Author: sts
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Who Decides What Is False
Notes from the Field — October 4, 2026 An outlet whose job is checking claims has been charged with spreading false ones. Matsadaash means, literally, “don’t believe.” It is the name of an independent Egyptian fact-checking and investigative outlet. In late September authorities arrested six of its journalists. Days later, one was charged with joining…
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Everyone Read the Same Summary
Notes from the Field — October 3, 2026 Where the prosecutor’s picture of the case came from, and who has been asked to check it. In November 2024 a Cornell student told Cornell’s own police that she had been raped by several men at a fraternity house. This fall a governor removed the county prosecutor…
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The Check Came After the Date
Notes from the Field — October 3, 2026 Before the machinery failed, someone said it would. In August, lawyers for Christa Pike told a Tennessee court she had a vein condition that would make a lethal injection hard to carry out. In May, the state had called off another execution after a physician spent more…
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Paid for by the U.S. Government
Notes from the Field — September 29, 2026 The ads say who paid. They don’t say who gets to decide whether that was allowed. The ads run during college football and prime-time shows. One resembles a black-and-white video from the president’s own 2024 campaign: Trump walking down a hallway, warning of a last confrontation. Each…
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One Complaint a Month
Notes from the Field — September 28, 2026 The weekly report is still published. The check on it is not. Cotton farmers price their crop off a report. Every week the Agriculture Department publishes how much American cotton has been sold overseas, and a farmer deciding what to ask for a bale reads it the…
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The Forty-Five Days
Notes from the Field — September 25, 2026 A waiting period built to protect Congress, and an end date it can’t outlast. In 1974, Congress wrote a rule to stop a president from sitting on money Congress had ordered him to spend. On the last Friday of September, the White House used that rule to…
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The Squad That Was Circling
Notes from the Field — September 22, 2026 The FBI does not usually publish who it was about to charge. It publishes who it did. The file on Susan Collins never got that far — not because agents ran out of evidence, but because the people building the case were reassigned before they could finish…
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The Same Judge, Twice
Notes from the Field — September 18, 2026 Eight years before he revoked three newsrooms’ access to the White House grounds, Donald Trump revoked one man’s. A federal judge — one of his own appointees — ordered the credential returned within a week. The mechanism this month is not new. Only the number of names…
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The Task Force That Stopped Meeting
Notes from the Field — September 17, 2026 Same name. Same legal force. Different graders. For more than a year, the panel that decides which medical screenings insurers must cover for free did not meet. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, founded more than four decades ago, is a volunteer panel of doctors and researchers…
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The Lawsuit With One Side
Notes from the Field — September 18, 2026 A case needs two parties. This one had a plaintiff and a mirror. A lawsuit needs two sides that want opposite things. Without them it isn’t a lawsuit. It’s a document with a court’s stamp on it. In January, President Trump, two of his sons and the…
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