The 2025 Tony Awards

Welcome to the 2025 edition of the Tony Awards for Excellence in Media.  Every year these awards are completely subjective; I try to recognize works that--FOR ME--represent powerful alternatives to the too often lazy and morally compromised corporate press. When possible, I also recognize journalists/pundits working IN the corporate press who have the courage to serve the public interest and resist intense pressure to produce clickbait, false balance, and the view from nowhere. 

This year's Tony Awards post is dedicated to all the international journalists killed or detained in 2025 for the "crime" of doing their jobs. According to Reporters Without Borders, 2025 was one of the deadliest years on record for journalists. As noted by Reporters Without Borders Director General Thibaut Bruttin: 

“This is where the hatred of journalists leads! It led to the death of 67 journalists this year – not by accident, and they weren’t collateral victims. They were killed, targeted for their work. It is perfectly legitimate to criticize the media — criticism should serve as a catalyst for change that ensures the survival of the free press, a public good. But it must never descend into hatred of journalists, which is largely born out of — or deliberately stoked by — the tactics of armed forces and criminal organizations . . . Key witnesses to history, journalists have gradually become collateral victims, inconvenient eyewitnesses, bargaining chips, pawns in diplomatic games, men and women to be ‘eliminated.’ We must be wary of false notions about reporters: no one gives their lives for journalism — it is taken from them; journalists do not just die — they are killed.”

And now, in no particular order, the 2025 Tony Awards. Drum roll please. 

*Saying NO to Oligarchy: The Wisconsin Voter.  In my 35+ years living in Wisconsin, I have never been as proud of my Badger brothers and sisters as I was on the night of April 1, 2025. That was when a majority of the state's voters loudly and proudly said NO to Elon Musk's overt and despicable attempt to buy a supreme court seat. While the corporate media kept insisting the race would be close--and uncritically reported Musk's attempts to seduce voters with million dollar bribes as a "large payout"--when all the votes were tallied liberal justice Susan Crawford secured a double-digit victory. 

Yes it is true that the oligarchic "donor class" wields huge influence in most state and federal elections, in both Republican and Democratic primaries and in general elections. But rarely are the oligarchs as open about their intentions as Mr. Musk. On a livestream reaching more than 10,000 people shortly before the election, Wisconsin's Republican US Senator Ron Johnson openly praised Musk's interference: 

"This is entirely winnable, and you know, if we do win it, again, we have to thank Elon for all the support he's given this race, and I was really glad to see President Trump throw in his endorsement as well." 

Thankfully Wisconsinites saw through the self-serving nonsense coming from Musk and the corporate media that enabled him. When MAGA eventually fades into oblivion, I firmly believe historians of the future will see the behavior of badger voters in April of 2025 as one of the major factors leading to that outcome. 

Elon Musk's absurd attempt to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat was such a fiasco for the state's Republican party that pretty much the entire state swung blue--a striking rejection of oligarchy. 

The Wisconsin Republican Party claimed that billionaire George Soros' contributions to Dems were the equivalent of Musk's to the GOP. Yet as this chart clearly shows, Musk's money dwarfed all other rich donors. When you add in the additional dollars donated by GOP puppet masters Hendricks and Uihlein, Susan Crawford's victory looks even more impressive.

*Principled Pundits of the Year: Ann Telnaes and Karen Attiah. Speaking of entitled oligarchs, in 2025 Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post) competed with Musk for some kind of bizarre Asshole of the Year title. Late in 2024 Bezos refused to allow the Post to endorse Kamala Harris in the presidential election. Then in February of 2025 he announced that the Washington Post opinion page would now feature marketplace propaganda instead of a marketplace of ideas: 

"I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others." 

[Note: In 2013 I write a Media Rants post called Bradlees For Bezos that ended up being more spot on than even I could have ever imagined.]. 

Bezos' dickheaded dictum mandating free market supremacy on the opinion page did not actually come as a surprise, in large part because of cartoonist Ann Telnaes' resignation from the Post about one-month earlier. Her cartoon lampooning Bezos and other entitled billionaire tech broligarchs paying off Trump was censored. She resigned in protest. In a substack post explaining her actions, she said: 

"As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, 'Democracy dies in darkness'." 

