Betsy Morais
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Articles by Betsy Morais
I Don’t Want My Trump TV
Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Guards have stopped reporters at the door, but there is a new clip show set to “Video Killed the Radio Star,” starting, naturally, with Jesse Pinkman, the ne’er-do-well survivor of Breaking Bad, and with appearances by the Seinfeld gang, the Friends friends, and the Office workers. You guessed it: we’re on the official White House dot gov website, and it’s the Monday after Donald Trump has banned CNN, MS Now, and Politico from the grounds.
Reporting the Platner Allegations
Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Back in April, Susie Banikarim wrote for CJR about Cheyenne Hunt, a lawyer and former congressional candidate, who played a role in surfacing allegations from several women that Eric Swalwellâa Democrat from California who was a front-runner for governorâhad sexually assaulted or harassed them.
The Access Issue
Our media moment might be defined by a certain paradox: Society has become increasingly fractured, such that people get their news and entertainment from a wider array of sources, each of them appealing to a community or niche. At the same time, much of that mediaâparticularly when it concerns newsârises or falls on the level of access to influential figures.
Who Sets the Narrative of Public Life
Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. Do you remember where you were ten years ago, when a 2005 video leaked from Access Hollywood in which Donald Trump told Billy Bush, a former host of the show, that when youâre a star, âyou can do anythingâ? Specifically, Trump was referring to assaulting women: âGrab âem by the pussy.â It was October (surprise!), two days before the second debate of the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump was to face Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Become a CJR member today—our work depends on you.
Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter. If you are reading this, you have very likely noticed that the news industry is undergoing extraordinary challenge and change.
Assaults on press freedom, at home and abroad.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about Mario Guevara, whose case represented "a singular and devastating blow to this country's commitment to freedom of the press" and also had a near-allegorical feeling, of forces closing in. This week, Jem Bartholomew writes about a new report shared with CJR by the US Press Freedom Tracker, led by the Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), which documented thirty-two instances of journalists being arrested or charged for doing their jobs in America in 2025.
Introducing the Journalism 2050 Issue.
Several months ago, over discussion with colleagues from Columbia's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, a question was posed: What will the news feel like in 2050? Immediately, we thought back to twenty-five years ago. How young we were in 2000, when LiveJournal was new, Talking Points Memo started up, and Y2K style was original. Google had been founded two years earlier; Gawker was two years away.
Introducing CJR’s incoming editor in chief.
Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. On June 14, a journalist named Mario Guevara stepped out into the street—Chamblee Tucker Road in Doraville, Georgia, north of Atlanta. Guevara, who is forty-eight, wore a red polo, jeans, and sporty sunglasses, black-rimmed with lenses tinted greenish-blue. He also had on a black helmet and press vest, indicating himself plainly as a reporter.
Journalists Attest to Experiences of Sexual Misconduct with Wesley Lowery
Sign up for The Media Today, CJRâs daily newsletter. Disclaimer: This story includes graphic depictions of sexual assault that some may find disturbing. If you need support, contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or access its online chat at online.rainn.org.
The PSAi
Sign up for The Media Today, CJRās daily newsletter. AI has already begun to transform the environment for news and information. Several months ago, CJR embarked on a project with TBWA\Chiat\Day, the ad agency, to use AI as a tool to spot AI visuals as fakesāand to highlight the role everyone plays in making them go viral. Since 1961, CJR has advocated for best practices in the journalism community, and we believe in strong standards for verification, transparency, and media literacy.
The Synthetic Media Issue
The Synthetic Media Issue Depending on the context, AI can be an extraordinary tool or a terrifying threat. The ability to expeditiously manufacture approximate āinformation,ā in the form of visuals or text, arrives as media manipulation has reached its apex: Donald Trump, elected by a popular majority, is the president of the United States for the second time; recently, the White House has posted AI-generated images of him as, among other things, the pope.
Wesley Lowery out after Title IX complaints.
Wesley J. Lowery, a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and one of the most influential journalists of his generation, has left his positions as the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop and as an associate professor of journalism at American University in Washington, DC, after less than two years there.
The Flurry at CNN
Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Old News
âThe press seems relentlessly focused on the status of the elderly,â Lucy Schiller wrote for CJR last year. She was referring to Joe Biden, the oldest president the United States has ever had; Donald Trump, his predecessor and rival; and the record-breaking age of the Senate.
