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There are stories that make a splash, and then there are stories that leave a mile-deep crater. This week’s piece by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, detailing how he was inadvertently added to a Trump administration group chat detailing war plans against the Houthis, falls smack into the second category.
A lot of praise has already been heaped upon Goldberg’s story, given what it tells us about national security and the competence of top administration officials. But for our purposes, we want to give a laurel to whoever edited the piece, because it shows how journalists can go right up to the line without crossing it.
One example is how Goldberg deals with the initial uncertainty around who was really on this Signal thread. So the story doesn’t say that Vice President JD Vance was arguing against the strike, but names one of the authors as “the account labeled ‘JD Vance.’” A response to Vance comes from “a message [that] arrived from the ‘Pete Hegseth’ account”—referring to the secretary of defense.
The piece also deftly takes the reader through Goldberg’s own thought process. It begins with skepticism, amid his reasonable concerns that the chat is an elaborate hoax: “I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans.” Then it proceeds to clarification, as Goldberg (sitting in a Safeway parking lot) sees via X that Yemen is being bombed on a timeline that jibes with the schedule detailed by the Hegseth account. Finally, there’s confirmation, when Goldberg emails the National Security Council and is told that “this appears to be an authentic message chain.” The Atlantic hit the publish button shortly afterward.
I’ve noted before that seeming softball interviewers can elicit the best quotes. So when National Security Adviser Michael Waltz appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News earlier this week, he probably was expecting a few slow, fat pitches right over the middle of the plate.
But Ingraham asked a key question that we’ve all been wondering about. And she persisted—in her own supportive way.
Ingraham wanted to know how Goldberg—a journalist who’s been tough on Trump for years—somehow wound up in Waltz’s phone contacts.
First, Waltz said he didn’t even know “this loser” Goldberg: “I can tell you for 100 percent, I don’t know this guy—I know him by his horrible reputation, and he really is the bottom scum of journalists uh…in the sense that he hates the president. But I don’t text him, he wasn’t on my phone, and we’re gonna figure out how this happened.”
Then, a few moments later, Ingraham posed a good follow-up: “I don’t mean to be pedantic here.… But you’ve never talked to him before, so how is the number on your phone?”
Waltz hemmed and hawed: “If you have somebody else’s contact and then somehow it gets sucked in, it gets sucked in.”
Ingraham pressed Waltz on whom he meant to include in the chat. “Well, I’m not.… Look, I take responsibility. I built the group. That’s the part that we have to figure out. Embarrassing? Yes.”
He wasn’t wrong about the last part.
The Chicago Police Department has gotten plenty of bad publicity for officers’ conduct in recent years, but there’s another problem as well: It fails to protect the city’s citizens. A new Chicago Sun-Times investigation shows that the department made arrests in just 6 percent of the city’s twenty-three hundred nonfatal shootings last year. Around half of these investigations are “suspended”—meaning officers have stopped investigating them—within a month after the shooting. And at least 80 percent of them are suspended each year.
Part of the problem is manpower, as the number of detectives assigned to the shootings dropped by 20 percent last year, perhaps partly because the department is paying out tens of millions of dollars to settle misconduct claims. And the stats don’t get much better if the victim dies: Chicago clears only 25 percent of its murders with an arrest; in New York City, it’s more than 50 percent.
The term “access journalism” has a bad rap, because it usually applies to reporters who’ve given up their independence to snag a friendly interview.
Sometimes, though, it’s the result of steady diligence, as in the case of photojournalist Philip Holsinger. “I’ve spent over a year in El Salvador documenting the security transformation in the country,” told CNN this week. “So I’ve had deep access to the prisons.”
The result was his stunning photo-essay and story for Time about the hundreds of Venezuelans whom the US has renditioned to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.
Holsinger was on the tarmac as the plane arrived, and he was there to watch the men as they were “marched through a gauntlet of black-clad guards, guns raised like the spears of some terrible tribe.” His photographs captured the physical and emotional transformation of the prisoners as they were shackled, shaved and sent to cells that contain eighty inmates at a time. “It was exile to another world,” he wrote. “Holding my camera, it was as if I watched them become ghosts.”
“Trump and GM CEO Discuss $60 Billion Investment amid Tariff War,” reads the USA Today headline. Sounds pretty good! That $60 billion will bring a lot of new, high-paying jobs to… uh-oh, wait a moment.
That headline appears above a Reuters dispatch, and is based on this quote from President Trump, who had just spoken with GM CEO Mary Barra: “They want to invest $60 billion,” Trump reported.
But Reuters asked GM about that claim, and this is as far as the company would go: “We share President Trump’s goals of a strong and competitive American manufacturing base and economy.”
We should be used to Trump making claims about investments that aren’t immediately true or don’t eventually pan out. (Remember those thirteen thousand jobs Wisconsin was promised by Foxconn in Trump’s first term?) But we should keep those claims out of our headlines, or insert some thirty-six-point caveats.
Hat tip to Jennifer Schulze for the GM item. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here.
Correction: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article was accompanied by a photo of US Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts. The photo has been changed to depict Michael Waltz, President Trump’s national security adviser and a former US representative from Florida.
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