The draft of the cartoon that led to Ann Telnaes resignation from the Washington Post. By censoring 
it, Jeff Bezos like Elon Musk attained the Broligarch Trifecta: Asshole, Bully, and Thin Skinned. 

Much to the chagrin of Bezos and his toadies choosing to stay with the Post, Telnaes ended up winning her second Pulitizer Prize in 2025, "for delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity – and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years."  Kudos to the Pulitzer selection committee! 

As if losing Ann Telnaes was not bad enough, in 2025 the Post fired the great Karen Attiah, an award winning African-American journalist and pundit known for writing and speaking with clarity and courage on a range of global and national topics. When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Post management somehow saw fit to fire Attiah for a series of thoughtful posts she made on the BlueSky platform about the media's ritualized responses to gun violence, and for merely repeating back claims Mr. Kirk had actually made about African-Americans and others. Read Ms. Attiah's powerful response: "The Washington Post Fired Me - But My Voice Will Not Be Silenced." 

Former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah

*Best New Podcast: Optimist Economy with Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards and Editor Robin Rauzi. Somehow the Tik Tok algorithm god sent "Optimist Economy" clips to my feed, and I was immediately taken with the intelligence, humor, and practical policy suggestions set forth by the hosts. Probably my favorite episode of the  year was a recent one (“Thanksgiving Prep: An Optimist’s Guide to Dinner Table Debate”) in which Kathryn Anne Edwards communicated a provocative and (for me anyway) sensible take on the issue of trans women in sports. 

Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards

*Best Media Criticism: Margaret Sullivan's "American Crisis" Substack. I've been a huge fan of Margaret Sullivan since her days as the New York Times' Public Editor (a position that the Times eliminated in 2017. That the NYT has declined in substantive and disturbing ways since then is really not even debatable at this point.). 

Sullivan explains the purpose of American Crisis this way:  "My aim is to use this newsletter (it started as a podcast in 2023) to push for the kind of journalism we need for our democracy to function — journalism that is accurate, fair, mission-driven and public-spirited. That means that I point out the media’s flaws and failures when necessary."

Two posts I found especially insightful in the past year were "Do better, Big Journalism. Please do much, much better" and "Four Essentials For the Press Right Now." In both, Sullivan describes specific ways the mainstream press is failing to meet the urgency of the moment, while also providing concrete ways they can be better. 

Media Critic Margaret Sullivan 

*Best Political Substack: Paul Krugman. Last year's entire Tony Awards post was dedicated to celebrating Dr. Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist who in 2024 resigned from the New York Times' op-ed page that he had contributed to for more than 20 years. Any worry I and others had about not being able to get enough of Krugman after he resigned from the NYT turned out to be misguided. In fact, his substack (co-edited with his spouse Robin) ended up becoming one of the most prolific and thoughtful on the Net. He somehow finds a way to upload rigorously supported posts virtually every day of the week--most of them for free (only highly detailed, weekend wonkish pieces on economics are put behind a paywall.). 

Paul Krugman

In less than a year Krugman's substack became one of the top-ten on the platform in terms of paid subscriptions. Writing about his experience, Krugman says: 

I never envisaged this Substack as a full-time job. It was supposed to be just a way to keep my voice out there post-NYT. But as it turns out, both Robin and I are working longer hours than we ever did in the past.

And the truth is that it’s great. I just hope that readers find what we’re doing useful in these scary times.

Speaking just for me, I find Krugman's daily posts extremely useful in these scary times. In fact his end of the year post on "Immigrant Derangement Syndrome" is the perfect segue into the next couple of Tony awards. 

*Best Letter to the Editor: Martin Oppenheimer in the New York Times. Dr. Oppenheimer is an emeritus professor of sociology at Rutgers University and a refugee from Nazi Germany. In response to a New York Times report on the USA's not-so-slow drift into authoritarianism, he submitted this short, eloquent letter: 

As a refugee from Nazi Germany, I noticed that there is one indicator of authoritarianism that you did not mention: the use of masked agents grabbing people off the streets and from their workplaces, invading their homes in the wee hours and “disappearing” them without hearings or even allowing them to contact their relatives. I believe that the danger of this tactic outstrips all the others.

Martin Oppenheimer
Franklin Township, N.J.

Maybe it's just me, but I think we really should be listening very closely these days to what refugees from Nazi Germany have to say. 

