Politico and Free Speech
The foreign-owned media company is demanding that I delete an 1,800-word article criticizing press coverage of Trump.
Yesterday evening, just after 7:00 PM, I received two calls from a number that I didn’t recognize. Whoever it was, it seemed urgent. The caller left two messages.
The first message was just dead air. The second message started mid-sentence, as if the caller had already been talking for a few seconds. Whoever they were, they failed to leave that information on the recording. I was about to erase it.
But then, I heard a vaguely familiar voice.
They wanted to “alert” me of a “violation.” The tone was stern.
“I’ll be following up in writing,” the voice said, “and I need you to take it down immediately.”
Take down what? I thought.
The letter arrived twenty minutes later.
It was from a lawyer at Politico, where I worked for six years as the Chief Washington Correspondent. The subject line was scary: “Notice of Violation of non-disparagement clause.”
The lawyer alleged that I had disparaged the billion-dollar company and demanded that I delete, in its entirety, an 1800-word article I wrote yesterday announcing the launch of this publication, Telos.
“You are required to cease making any such statements and take down your blog post immediately,” they wrote. “We reserve all rights.”
There is a lot to unpack about this episode, but what first struck me about this demand is that I wasn’t just being asked to censor critical reporting about Politico, I was being asked to censor critical reporting about Trump.
Because the article was not about Politico. It was about the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on the media and what we as journalists should do to cover the crisis in Washington more responsibly.
In other words, with this letter, Politico, regrettably, was doing the bidding of the Trump administration by using a legal threat to assist the White House in stifling criticism of the president. Frankly, that is much more concerning than anything I wrote yesterday about Politico, which I only mentioned three times.
First, at the top of the piece, I said Politico’s “style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing.”
I stand by that statement and it would be an extraordinary act of censorship for a news organization to attempt to ban a former employee from commenting on it in perpetuity, especially given how central Politico’s coverage is to any reporting on the relationship between the press and the Trump administration, which I intend to cover aggressively.
Later in the piece, I documented how the law firm Paul Weiss had deleted material from the biographies of its lawyers and rewrote the company’s own values and history to appease the White House.
I made the following point about my reaction to uncovering this 1984-like purge:
It shook me. And there is no way to capture that when writing for a place such as Politico.
(Please pause here to dwell on the fact that a news organization is pressuring a journalist to delete reporting about the Trump administration pressuring a law firm to delete stuff it doesn’t like.)
Anyway, there is nothing disparaging about mentioning Politico as an example of the kinds of news organizations that don’t publish certain genres of writing. It is just a factual statement and Politico should not be sensitive about that.
Finally, I mentioned Politico a third time:
Unfortunately, at my publication, things weren’t much better. I saw up close how easy it was for a media conglomerate to grovel before the Trump administration when the wrong people are in charge.
After Trump attacked Politico for selling subscriptions to the federal government, Politico made a regrettable mistake. To smooth things over, they sent our White House reporter to be an onstage guest at CPAC, a sewer of media bashing and cheerleading for the degradation of our democracy where some activists were publicly organizing an unconstitutional third term for Trump—in other words, a coup.
Of course, these are publicly available facts that were widely reported on and discussed earlier this year. It is absurd and frightening for a news organization to try to use boilerplate contract language to prevent former reporters from ever mentioning anything negative about the company.
No doubt if I had applauded the decision for Politico to collaborate with CPAC, the lawyers over there would have had no objection.
But either way, it’s not disparaging. Disparagement is defined as “the representation of someone or something as being of little worth; disrespectful criticism or belittlement.”
Writing that “Politico made a regrettable mistake” is the definition of respectful criticism. Far from being of little worth, I believe Politico is important—and I also believe there’s a lot of room for improvement and I’m not going to be censored or intimidated by legal threats.
Writing that “Politico made a regrettable mistake” is the definition of respectful criticism. Far from being of little worth, I believe Politico is important—but I also believe there’s a lot of room for improvement and I’m not going to be censored or intimidated by legal threats.
The rest of my piece was about the Trump administration’s weaponization of the government, how “vast swathes of the media are ill-equipped to cover the current crisis,” and how I hope Telos can offer a modest corrective.
Again, the piece wasn’t about Politico. It was about how we, as journalists, lawyers, universities, and Trump’s other targets, should respond to this crisis of democracy.
I will offer one modest proposal about what news organizations should not do in response to this situation: don’t send demand letters from your legal department to journalists asking them to delete critical reporting about Trump.
(What is also unusual about this particular letter is that Politico itself has an article on its site that links to the allegedly taboo material at Telos.)
Axel Springer, the Berlin-based owner of Politico, has a mission statement on its website describing “what defines us.”
I would urge Mathias Döpfner, John Harris, Jonathan Greenberger, and the other folks running Politico to read it carefully and reconsider their request:
At Axel Springer, freedom is not just a value; it is our guiding principle. We stand firm in its defense, recognizing that freedom is the catalyst for progress — in business, in society, and especially in journalism.
Finally, this has all put me in a bit of an awkward spot. I’m scheduled to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this weekend as a guest of Politico. Politico has also invited me to its pre-dinner reception on Saturday night and its annual brunch on Sunday (it’s cowboy-themed this year, which sounds fun).
I hope by then that this episode will have blown over.
Sometimes, the corporate side of a media company mistakenly acts in ways that contradict the news values of the company.
And I’m holding out the possibility that the letter was sent to me in a moment of pique by an otherwise well-meaning Politico attorney before the editorial staffers—many of whom I know would be appalled by this kind of a request—were informed.
I hope cooler heads prevail here, and I hope that my friends at Politico will think carefully about whether they really want to go around censoring journalists.
Say what? I had just finished sharing your first post with others in my network, adding how I found it both terrifying and hopeful. Facebook and X have become cesspools of MAGA misinformation, and I am convinced more than ever now that Substack will be the platform where the good fight is fought and won. As you stated, hopefully cooler heads will prevail and you won’t find yourself at odds with your former employer, because that would be outrageous. Good luck with the new venture!
Yikes! One suggestion: Talk to your lawyer before accepting the invitation to the Springerfest. In light of their demand you have no choice but to treat your former employer as a potential adversary.