The Headlines - Trump’s Media Lawsuit Threats, and Injuries at Amazon Under Scrutiny

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

Plus, a troubling trend in American schools.   Tune in every weekday morning. To get our full audio journalism and storytelling experience, download the New York Times Audio app — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.Tell us what you think at: [e-mail]. On Today’s Episode:Trump and His Picks Threaten More Lawsuits Over Critical Coverage, by David EnrichHow Will the Rebels Rule Syria? Their Past Offers Clues, by Neil MacFarquhar and Justin ScheckAmazon Disregarded Internal Warnings on Injuries, Senate Investigation Claims, by Noam ScheiberAn Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones, by Natasha SingerHow CT Scanners Are Being Used on Trading Cards, by Larry Holder and Craig Custance

From the New York Times, it's the headlines. I'm Tracy Mumford. Today's Monday, December 16th. Here's what we're covering. Donald Trump and his allies have been issuing a flurry of legal threats, apparently aimed at intimidating news outlets over their coverage of the president-elect and of his proposed cabinet members. This October, Trump sued CBS News over how it edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala

Harris. Just before Election Day, a lawyer for Trump accused the New York Times of publishing three articles that were, quote, deceptive, and demanded a retraction and an apology. It's notoriously difficult for public figures in the U.S. to win defamation lawsuits, but even filing or just threatening the suits can pay off. This Saturday, ABC News said it had agreed to settle a defamation suit that Trump brought after one of its anchors inaccurately said Trump was held liable for rape in a civil trial. In fact, he was found liable for sexual abuse.

The settlement followed months of Trump publicly attacking ABC News, going so far as to suggest it should lose its federal broadcast license. Some legal and media experts now wonder if the settlement could embolden Trump and others to intensify their assaults on the media even more. Beyond Trump himself, his pick for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has also been warning journalists about potential lawsuits. Hegseth's lawyer warned Vanity Fair and The New Yorker that articles they were planning to publish about his past,

including drinking and marital problems, could be defamatory. Hegseth has denied having a drinking problem. Both outlets still publish the stories. Once in the White House, Trump and his team will have more powers at their disposal. They've discussed issuing subpoenas for news organizations, prosecuting journalists and their sources, and cutting funding for public media. Just over a week after the dictator Bashar al-Assad was thrown out of power, a crucial question has been hanging over Syria. How will the rebels who took power actually run the country?

The group that took control, Hayat-Tahrir al-Sham, had early ties to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, but then grew more moderate. My colleague Neil McFarquhar has been looking at the small chunk of the country that the group has controlled in recent years for clues about how it may approach running all of Syria. Around 2016, they broke with these extremist groups entirely and set up a government of their own that was still strict and conservative in terms of enforcing Islamic law, but not brutal. They were much more pragmatic. I mean, things like alcohol was not for sale, but they didn't enforce punishments like whipping for, you know, adultery or getting your

hand chopped off if you were convicted of being a thief. And the core of the group focused on creating an army while they also set up a civil administration that kind of ran day-to-day life in the territory. They collected taxes, they set up distribution of electricity and water and cell phone service. So they managed to create a certain stability within the region. At the same time, there was an authoritarian element to the administration because they jailed their critics, there were often protests about the harsh conditions in jails, and of course there's always a lingering suspicion that because their roots are in, you know, the more extremist jihadist groups that somewhere bubbling beneath the surface that ideology might still emerge.

Although one analyst I talked to suggested that they should be judged on the last eight years when they kind of ran a pragmatic administration rather than the previous five when they had been a jihadist organization. The Senate Labor Committee, led by Bernie Sanders, has released an investigation it says shows Amazon ignored recommendations from its staff about how to keep its warehouse workers safe. The committee got access to an internal Amazon study that looked at its productivity quotas — for instance, how many items workers are expected to pick off shelves.

It found that higher quotas led to higher rates of injuries and recommended relaxing enforcement of the quotas. That didn't happen. The investigation found evidence suggesting senior executives at the company rejected the recommendation because they were worried it would lower productivity. In response to the Senate's findings, an Amazon spokeswoman said the investigation was highlighting out-of-date research.

A later report Amazon conducted disputed the link between quotas and injuries, and determined that some workers were just more prone to getting injured. The Senate investigation also found the company discourages injured workers from getting appropriate medical care outside the warehouse. It sends them to on-site facilities that only offer basic first aid. Amazon has also denied that claim. The Times has been looking at a troubling trend in American schools.

Cell phones and social media are making fights between students more common and more violent. You know, students are having a quarrel and then 30 kids take their phones out and the kids are having a verbal spat, then feel the pressure to save face and they start physically assaulting one another because the cameras are out. And then you have kids trying to rush out of their classroom down the stairs to watch it, film it, comment on it, and share it. And it becomes a kind of reinforcing negative vicious cycle. My colleague Natasha Stenger has reviewed hundreds of videos that kids have posted from schools all over the country and talked to administrators, teachers, and students. She says fights at school are not a new problem by any means, and posting fights to social

media isn't even new either. There are even dedicated accounts that show nothing but school fights. But she says it's gotten worse in the past few years. Students are more attached to their phones than ever, and there's been a rise in emotional issues and aggression after pandemic lockdowns. Fights, and the videos of them, have been surging, and schools are having trouble keeping up. We found that students are moving to much more private channels, that they are using iMessage to text each other the fight videos, they're using AirDrop to send kids in schools the location of

the fight or where they plan to assault someone. And then they're sharing it via text message or they're sharing the videos via snap. And so it makes it much harder for teachers and school administrators and school police officers to stop the fights because all of this stuff is now happening much more underground than it was. But also the fights live on on the phones. Then they're immediately shared and everybody's seen it and it becomes part of school culture. The kids ask each other, do you have the video? They watch the videos together. They post comments on the videos, which can further humiliate the victim. And then they keep them around for a while. So when there's another fight, you can

compare today's fight to the video of the fight three months ago or three years ago. And it never goes away. And so it has in a sense made certain students feel less safe in school, like it really detracted from learning. And many school administrators and teachers we spoke to said they felt like it made it much, much harder

for them to do their jobs because it took time away from operating the school and teaching in the classroom. And finally, when you buy a sealed pack of trading cards, whether it's Pokemon cards, baseball cards, there's supposed to be an air of mystery to it. You don't know what's inside. There could be a super valuable rare card, or it could be something that you've already got 20 of. Now one company has found a way to take some of the guesswork out of it, and it could disrupt the whole industry.

Industrial Inspection and Consulting in Michigan realized it could use the CAT scan machines that it normally uses on machine parts to peer behind the trading card packaging. Collectors and sellers can now scan their inventory and figure out whether there's something in the pack worth ripping it open for, or whether they can safely sell it on to someone else, knowing they're not missing out. One of my colleagues at The Athletic went to see the process in action. It costs $650 to scan a case of cards. Considering cases can be worth thousands of dollars, some argue the investment is worth

it. But some enthusiasts think it's morally questionable to sell a scanned pack. It's like selling a lottery ticket that you know for sure won't win. Some trading card enthusiasts think manufacturers are going to have to change their packaging in order to adjust to the new reality. Those are the headlines. Today on The Daily, how Pete Hegsess fight to become defense secretary could be derailed by one senator. That's next in the New York Times audio app, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracy Mumford. We'll be back tomorrow.