*Best Immigration Reporting From a Wisconsin Media Source: Sophie Carson's and Jovanny Hernandez's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Reports on the Case of Yessenia Ruano. 

Kudos to Wisconsin's largest newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel--and especially reporter Sophie Carson--for providing some outstanding coverage of the real world consequences of the Trump Administration's mass deportation program. Ms. Carson's in-depth reporting on the specific case of Yessenia Ruano, a married Salvadoran immigrant with twins, a job as a teacher's aide and no criminal record during 14 happy years in Milwaukee, is as infuriating as it is heartbreaking.  Please read "14 Years in Wisconsin, A New Life in El Salvador" for a gut-wrenching example of the truly shameful actions that are currently being carried out in our names. After Yessenia made the decision to self-deport rather than continue being bullied and harassed by agents of the federal government, the Milwaukee Common Council observed 14-minutes of silence in solidarity with her. 

Fun Fact: After graduating from college, Sophie Carson worked briefly for the Oshkosh Northwestern as a reporter covering crime and the courts. 

Photojournalist Jovanny Hernandez traveled to El Salvador for video coverage of Yessenia's new life in that country. 

*Best Data Driven Media Criticism: Media Matters For America's Report on "The Right Dominates the Online Media Ecosystem, Seeping Into Sports, Comedy, and Other Supposedly Nonpolitical Spaces." 

This in-depth and important study, written by MMFA's research director Kayla Gogarty with the help of a team of data collecting researchers, should be a wake-up call for the alleged progressive activists who still don't fully grasp or appreciate the role of digital social media in normalizing reactionary, anti-(small d) democratic viewpoints for millions of people.  

Media Matters For America Research Director Kayla Gogarty.

When presented with the reality of right wing dominance of the online media ecosystem, the stupid response from so-called progressives is along the lines of "we need a left wing Joe Rogan," as if progressive policy ideas would gain more traction if we would just dumb them down, communicate them in a Trumpian troll fashion, or turn them into rage bait. Good luck with that. 

Here's a thought: what if progressives actually started practicing what they preach? Specifically, why not create a spirit of SOLIDARITY among left/grassroots/progressive digital content creators? We (i.e. progressive content creators) do a piss-poor job of promoting each other's work. This Tony Awards column is just one tiny example of what should be done on a much larger scale: RECOGNITION of--and an attempt to get wider EXPOSURE for, content creators who operate in good faith and respect the intelligence of their audience(s). You know, the OPPOSITE of dumbing down, trolling, and rage baiting. 

*Media Rants Interview Of The Year: A Conversation With Mike McCabe About "Miracles Along County Q."

In an attempt to practice what I have personally been preaching for a long time, I created two YoutTube podcasts in 2025 to bring attention to people and ideas I perceive as aiding humane and valuable work. The 498 Show podcast features conversations with former UW Oshkosh students I've been blessed to work with over many years. The Media Rants podcast is a complement to this blog, featuring guests who shed light on anything media related. 

I thoroughly enjoyed every interview I was fortunate to conduct in 2025, and received some uplifting feedback along the way. One interview that stood out for me was Part One of my August of 2025 conversation with democracy activist, substacker, and novelist Mike McCabe. In that interview, which covered Mike's inspirational novel Miracles Along County Q, we discussed a number of ways in which some of the book's core themes challenge contemporary values, especially the tendency to think positive change is impossible and forgiveness is passe'. The book introduces readers to Ebiyan House, described in Mike's Substack as "A place like no other, off the beaten path, where cruelty meets its match and despair goes to die." It occurred to me that worthwhile public affairs media should be similar: a space where cruelty meets its match and despair goes to die. I submit to you that when progressive media content creators collectively adopt Ebiyan House values, they will have uncovered the secret to becoming trusted sources that masses of people actually care about.  

*The Tom Paxton/Phil Ochs Award For Best Topical Folk Music: Jesse Welles. In the 1960s Tom Paxton and Phil Ochs, both of whom were inspired by Bob Dylan, became (IMHO) the two greatest topical folk singers of their generation. Paxton's 1964 "Ramblin' Boy" album and Ochs' 1964 "All the News That's Fit to Sing" remain as groundbreaking works in the folk protest genre. Ochs tragically took his own life in 1976, but 88-year-old Paxton is still out there fighting the good fight: check out his wonderful 2025 song "No Kings Here."

