bondi, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, in his campaign for the bar’s presidency. Many feared Bondi would defang the bar’s disciplinary board (which he would not have directly controlled), so his defeat was framed as a triumph for the rule of law.

Some might see this week’s news that the D.C. Bar initiated disciplinary proceedings against disgraced Department of Justice lawyer Ed Martin as validating that sentiment. I’m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong — Martin should be disbarred. Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) partnered with Demand Progress on a complaint last May over his ridiculous threats against people who criticized the Trump administration — including when an article in Wired identified inexperienced employees at the Department of Government Efficiency.

But Martin can’t be the sole sacrificial lamb. If investigations are reserved for attorneys as brazenly lawless as him, that’s quite a low bar (pun intended). There have been plenty of well-founded complaints against Trump administration lawyers filed in Washington and elsewhere since Bondi’s loss. Few go anywhere.

The need to act is clear. A November study found that dozens of courts have called out government lawyers for misrepresentations. Judges are (finally) threatening them with contempt for their antics, but the courage hasn’t spread to disciplinary offices, which have the power to disbar and suspend lawyers.

For example, a disciplinary complaint from FPF against Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr last July detailed Carr’s assistance to President Donald Trump, whose gilded face he wears as a lapel pin, in laundering an alleged bribe through the courts. Carr stalled CBS parent Paramount’s merger with Skydance, finally approving it two days after Paramount paid Trump $16 million to settle his frivolous lawsuit over an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

Hopefully, the Martin investigation is the start of attorney discipline boards showing some backbone.

The D.C. Bar’s December letter dismissing the complaint said the allegations “do not align with the language of those Rules and how they have been applied” by appellate courts, also noting supposed ambiguity in First Amendment law governing broadcasters.

It’s no surprise that there is no precedent specifically prohibiting FCC chairs from helping presidents extort licensees with frivolous lawsuits. The rules are broad because unethical antics are unpredictable. One prohibits “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” Another restricts “Conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.” The First Amendment has nothing to do with the impropriety of facilitating bribery.

The D.C. Bar is not the only one reluctant to stick its neck out. Maryland’s Attorney Grievance Commission ducked another complaint against Carr, from the Campaign for Accountability, about his infamous “easy way or the hard way” ultimatum to pressure Disney to pull Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. Its rules, it said, allow (but don’t require) it to dismiss complaints that aren’t based on firsthand knowledge. It’s not like they were being asked to investigate rumors — Carr’s threat was on a recorded podcast — but they saw an opening to shrivel away and shrank through it.

Virginia’s state bar has joined its cowardly comrades around the Beltway. Last month, federal Judge William B. Porter chewed out prosecutor Gordon D. Kromberg for omitting the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 — which restricts seizures of newsgathering materials — from his warrant application for the January raid of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson’s home. Many experts believe the Natanson raid violated the act, and Porter said he may not have authorized it had the law been disclosed.

The DOJ’s stunt backs disciplinary offices into a corner — if they shy away from actionable complaints, they look like capitulators.

Before Porter gave Kromberg a piece of his mind, FPF filed an ethics complaint against him in Virginia, where he is licensed, about the omission. But the disciplinary board said it’s up to judges to decide whether attorneys have misrepresented the law — a perplexing position when the rules the board enforces expressly obligate lawyers to disclose authority that is adverse to their positions. Virginia cited a similar cop-out to not investigate embattled ex-prosecutor Lindsey Halligan. It’s reminiscent of Florida’s bar concocting a policy of not investigating federal officials to avoid investigating Attorney General Bondi.

We resubmitted the complaint about Kromberg after the judge made his position clear. Crickets.

Yet despite the inaction, the administration sees disciplinary offices as threats (or scapegoats). Last week, it proposed a rule empowering itself to “request” state bars suspend probes of prosecutors so the DOJ can investigate first, presumably from behind its giant North Korea-esque Trump banner. It says it “shall take appropriate action” if requests are ignored.

The proposal is nonsensical. The DOJ can already “request” state bars’ deference, just like I can call Domino’s and “request” free pizza, but there is no “appropriate action” either of us can take to get our way. Federal law says government attorneys are subject to state rules. Ironically, the proposal is so absurd that a lawyer defending it might violate their ethical obligations.

But the DOJ’s stunt nonetheless backs disciplinary offices into a corner — if they shy away from actionable complaints, they look like capitulators, just like the law firms that humiliated themselves by buckling to Trump.

Hopefully, the Martin investigation is the start of attorney discipline boards showing some backbone. We’ll see. FPF filed another complaint last month, with New York’s Attorney Grievance Committee, about government lawyer Sean Skedzielewski’s claims to a federal judge in Chicago that riots by “violent terrorist organizations” justified Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rampage against the First Amendment.

As with regulators facilitating presidential shakedowns, no one ever thought to write a rule prohibiting government lawyers from fabricating terrorist invasions. The easy way out is there for the taking.

