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Carlos Watson Sentenced to Nearly 10 Years

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Jury Found Onetime TV Anchor Conspired to Commit Fraud

A Plea: Save Us From Social Media Propaganda

Lack of Accountability Is ‘Existential Threat’ to Journalism

Journal-isms Roundtable photos by Don Baker/Don Baker Photography Group

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“In this video, we explore Carlos Watson’s vision behind OZY Media, a platform aimed at highlighting emerging talent. Hear stories of creativity, growth, and finding promising voices that went mainstream, including young stars before their fame.” (Credit: YouTube)

Jury Found Onetime TV Anchor Conspired to Commit Fraud

Carlos Watson, the Black entrepreneur and former cable news host who attracted high-profile investors to his Ozy Media Silicon Valley startup but was found guilty of fraud, was sentenced Monday to 116 months — almost 10 years — in prison.

“The sentence came five months after a federal jury convicted Mr. Watson and Ozy Media of conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud,” Danielle Kaye reported for The New York Times.

“The jury also convicted Mr. Watson of identity theft, following a two-month trial during which witnesses detailed an impersonated phone call, fabricated contracts and misleading claims about Ozy’s earnings from 2018 to 2021.

“Mr. Watson, who had pleaded not guilty and continued to assert his innocence up until his sentence, faced a maximum of 37 years in prison. Government prosecutors had requested a 17-year sentence and $65.6 million in forfeiture to the government.

“ ‘The fact that we’re here in this circumstance is tragic,’ said Judge Eric Komitee of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, who presided over the case and imposed the sentence. ‘But it’s a tragedy of Mr. Watson’s own making.'”

Breon Peace, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement, “The jury found that Watson was a con man who told lie upon lie upon lie to deceive investors into buying stock in his company.”

Shaan Merchant (pictured) wrote Dec. 12 for Slate that, “At the center of Ozy was the lore of Carlos Watson: The son of a Black American mother and Jamaican immigrant father, both teachers.

“He often told a story about how he had been kicked out of kindergarten but overcome all odds, thanks to his hard work and determination. He attended Harvard, then Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the school’s law review. He went on to work for McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, co-founded a college-prep and tutoring company that he sold to Kaplan (disclosure: Slate and Kaplan are owned by the same parent company), and eventually transitioned to media, with stints at CNN and MSNBC.

” ‘He is telegenic, charismatic, smart as heck, and a natural in the business. I have rarely seen someone with such ease in front of the camera and the ability to connect with people in the way he does,’ Princell Hair (pictured), then a CNN executive, told a Stanford publication in a 2006 profile.

The Times continued, “Mr. Watson started Ozy in 2013, publishing news articles and newsletters before venturing into podcasts and television productions. The start-up secured commitments from prominent investors at a time when digital publishers, like BuzzFeed and Vice, attracted billions of dollars in investments that largely didn’t pan out. . . .”

“Throughout the legal proceedings, Mr. Watson denied the fraud allegations. In court, his lawyers argued that his representations to investors had been based on good-faith assessments of Ozy’s finances, and they shifted the blame for any fraudulent activity onto other former Ozy employees. When he took the stand at his trial, Mr. Watson said that he did not intentionally inflate revenue estimates, but rather presented the types of service-based income typical of a ‘scrappy young company’ in its early years.

“Mr. Watson, at his sentencing hearing on Monday, reiterated his stance that the government selectively prosecuted him because he is a Black man.”

A prayer circle in Mountain View, Calif. The Rev. Jeff Grant is flanked by Carlos Watson and his sister Beverly Watson. (Credit: Rev. Jeff Grant/Medium.com)

It was an argument some of Watson’s supporters echoed.

David T. Robinson wrote Nov. 8 on LawClues.com:

“The injustice of this case becomes even clearer when you consider that OZY Media was, in fact, a real and valuable, Emmy Award-winning media company. Mr. Watson was an innovative entrepreneur who built a thriving startup from scratch. OZY attracted over 200 major clients — including Coca-Cola, Target, and Walmart — and employed nearly 1,000 full-time and freelance staff, 90% of whom were women or people of color. Yet instead of celebrating this achievement, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn spent somewhere between $10-20 millions of taxpayer money to destroy a thriving Black-owned business headquartered on the other side of the country.”

A 2023 story in the Bay State Banner in Boston was headlined, “The troubling case of Carlos Watson: ‘Too Black for Business’ “

The author, Brian Wright O’Connor (pictured), taught Watson at Harvard. He wrote, “The ledger of African American business leaders who have faced criminal investigation and financial ruin after rising to the top is long and includes such figures as former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, San Francisco financier Calvin Grigsby and former star securities trader Joseph Jett – all hounded by inquiries while colleagues apparently were deemed too white to indict.”

