Month: June 2025

• Marty Baron: Traditional media ‘sorely disconnected’ from what’s happening across the nation

  June 4, 2025

  The Atlantic’s David Frum interviews former Washington Post and Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, who, after the obligatory discussion about Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos, etc., makes some excellent points about how the traditional media has lost touch with large swaths of the American public, thanks partly to ‘ideological rigidity’ and too many journalists sharing similar backgrounds. Some sample quotes:  

  “I don’t disagree with you that there has been a certain ideological rigidity within newsrooms and unwillingness to recognize nuance, a tendency on the part of, particularly, the younger generation, I think, to divide the world into victims and victimizers, oppressors and the oppressed, and basically see the world without a nuance, see it through sort of a binary separation. …

  “I think that the unwillingness to sort of recognize nuances has hurt our credibility with the general public. That’s where I think it’s done real damage, is that it has contributed to the decline in confidence in major news institutions. And that’s a perilous place to be.”

  And he later laments “how sorely disconnected we are from so much of what is happening in the country, and I think that’s something that definitely needs to be corrected, and corrected quickly. It’s cause for a lot of self-reflection on the part of all of us who are in the media, and we need to make sure that that doesn’t continue.”

• Moderna Inc.: The rise and fall

  June 3, 2025

  

  
  The Wall Street Journal takes a look at Moderna Inc. – and it isn’t a pretty picture for the Cambridge company that only a few years was hailed as a world hero for developing a COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. Today? It’s been kicked to the curb by Wall Street investors, with its share price plummeting from a high of $484 in 2021 to around $27 today. The main causes: a changing regulatory environment for vaccines (read: RFK Jr.) and a failure to diversify its products.

  Update – 6.10.25 – From the Globe: “‘People inside Moderna are afraid’: As the anti-vaccine climate intensifies, a big local firm has much to lose.”

• ‘It’s just a crappy time to be an incumbent’

  June 2, 2025

  Re my post yesterday on the odd UNH survey showing a dramatic plunge in Gov. Healey’s poll numbers: I love Jon Keller’s response to the findings: “(P)art of Healey’s problem may be that it’s just a crappy time to be an incumbent. Her sworn enemy, New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte, is doing no better, with an identical 49% approval rating and disapproval that’s up seven points since she took office this winter.”

  It really is a crappy time. People are just tired of the same old same old. I know I am. Neither party seems to get it.

• Is Healey more vulnerable than thought?

  June 1, 2025

  I’d like to see what other polls show before attributing too much to the latest UNH survey that suggests Gov. Maura Healey’s re-election bid is more shaky than thought. The UNH survey of Mass. residents found that only 49 percent of respondents thought Healey “deserves to be reelected,” according to the Herald … That’s at odds with other recent surveys showing Healey’s approval ratings in the 60 percent range. … The UNH survey results definitely ring true when it comes to the top concerns of residents – housing, immigration and general cost-of-living.