Many people say they avoid the news. The news doesn’t avoid them.
In our new election-focused issue, Josh Hersh contends with the problem of news avoidance.
Repeating Ourselves
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: In April, the Donald Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee announced the “most extensive and monumental election integrity program in the nation’s history.” The plan involved more than a hundred thousand attorneys and volunteers posted in competitive states, plus an “Election Integrity Hotline” ready to take your call.
The Election Issue
It’s another election season, and we’re in reruns. Donald Trump, the first convicted-felon former president, is carrying on at rallies as ever, repeating the word “rigged.” Joe Biden, America’s oldest president, is mostly staying home, also as before. The world rages with war; stateside, democracy feels imperiled. “We’re just kind of over it,” Noemi Peña, a twenty-year-old from Tucson, told the Wall Street Journal in March.
Columbia Daily Spectator at the center - Editor and Publisher
Posted Tuesday, April 30, 2024 9:44 am Last week, the congressional spotlight fell on Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, who followed the acts of Claudine Gay (formerly Harvard’s president) and Elizabeth Magill (formerly Penn’s). Gay and Magill were asked to speak in December to a House committee about their schools’ climates since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel launched a siege on Gaza; both presidents’ tenures unraveled shortly after.
Spectator at the center
Last week, the congressional spotlight fell on Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, who followed the acts of Claudine Gay (formerly Harvard’s president) and Elizabeth Magill (formerly Penn’s). Gay and Magill were asked to speak in December to a House committee about their schools’ climates since October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and Israel launched a siege on Gaza; both presidents’ tenures unraveled shortly after.
Back to Work
Back to fall, back to school, back to the office. From the New York Times to Hearst, media companies are summoning employees to appear in person; many executives’ acceptance of remote work, facilitated by the pandemic, has now, apparently, run out.
Mitch McConnell and the Discourse of Old Age
An aide approached, close by his side. She placed a hand gently, firmly on his back. “Did you hear the question, senator?” (A quiet “Yeah.”) Her eyes darted down. “Okay,” she said. Her bottom lip curled under. “All right.” She turned to face the crowd. “I’m sorry, you all, we’re going to need a minute.” Mitch McConnell, Kentucky senator and eighty-one year old, “appeared to freeze,” as press reports put it—the second time he had done so in public view this summer.
ESPN’s Big Gamble
In 2018, the US Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act and lifted the gate to sports gambling across the country. Betting is now legal in thirty-four states, plus Washington, DC; in the past five years, according to the Washington Post, Americans have wagered more than two hundred billion dollars on sports. Fantasy-league platforms—such as FanDuel and DraftKings—have metamorphosed into sportsbooks that are swallowing sports media whole.
A Very Online summer
Last summer, in a piece for CJR, Karen Maniraho spoke with writers who cover the internet and its subcultures. “The best of these journalists are immersed in the internet but do not obsess over viral moments, which fly by too fast and seem, in isolation, to be trivial,” she observed.
Moral panic, queer expression
On March 3, 1873, Congress passed what later became known as the Comstock Act, which made it illegal to send material by mail that was “obscene, lewd, or lascivious,” “indecent or immoral.” The wording was vague, and used to target anyone interested in exploring their sexuality, particularly women and queer people.
A year since Dobbs
When the news broke, it wasn’t exactly news. For one thing, there had already been a leak—a month earlier, Politico reported, based on a draft opinion, that the Supreme Court had voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. For another, America’s abortion-rights activists, who had been painfully aware of the limits to access for years, had seen this coming—a crisis already in motion. Nevertheless, when a ruling arrived in the case of Dobbs v.
Beginning again, and again
This spring, Digiday reported that “media companies are still mostly hiring white people.” The news was damning not only because of the facts of the matter, but also the context: just a couple of years ago, the journalism industry was said to be undergoing a “reckoning” over racism. High-ranking white people resigned or were dismissed; there were prominent hires of Black editors and other people of color; newsrooms issued apologies.
Annie Hylton on a young journalist at TV Rain
Last March, shortly after Vladimir Putin declared war and announced an invasion of Ukraine, his government blocked TV Rain, Russia’s only surviving independent news network. Soon, word spread that Russia’s parliament planned to impose a law banning “fake news” about the military; the staff of TV Rain learned that they could be vulnerable to criminal prosecution. Valeria Ratnikova, a twenty-two-year-old rising star at TV Rain, was paralyzed by grief.