But in Slate, Merchant put forth another take on Watson’s Blackness. With “marketers suddenly looking to fill new-found diversity quotas, Watson was all too happy to be their smiling solution. He seemed to find particular success doing so. . . .

“ ‘When we were out there fighting for Black-owned media to get advertising dollars, you were the darling of the industry. You weren’t out there fighting with us,’ Roland Martin (pictured), host of the YouTube show #RolandMartinUnfiltered, later said of Watson after Ozy had fallen apart. ‘You were the darling of white venture-capital money. Y’all raised $75 million.”

Indeed, by 2017, Watson’s Ozy Media had raised $35 million from such investors as German media conglomerate Axel Springer, Emerson Collective, and several Silicon Valley angel investors including Laurene Powell Jobs, Ron Conway, David Drummond, Larry Sonsini and Dan Rosensweig.

Ozy based in Mountain View, Calif., said then it would use the funding to continue to hire editorial staff that “discover and report on important, cutting-edge stories being told nowhere else,” and to grow its video team and production capabilities.

“The Carlos Watson Show, ” featuring “meaningful conversations with the game-changers and change-makers who are ahead of their time,” was billed as Amazon Prime’s first talk show.

Samir Rao, the other founder of Ozy, and Suzee Han, a former Ozy chief of staff, pleaded guilty last year to fraud charges and testified against Watson, the Times story reported.

A Plea: Save Us From Social Media Propaganda

Lack of Accountability Is ‘Existential Threat’ to Journalism

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Journal-isms Roundtable photos by Don Baker/Don Baker Photography Group

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On “Rising,” Niall Stanage and Amber Duke discuss how billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg compete for Donald Trump’s attention. (Credit: The Hill/YouTube)

Lack of Accountability Is ‘Existential Threat’ to Journalism

The influence of propaganda and disinformation on the American public has become such a threat to legitimate journalism that safeguards are needed to ensure that “the free flow of information” gathered by truth-seekers is protected, according to the U.S. director of Reporters Without Borders, one of the world’s largest and most influential press-freedom organizations.

“We think of propaganda as yet another existential threat to journalism, partly because propaganda so often tries to displace journalism directly,” Clayton Weimers (pictured), executive director of the Reporters Without Borders Washington-based U.S. office, told the Journal-isms Roundtable.

Propagandists do this “by mimicking it, by stealing its hallmarks, by stealing its authority so that it can confuse or convince something of something that isn’t real. But frankly, the purpose of propaganda often isn’t to make you believe something that isn’t true. It’s just to make you believe nothing at all. And that leads to more disengagement, more turning away from the news, which we’re all experiencing right now.

“I think we all have friends who are telling . . . right now, ‘Oh, I love you and your journalism, but I just can’t deal with the news right now.’ It’s so, so common right now. I think we’ve all heard it.

“So, you know, we really need to think of the way that the information space, especially online, is being structured as itself a threat to press freedom.

“When we have the new conduits of information being controlled by billionaires like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, we need to hold them more accountable.”

Musk, a key supporter of President-elect Donald Trump, bought Twitter in 2022, renaming it X.

Zuckerberg is co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, which includes Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

Weimers continued, “We need to find democratic safeguards and transparent safeguards that will help make us understand how information is getting to people and how we can ensure the free flow of information rather than a very, shall I say, colored view of the world that often you get from social media.

“Fixing the marketplace for news is an existential problem for journalism.”

The Paris-based press-freedom organization, known by its French acronym RSF, describes itself as “an international non-profit organization that has been working for 35 years to promote and defend journalism around the world.

“Through its Paris headquarters, 13 international bureaus and sections, and network of correspondents in 130 countries, as well as consultative status at the United Nations, UNESCO, the Council of Europe, and the International Organisation of the Francophonie, RSF has the experience and on-the-ground presence to effectively defend journalism on a global scale.”

Forty people were on the Journal-isms Roundtable Zoom call, with another 157 having watched on Facebook by Dec. 14, and 80 others on YouTube by then. (Credit: YouTube)

Weimers spoke at a Dec. 8 session of the Journal-isms Roundtable, at which experts on the economy, human rights, news coverage of the environment and on writing and emotional wellness — along with a former U.S. ambassador — joined a conversation with journalists about the after-effects of the November election and how journalists should approach what happens next.

The session took place three days after Paul Farhi and John Volk reported that “Donald Trump won the 2024 election with one of the smallest popular-vote margins in U.S. history, but in news deserts – counties lacking a professional source of local news – it was an avalanche. Trump won 91% percent of these counties over his Democratic rival, Kamala Harris, according to an analysis of voting data by Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project.”

In addition, Pew Research found in November that about one in five U.S. adults, 21 percent, say they regularly get news from news influencers on social media.