Originally from Ozark, Arkansas, 33-year-old Jesse Welles is carrying on the Paxton/Ochs tradition in the digital age. YouTube recordings of his songs, often featuring just Jesse in a field with his guitar, have the passion, wit, and moral clarity of the best of the 1960s protest singers. One excellent example from 2025 is "The Department of War":

I realize the my Tony Award recipients represent only a fraction of the works that are deserving. If you are aware of media products that I should definitely be checking out, I would love to hear about them. 

If you got this far, thank for reading. And Happy New Year! Let's hope in 2026 our country can begin to find it's way back to sanity and solidarity. 

The 2024 Tony Awards: Celebrating Paul Krugman

Every year since 2003, I have given out Tony (Palmeri) Awards for the year's outstanding media. This is the first time since 2010, when I recognized the remarkable video documentarian (and Oshkosh native) Colin Crowley, that I am awarding only one Tony. In 2024 the award goes to the Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist who announced in December that he would no longer be a regular contributor to the New York Times opinion page, contributions that he's made since January of 2000. Though I've disagreed with Krugman many times, I've always admired his ability to communicate his thoughts about complex [and often divisive] topics in a language that most everyone can understand. That is, Krugman has played the public intellectual role in a way few academics can pull off. 

Before diving into my reasons for celebrating Krugman, I'd like to explain why I am not handing out any other awards this year. Quite simply and depressingly, 2024 was the worst year for American journalism and punditry since 2003--the year the mainstream corporate media enabled the duplicity and depravity that gave us Operation Iraqi "Freedom." (More than 20 years after deposing the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, the US government today remains silent as the current Iraqi government carries out unlawful executions at a staggering rate.). 

In 2024, mainstream media in its coverage of the presidential election proved once again that when it comes to anything Trump related, the freedom of the press as the great "bulwark of liberty" will be sacrificed in the name of what is good for the news as a BUSINESS. New York University journalism professor and media critic Jay Rosen provided a framework for how the 2024 election should be covered that mainstream media ultimately failed to incorporate in any meaningful way. Rosen tweeted: 

Not the odds, but the stakes. That's my shorthand for the organizing principle we most need in journalists covering the 2024 campaign. Not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for American democracy. Not the odds, but the stakes.

Instead what mainstream media provided us was essentially a repeat of 2016: obsession with polling data, treating bad faith actors known to flood the media space with "alternative facts" as credible sources, allowing blatantly false claims in political advertisements to go unchallenged, and framing Mr. Trump's anti-democratic tendencies as accusations made by his political opponents rather than as empirically verifiable facts. And while it is true that the so-called liberal spaces of mainstream media assisted establishment Democrats in covering up President Biden's decline until the June debate made it no longer possible to do so, that paled in comparison to the persistent "sanewashing" of Trump.

I think when future generations look back on the American continent of 2024, they will be hard pressed to explain the results of the Mexican presidential election compared to what transpired in the USA. In June of 2024, in a country still struggling to reign in a culture of toxic male machismo, Mexico elected its first female president--who also happened to be a climate scientist by trade. Meanwhile the United States elected a climate change denialist who also happened to be twice impeached, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and led an insurrection after he lost in 2020. No doubt future generations will somehow have to conclude that mainstream media had something to do with these topsy turvy results.

Maybe the worst mainstream media offender of 2024 was, sadly, the New York Times. Media critic Dan Froomkin's excellent analysis and critique of NYT publisher A.G. Sulzberger's speech at Oxford University demonstrated convincingly that the paper was not willing to go to bat for its OWN definition of independent journalism. For Froomkin, Sulzberger communicated two messages to media critics very clearly in his speech:

1. You will earn my displeasure if you warn people too forcefully about the possible end to democracy at the hands of a deranged insurrectionist.

2. You prove your value to me by trolling our liberal readers.

As someone who has been a NYT reader and subscriber for many years, it's hard for me to disagree with Froomkin's analysis. Paul Krugman has not commented on the changing (sinking?) journalistic and editorial standards at the Times, but one has to wonder if his decision to leave was motivated at least in part by not wanting to be associated with a news organization that trolls its own core readers. 