Ruth Margalit on Netanyahu and the press
When Benjamin Netanyahu returned to office at the end of last year, he entered his sixth term as prime minister of Israel, leading the most far-right coalition in the history of the country. Within days, his government announced a plan to overhaul the judiciary, one that would dramatically diminish Israel’s separation of powers and hand greater authority off to him. (You can read more about the plan here.) Protests erupted; they have continued since.
Q&A: Feven Merid on the Black American journalists who went to Nigeria in the eighties Original
This week, Feven Merid writes about Jacaranda Nigeria Limited, a group of Black journalists who traveled from the United States to Nigeria in the early eighties. Shehu Shagari, the first president of Nigeria to have been elected under an American-style constitution, hired Jacaranda to upgrade the Nigerian Television Authority, the country’s state-owned broadcaster.
Emergency upon Emergency
In June, a few days before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, an article was published in a medical journal called Clinical Infectious Diseases. In the United States, from January 2020 to December 2021, researchers found, pregnant women with covid-19 were nearly four times more likely to be admitted to intensive care than those who were not pregnant.
The Abortion Issue
In June, when the Supreme Court ruled on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, newsrooms responded in vastly different ways.
Nothing to It
In 1975, at the age of twenty-nine, John Bennet got a job at The New Yorker, under the editorship of William Shawn. He was first placed on the copy desk. Eventually, he edited Pauline Kael, Seymour Hersh, John McPhee, Alma Guillermoprieto, Oliver Sacks, Robert Caro, Elizabeth Kolbert, Bill Finnegan, and many others. In 2001, he started teaching courses in magazine writing at Columbia Journalism School.
Taking Pictures: A Way for Photographers to Protect Their Work
A photograph is taken: camera up, frame the shot, click, and you own the moment. Or there’s the digital pilfering way: click, save, and it’s yours now. And his. And hers. This troubles Yunghi Kim, a photojournalist who got her first real job at the Quincy Patriot Ledger, in Massachusetts, around thirty years ago, taking pictures of parades and nursing homes.
A year to turn the page
The Media Today By Betsy Morais, CJR December 18, 2020 The year 2020 has been humbling in the face of nature. The coronavirus pandemic rattled the earth and revealed just how unstable the ground beneath us was. For journalists, the avalanche of life-or-death news crashed into an industry already beset by acute financial strain, the warping effects of disinformation, and long-standing inequity.
Zero Dark Cavity
Soldiers, one might think, have more serious concerns than teeth. More than a century ago, the Army’s first contract dental surgeon, John Sayre Marshall, remarked, “Good, or at least serviceable, teeth are very necessary as a means of maintaining the general health, and consequently the highest efficiency of the Army.” But war is stressful; you forget to floss.
Disbelief and Trump’s diagnosis
CJR Outbox By Betsy Morais, CJR October 2, 2020 In the spring of 1960, Dwight D. Eisenhower told an elaborate lie. An American U-2 plane, part of a CIA mission to spy on the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile program, was detected by Russian officers and brought down near the town of Sverdlovsk (known today as Yekaterinburg). The fate of the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was unknown. He was presumed dead.
Happy Hundredth, Roger Angell
The Profile By Betsy Morais, CJR September 18, 2020 Tomorrow is Roger Angell’s hundredth birthday. I met Roger at The New Yorker, where he has contributed since 1944. I was assigned to be his assistant; we’ve since become dear friends. Reading his pieces, many of them about baseball, a few things are obvious: Roger is a terrific noticer. He has an extraordinary talent for finding just the right word.
Us Versus Him
By Betsy Morais and Alexandria Neason, CJR August 10, 2020 Graeme Sloan/AP Images Here comes Trump. He wears a navy suit, a white shirt, and a patterned blue tie. Cameras follow him as he makes his way across the White House lawn, in the shade of a tree, and then through a gate. He does not wear a mask, though the world is fighting a deadly disease that spreads through respiratory droplets.