That is a trend accompanied by the steady disappearance of local news, the growth of distrust in institutions and the hostility toward the press expected from the incoming Trump administration, Weimers said.

Forty people were on the Zoom call, with another 157 having watched on Facebook by Dec. 14, and 80 others on YouTube by then.

Some of the observations:

Linda Jones (pictured), a Dallas-based “writing and emotional wellness doula,” stressed the importance of maintaining emotional health, advice especially geared toward those who were invested in the success of Vice President Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate. Personal writing is one method. “Not the writing that brings us stress on deadline, but that personal writing.” It has to be “‘a constant practice, the constant practice of releasing, having a release valve. . . . and also being in community.  . . . basically monitoring how you’re feeling at all times when you’re doing this work.”

Earlier that day, Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” in his first one-on-one interview as president-elect, that the price of groceries and border issues won him the election. But Patrick Mason (pictured), chair of the Economics Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told the Roundtable he was alarmed by the net effect of Trump’s economic proposals.

“Collectively, when you look at these economic policies, they’re just bad,” Mason said. “And they are designed to redistribute wealth and power toward the most affluent people.” Raising tariffs would be inflationary, mass deportations of the undocumented would be costly, and proposed budget cuts would likely reduce “critical societal building blocks, such as health care and education, which are essential for maintaining a stable and equitable society.

“Where you have tariffs on things that you’re buying from others, and  you’re trying to deport people who are already here, it’s kind of like you’re closing off the international sector of the economy, which won’t be good for the overall economy in the country,” the economist said.

Mason, who spent 23 years at Florida State University, where he was professor of economics and director of African American Studies, said there had been a back-room attempt to undermine tenure in Florida. “If you do not have tenured professors, you won’t have anybody for the news media to talk to to explain complex issues, which then undermines the whole information process.

“So in the state of Florida, the entire education system was politicized from [Pre-K ]to Ph.D. in terms of the content of what can be taught, in terms of what professors can say. It already has a chilling impact.”

Evlondo Cooper (pictured), senior researcher for the climate and energy program at the watchdog group Media Matters for America, said that in Trump’s previous term, he rolled back more than 100 environmental rules. But media coverage of climate and the environment “largely focused on the political theater, the inflammatory statements.”

This time, Trump is nominating fossil fuel advocates like oil-industry CEO Chris Wright to head the Energy Department and environmental regulation opponents such as former Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

They “want to fundamentally reshape and undermine what I believe is minimal climate action that’s happened under the last few administrations.

“He’s going to plan to eliminate environmental justice offices across the country, redrawing national monument boundaries to enable drilling. These aren’t isolated changes, but part of a coordinated planned dismantling,” Cooper said.

Margaret Huang (pictured), president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups, warned journalists about the correlation between Trump’s rhetoric and hate speech that leads to violence.

“The challenge lies in covering these perspectives without legitimizing harmful ideologies,” she said.

“Journalists have this really important role to play to distinguish between different political perspectives, people who might agree with some of the positions of the Jan. 6 folks but who are not actually advocating for the violent overthrow of government or who are not actually advocating for the return to other times of our history where people were treated as second class or less citizens.”

Charles Ray (pictured, by Sharon Farmer) a former U.S. ambassador and chair and trustee of the Africa Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote this month for the Daily Kos, “it’s plain to see that the one thing we can all depend on after January 2025, is chaos and plenty of it.

“One can only hope that once the pot of chaos starts to bubble, enough members of the Senate, and at least one or two GOP House members will wake up to reality and become the adults in the room who won’t be present in the Administration this time around.”

Ray, whose postings included Zimbabwe, Cambodia, Vietnam and Sierra Leone, told the Roundtable that a Trump effort to “politicize a lot of the civil service and foreign service jobs, anything that even remotely touches policy to enable the president to fire people at will without having to go through the civil service procedures . . . is going to have a chilling effect on how people at low levels, very low levels in the [State] Department do their jobs.”

Ray also noted “a worsening of a problem that’s been in existence for a long time, and that’s the failure to staff adequately a lot of our embassies and consulates in key places and especially places on the 54 countries of Africa. Very few of those embassies are fully staffed, and very few have been fully staffed for decades.”
 
Toward the end of the two-hour discussion, Elliott Francis (pictured), veteran broadcast journalist who is producer/host of “NOW” on Facebook Live, called for “a procedure of certification for journalists much in the same way that meteorologists are granted certifications.”

John C. Watson (pictured), J.D., Ph.D., who teaches communications law and journalism ethics at American University, said Francis’ idea was “a gospel I’ve been preaching for 25 years. Once we have this certification slash licensing in place, we can let people know these are the people who are trained to do it. And you can listen and read those other people.” Watson said this would not be called “licensing” nor decided by a government, and he and Francis  promised to get back to the Roundtable with a fleshed-out proposal.  

Contributing: Christian Spencer

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