Seth Stern

SIUE Campus Community, Alumni and Local Employers Now Have Opportunity to Grow with Google

23 hours 49 minutes ago
EDWARDSVILLE – As part of a system-wide initiative, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville has partnered with Google and the National Association of Higher Education Systems (NASH) to provide Google Career Certificates to students as co-curricular offerings or embedded into academic programs. SIUE students, faculty and staff now have the opportunity to Grow with Google and earn no-cost training licenses in the form of Google Career Certificates and Specialization. SIUE Online Services

Senate panel pushes stricter reporting for foreign funding to US colleges and universities

23 hours 52 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — Members of a U.S. Senate panel expressed bipartisan consensus Thursday that the country should be cautious of “malign” foreign dollars flowing to American colleges and universities, with some Democrats also arguing recent funding cuts undermine the country’s lead in global research. The hearing in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions […]
Shauneen Miranda

GOP cuts in federal food aid scramble passage of long-delayed farm bill

23 hours 52 minutes ago
The U.S. House Agriculture Committee advanced a sweeping farm bill early this month, attempting to revive Congress’ stalled effort to rewrite the nation’s agriculture law the same way it’s been done for decades. But the vote also exposed the fragile coalition that will determine whether the legislation can ever move forward.  Those who watch the […]
Allison Winter

Six more US troops killed in Iran war, in crash of refueling aircraft

23 hours 53 minutes ago
WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense announced Friday that six more American troops have died as a result of the war in Iran, bringing the total to 13 since the conflict began in late February.  U.S. Central Command wrote in an early-morning social media post that a “KC-135 refueling aircraft went down in western Iraq” […]
Jennifer Shutt

Trump Rolls Out White Carpet For White Migrants

23 hours 54 minutes ago
Roughly a year ago — as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism — his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that […]
Tim Cushing

How the powerful hijack ‘doxxing’ to hide the truth

23 hours 55 minutes ago

Government officials have discovered a new tactic for attacking reporting they don’t like: They just call it “doxxing.”

At the federal, state, and local levels, authorities are increasingly stretching the term doxxing beyond recognition to threaten journalists who report about immigration enforcement, potential misconduct by elected and appointed officials, and military actions.

Unfortunately, this reframing of routine journalism as doxxing works all too often exactly as intended, chilling reporting and leaving the public less informed.

Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) recently spoke to four reporters who have firsthand experience facing accusations of doxxing based on their reporting, along with the harassment and legal threats that often followed. We discussed how this tactic works, and how journalists and others can fight back.

“Framing people who are in positions of, frankly, incredible power in the government — which we all pay taxes to and all deserve transparency from — as victims of doxxing for just naming what their roles are and what they’re supposedly doing is a great way to continue to demonize media,” Vittoria Elliott, a reporter for Wired, explained.

Elliott described how she was harassed online and faced legal threats from the Department of Justice after her reporting about the young engineers who held power at DOGE.

Elliott urged news media companies to recognize that journalists now report in an environment where the government is actively attempting to criminalize certain elements of their work. Journalists and media organizations must be “clear eyed” about the risks, she said, and explain the process of journalism to the public, while also doing more to “prepare for the fact that elements of our jobs are going to be recategorized as criminal activity.”

Doug Sovern, a former investigative reporter and political reporter for San Francisco’s KCBS radio, agreed that the “doxxing” label is a tactic of demonization, adding that government officials “also know that some media will back down” when faced with even spurious accusations of doxxing.

After the Federal Communications Commission threatened the license of KCBS for reporting on an immigration raid that happened in public, the station’s corporate owner “started basically spiking interviews,” Sovern said, “out of fear of more reprisal or antagonizing the Trump administration.”

“There’s been no loss of license. Nothing’s happened,” Sovern added. “But there was so much fear on the part of our corporation and their bottom line that it really had a chilling effect on everything we were doing in the political space.”

Gregory Royal Pratt, an investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, spoke about the harassment and threats he faced after a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson condemned him for reporting on a public immigration raid in Chicago. He echoed Elliott and Sovern, explaining that doxxing accusations are “clearly a very deliberate thing meant to intimidate me out of reporting.”

“At least for a moment I thought about it,” Pratt added, “Then it’s like, ‘All right, let’s get back to work.’”

Pratt also hailed as “American heroes” the ordinary people who record immigration agents in public and are themselves often accused of doxxing. “People recording and documenting history as it happens, without interfering, without being violent,” he said, “is really, really important.” He added that journalists and the public “would not be getting the truth out of the federal government without it.”

Charlie Kratovil, the founder and editor of New Brunswick Today, described his legal challenge to Daniel’s Law in New Jersey, which ultimately resulted in a loss before the New Jersey Supreme Court.

Under the law, which prohibits the publication of certain information about government or law enforcement officials, “We’ve seen governments wholesale just remove all kinds of records from the internet that used to be public, whether it’s property records, financial disclosure statements — and for people who are not police, not law enforcement, not judges,” Kratovil said. “The seemingly endless expansion of this is only going to lead to more corruption and more crime and people getting away with it,” he added.

Watch the whole event here.

If you’re a journalist facing online harassment as a result of your reporting, check out Freedom of the Press Foundation’s resource page on preparing for online harassment or request a training with our Digital Security Training team.

Freedom of the Press Foundation

Daily Deal: Luminar Mobile for iOS And Android

23 hours 59 minutes ago
Luminar Mobile is your all-in-one creative companion designed for iOS, Android OS, and Chrome OS. Powered by an intuitive, touch-responsive interface, it lets you enhance photos effortlessly—anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re adjusting lighting, perfecting portraits, or adding artistic flair, Luminar Mobile delivers pro-level results in the palm of your hand. It’s on sale for $20. Note: […]
Daily Deal