Outside In
Photo of Lisa Desjardins by Tom Williams / CQ–Roll Call Inc. / Getty Images A decade ago, when someone else was president of the United States, when there was no covid-19, when George Floyd was alive, the writer Rebecca Solnit gave an interview to The Believer magazine. It was not a presidential election year.
The story has gotten away from us
By Betsy Morais and Alexandria Neason, CJR June 3, 2020 A narrative, by its nature, is a contained thing. Some bits get trimmed out in the interest of coherence. Some get cut for time or space. Always, a storyteller makes choices, choices that are informed by her worldview, to collect material in support of a thesis, a plot.
Sharing Is Caring Is Sharing
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. —George Orwell, “1984” Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is theft. —Dave Eggers, “The Circle” The construction begs for comparison, and yet “The Circle” is no “1984.” In the future, according to Dave Eggers, one mega social-network corporation, the namesake of his new novel, has become the technological architect of daily life—arranging conversations, restocking pantries, making payments, and ranking human beings.
In the Air
By Betsy Morais, CJR Spring 2020 Xiamen, a port city on the Taiwan Strait, sits on an island with white sand, mangoes, and tropical mist. The parks are lush with green. Flame trees bloom red in summer. Everywhere there are banyan trees—their canopies wide, their aerial roots hanging down like trunks; it’s said that a single banyan tree can be a forest.
Ladies Who Drink
On the third floor of the Strand the other night, women with streaks of gray in their hair, women with lavender cardigans, women who brought their husbands mingled cheerfully against a backdrop of richly hued books. They talked and smiled and looked at the other women. They huddled around a table with cheese and grapes, waiting for their pour of the wine.
Now and Forever with a Giant Baseball for a Head
All the love in the world, as we know, won’t get the Mets to the playoffs. But when one season ends another begins. Mrs. Met, for her part, refuses to frown. (A humanoid with a giant baseball for a head, she is stamped with a permanent toothless smile.) The other night, she directed her attention to next spring’s recruits: not ballplayers—brides.
Champagne Isn’t Only for Special Occasions
Ariel Arce, the founder of Air’s Champagne Parlor in Greenwich Village, among other trendy spots, wants people to take bubbles seriously, but she doesn’t put them on a pedestal, either. That means she doesn’t reserve Champagne for special events. “I don’t really like to classify Champagne as celebratory anymore,” she says. “We have a real revelation with people drinking sparkling wine for every and all occasions.
Why the Martini Has Stood the Test of Time
Martinis tell time. They’re not to be rushed or wasted; you’re supposed to savor them, in sips that set their own clock. Martinis, like moments, have ephemeral power. “The proper union of gin and vermouth is a great and sudden glory; it is one of the happiest marriages on earth, and one of the shortest lived,” Bernard DeVoto, the essayist and martini apostle, wrote.
Jennifer Hudson meets freed Reuters reporters at the Pulitzer lunch
Business of News By Betsy Morais, CJR May 28, 2019 Jennifer Hudson. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews) The distribution of the Pulitzer Prizes, in the rotunda of Low Library at Columbia University, one of the stateliest columned rooms this side of the Atlantic, is a perennially anticlimactic affair. The winners are announced weeks ahead.
Ballet Kink at the Guggenheim
“I’m thinking about the dynamics of power,” Brendan Fernandes, an artist, said the other day, on the Upper East Side. He is thirty-nine, with a shaved head, a trimmed beard, and an industrial earring that runs across the top of his left ear like a curtain rod.
How a Relationship Dies on Facebook
Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg both quit Facebook about a year ago. “I felt that I had developed an unhealthy addiction to lurking and creeping,” Cederberg, who is twenty-three, told me. Late at night, he would find himself staring at his computer screen, clicking mindlessly from one page to another. “I’d end up on some girl from Bangladesh’s Facebook account, and I’d be angry that I couldn’t see her profile.” “I just don’t see what the plusses are,” Woodman, twenty-two, said.
Collusion by any other name
First Person By Betsy Morais, CJR April 18, 2019 Attorney General William P. Barr is seen on TV monitors. Photo by Olivier Douliery/Abaca/Sipa USA via AP images. Copies of the report by Robert Mueller have been distributed, like flashlights during a deep fog. What we’ve made out so far, and will continue to see, is a landscape of not only the new but also what had been there all along—what we’d become accustomed to seeing only through the obscured view of heavy clouds.
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