Joel Simon

Nov 19, 2024 | cjr.org | Joel Simon

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. Since Donald Trump was reelected, a feeling has pervaded newsrooms. It can perhaps be best summed up as: Why don’t Americans believe us? It’s good we’re asking. The forces that brought us to this moment are powerful and complex and beyond the capacity of individual journalists or news organizations to resolve, but we can’t be paralyzed by that. We still have a critical role to play.

Oct 31, 2024 | cjr.org | Joel Simon

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. There’s a scene in the new play Vladimir, running at the Manhattan Theatre Club through November 10, in which a Russian journalist named Raya gets in a heated argument with one of her sources, Chovka, a young Chechen woman. Chovka has taken part in a terror attack on a school that left hundreds dead including many children in order to avenge the death of her own family.

Sep 20, 2024 | cjr.org | Joel Simon

On May 30, 2020, as demonstrations erupted in New York City in response to the murder of George Floyd, photojournalist Adam Gray was working the streets around Union Square documenting clashes between police and protesters. Gray, who was on assignment for the US Sun, was carrying three professional cameras and wearing State Department–issued media credentials around his neck. Police surrounded Gray, placed him in handcuffs, booked him for unlawful assembly, and held him overnight.

Aug 26, 2024 | vanityfair.com | Joel Simon

In February 2017, just a month into his presidency, Donald Trump asked to meet alone with FBI director James Comey in the Oval Office. The president urged Comey to abandon the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unauthorized contact with Russia. He also floated another idea: Why not jail journalists who leak classified information?

Jul 11, 2024 | cjr.org | Joel Simon

The independent website El Toque thrived in Cuba during the period of relative openness surrounding the 2016 visit to the island by US president Barack Obama, during which he met with Cuban leader Raúl Castro. But rising tensions with the Trump administration, the transfer of power to a new president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, in 2019, the COVID pandemic, and a protest movement that brought thousands to the streets ushered in a wave of repression that forced its entire staff of twenty into exile.