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Ryan Lizza’s model new Substack, Telos, is barely a day outdated and it’s already sparked a battle together with his former service provider, Politico.

At issue is the former Politico Playbook co-writer’s initial post in which he welcomed readers to his new site and lamented the current state of journalism in America.

The post, which went live on his Substack on Monday, began:

Some information: I not too long ago left Politico, the place I’ve served as the Chief Washington Correspondent considering the fact that 2019.

The principle purpose? Their fashion of political coverage is just not meeting the remarkable second of democratic peril we face.

I do know that sounds dramatic, but the hole between what is if truth be told happening in Washington and how it was being framed and suggested was much too large.

This new publication, Telos, is my modest try and do issues better.

I don’t mean to pick out on my pals in the media. All the folks and establishments on Trump’s enemies checklist are struggling with methods to respond.

Lizza went on to speak about how he reached a “second of extreme readability” when he observed how main law companies like Paul Weiss were bending the knee to President Donald Trump, agreeing to provide hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars of pro bono work and alter firm insurance policies to meet his calls for.

But what really struck him used to be how these corporations have been memory-holing content material from their internet sites, deleting articles that bragged about their lawyers’ accomplishments and court victories — but these successes have been towards the president or his targets.

“That’s some 1984-level shit,” Lizza wrote, adding that seeing it “shook” him and he felt that there was “no approach to seize that when writing for a spot equivalent to Politico,” the place he “saw too many headlines that covered Trump’s assault on these regulation companies as if it have been an exciting tennis in shape, and it made me painfully conscious that vast swathes of the media are ill-geared up to cover the present concern.”

Consistent with Lizza, later Monday evening he bought a name from an unknown quantity and then a stop-and-desist letter from a Politico attorney with a “scary” topic line: “Discover of Violation of non-disparagement clause.”

The letter accused Lizza of disparaging his former organisation, which he referred to is a thousand million-dollar firm, “and demanded that I delete, in its entirety, an 1800-phrase article I wrote the day past asserting the launch of this newsletter, Telos.”

Lizza was once defiant in a Tuesday submit responding to the attorney’s letter, arguing that the Monday post “was not about Politico.” As an alternative, Lizza wrote, his first article used to be “about the Trump administration’s exceptional assault on the media and what we as journalists must do to cover the quandary in Washington extra responsibly.”

By using asking him to delete the entire post, Lizza persisted, Politico’s legal professionals were not simply asking him “to censor crucial reporting about Politico, I was once being requested to censor vital reporting about Trump,” and had been “doing the bidding of the Trump administration by way of the use of a legal threat to assist the White House in stifling criticism of the president.”

“Frankly, that’s far more regarding than anything I wrote the day prior to this about Politico,” he wrote, “which I only talked about 3 times.”

He additionally took issue with the legal professional’s accusation that his submit used to be disparagement, as a result of “there’s nothing disparaging about bringing up Politico for example of the sorts of news organizations that don’t post certain genres of writing. It is only a factual commentary and Politico will have to not be sensitive about that.”

Writing that his former organisation had “made a regrettable mistake,” wrote Lizza, was “the definition of respectful criticism,” and now not the belittling or disrespectful criticism that will constitute disparagement.

Oliver Darcy supplied a similar assessment in his Standing newsletter Tuesday night time. “While Lizza’s critique was once pointed and talked about POLITICO in a handful of posts, it particularly did focus extra widely on the broader trade’s woes,” he wrote, adding that Lizza “rightly” objected to his former business enterprise’s makes an attempt to censor him.

Lizza concluded by way of declaring he was “now not going to be censored or intimidated by means of prison threats,” and noting that no longer only was his allegedly disparaging post linked elsewhere on Politico’s web page, the company had invited him to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and related situations as its visitor this coming weekend.

“I’m keeping out the possibility that the letter was sent to me in a second of pique via an in any other case well-that means Politico lawyer before the editorial staffers—many of whom I know would be appalled by means of this kind of a request—have been knowledgeable,” he wrote. “I’m hoping cooler heads succeed right here, and I hope that my friends at Politico will consider carefully about whether they truly want to go around censoring journalists.”

Learn Lizza’s put up here.

The post Ryan Lizza’s Exit from Politico Will get Adversarial After Company Attorneys Demand He Delete Substack Post first regarded on Mediaite.