Regardless, allow me to spend the remainder of this post celebrating Paul Krugman's writing. Over the years he has come up with dozens of concepts and arguments that have provoked me to think more critically about topics, reconsider my own thoughts, and/or write about certain topics myself. Let me just provide five examples: 

1. Kakistocracy: I'm sure he was not the first to use the term, but when Krugman described the Trump cabinet as a "kakistocracy" it struck me as the most perfect descriptor possible. A kakistocracy is "a form of government in which the worst persons are in power." (In his most recent substack piece, Krugman comments on Trump's sudden betrayal of his MAGA base to align his views more closely with his wealthy donors, and reaches this spot-on conclusion: "What all three of these reversals suggest to me is that the 2024 election wasn’t a victory for populism or actually any kind of 'ism.' What it did, instead, was deliver the levers of power into the hands of people who can be bought.")

A kakistocracy indeed.

2.  The Confidence Fairy. I happen to work at a University recently decimated by austerity budgets manufactured by highly paid external consultants. In justifying austerity, UW System administrators assert the same tired rhetoric politicians use when slashing programs that benefit workers: these tough decisions will result in short-term pain, but ultimately build confidence in the System and inspire great taxpayer and private stakeholder support. That is, somehow an institution can build confidence by destroying it. It's kind of like a pathetic variation of the Vietnam era admonition that we had to "destroy the town to save it." Look for Krugman's "confidence fairy" to make a grand return in Republican discourse later this month as they try to rationalize why we need massive cuts to the federal budget while giving more tax breaks to the richest one-percent. 

3. Zombie Ideas. This might be my all-time favorite Krugmanism, discussed extensively in his 2020 book Arguing With Zombies and summarized in a column entitled How Zombies Ate The GOP's Soul: 

"A zombie idea is a belief or doctrine that has repeatedly been proved false, but refuses to die; instead, it just keeps shambling along, eating people’s brains. The ultimate zombie in American politics is the assertion that tax cuts pay for themselves — a claim that has been proved wrong again and again over the past 40 years. But there are other zombies, like climate change denial, that play an almost equally large role in our political discourse."

Krugman shows how the Republican party has been overrun by zombie ideas. If the party is ever to rescue itself from Trumpism at the national level and its Trump-lite derivatives in the states, it will have to come to grips with what Krugman says here: 

Think about what is now required for a Republican politician to be considered a party member in good standing. He or she must pledge allegiance to policy doctrines that are demonstrably false; he or she must, in effect, reject the very idea of paying attention to evidence.

It takes a certain kind of person to play that kind of game — namely, a cynical careerist. There used to be Republican politicians who were more than that, but they were mainly holdovers from an earlier era, and at this point have all left the scene, one way or another. John McCain may well have been the last of his kind.

What’s left now is a party that, as far as I can tell, contains no politicians of principle; anyone who does have principles has been driven out.

The Republican Party is right now held way too tightly in the grips of MAGA for those words to even be heard. But heard they must be if we are ever going to be able to return to a "normal" two party system. To be clear: the Democrats have their own variety of dysfunctions, most notably the establishment's fierce opposition to the progressive wing of the party. But factional disputes and fear of progressive upstarts is not the same as requiring delusion as the price of admission to the party ball. Not even close. 

4. The Years Of Shame: On the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Krugman wrote a short piece that literally provoked former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to cancel his New York Times subscription. The piece said in part:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

Krugman's piece stuck with me for a long time, and on the 20th anniversary of September 11th I wrote a Krugman-inspired piece on 2001-2021 as our nation's "third score of shame." 

5.  The Public Intellectual Style: What I've most admired about Paul Krugman is his ability to write for a general audience. This is not an easy thing for academics to do, and most fail at it. In 2011 he wrote another short piece explaining his efforts to write in a conversational tone. I was impressed, though not surprised, that his "bible" for commandments on how to write clearly is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," a work that--when I first read it in graduate school back in the 1980s--transformed my entire outlook on what I should be doing as a budding academic. Few public intellectuals demonstrate Orwell's commitment to clarity as well as Paul Krugman. 

Dr. Krugman has left the New York Times, but he most certainly has not stopped writing. His excellent substack, "Krugman Wonks Out," is well worth your time. And it's free!  

Congratulations to Dr. Paul Krugman for being the sole recipient of the 2024 Tony Award.