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Chris McDaniel

@csmcdaniel.bsky.social
1K followers 757 following 76 posts

News Producer at Last Week Tonight. Previously an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News. Winner, 2011 PAX East Super Smash Bros. (N64) Championship. Signal: csmcdaniel.89

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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Wendell Berry died last week, so I've been reading through his poetry. This one comes to mind with forever chemicals: "I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever. Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?"
The Dream by Wendell Berry

I dream an inescapable dream
in which i take away from the country
the bridges and roads, the fences, the strung wires,
ourselves, all we have built and dug and hollowed out,
our flocks and herds, our droves of machines.

     I restore then the wide-branching trees.
I see growing over the land and shading it
the great trunks and crowns of the first forest.
I am aware of the rattling of their branches,
the lichened channels of their bark, the saps
of the ground flowing upward to their darkness.
Like the afterimage of a light that only by not
looking can be seen, I glimpse the country as it was.
All its beings belong wholly to it.  They flourish
in dying as in being born.  It is the life of its deaths.

     I must end, always, by replacing
our beginning there, ourselves and our blades,
the flowing in of history, putting back what I took away,
trying always with the same pain of foreknowledge
to build all that we have built, but destroy nothing.

     My hands weakening, I feel on all sides blindness
growing in the land on its peering bulbous stalks.
I see that my mind is not good enough.
I see that I am eager to own the earth and to own men.
I find in my mouth a bitter taste of money,
a gaping syllable I can neither swallow nor spit out.
I see all that we have ruined in order to have, all
that was owned for a lifetime to be destroyed forever.

    Where are the sleeps that escape such dreams?
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
I often think about this longtime 3M scientist who studied the prevalence of PFAS for the company back of the day, and watched our 2021 segment on PFAS and assumed we must have been wrong on its harms, before deciding to google it. www.propublica.org/podcast/fore...
IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Hansen: I maybe would glance at it, but I wouldn’t read it very carefully. It’s almost like I just didn’t really want to know.

Lussenhop: Until 2021. An old college professor sent her a message with a link to a video.

IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Hansen: A John Oliver video.

LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER, John Oliver: Our main story tonight concerns chemicals. Specifically, we’re gonna be talking about a particular class of chemicals tonight, called PFAS.

IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Hansen: He was reporting on PFAS and the effect that it had on communities.

IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Hansen: He’s wrong. He’s talking about all the ways that it’s harmful, and it’s not. I said, it kind of makes me mad, honestly. 

Lerner: She writes back to her professor, and the professor says …

IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Hansen: “Are you sure it’s wrong?” And so I kind of rolled my eyes and then I went in and I was like, OK, I’m just gonna go to the literature. 

Lerner: And sitting in her kitchen, Kris googles the health effects of the chemical that she had found so many years ago.

IN-PERSON INTERVIEW, Hansen: And I couldn’t believe how many articles there were on the toxicity associated with fluorochemicals.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
The records requests were harder. In my experience, police departments have been the govt agencies least willing to comply with open records law. After I was exceedingly annoying, they eventually turned over a 30,000 page pdf of the database (which we had asked for in a csv) and ghosted me.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
We started going through the city's business permits and filing open records requests. @mayatribbitt.bsky.social found this first one, and eventually (with @claireg1.bsky.social) we located dozens more permits with this requirement in them.
A permit with the text:  The applicant, landlord, and/or operator shall install and maintain exterior security
cameras on the Site that cover the entire extent of the Site, as approved by the Rialto Police
Department. The security cameras shall be accessible to the Rialto Police Department via
the internet through FUSUS hardware and application. The security cameras shall be
installed and operational prior to the issuance of a business license.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Back in 2023, Reuters reported that one city in CA was beginning to *require* private businesses to hook their cameras up to the police, giving live access. This raised a lot of questions for us: How were they requiring this? How often are cops accessing the footage? www.reuters.com/article/tech...
Rialto is betting big on cameras: from 2020 all newly constructed or remodeled commercial and industrial properties in the city were required by the police to register cameras in the Fusus system and allow police to access a live-view, according to the police department.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
Earlier this year, the FCC wrote to a local radio station in SF, unhappy with their coverage of an ICE raid. After Brendan Carr sent them a letter of inquiry, the station cut back on political reporting, and pushed reporters toward human interest stories. Very bleak. apnews.com/article/trum...
After Carr’s threat, staffers involved in the story were summoned to meetings with lawyers hired by Audacy. The attorneys scoured employee social media posts and grilled some on whether they had any political bias, current and former staff said.

The station’s news director, Jennifer Seelig, sits on the board of the Radio Television Digital News Association, which gives out a prominent First Amendment award. She told people that business considerations required the station to avoid angering the FCC, current and former staffers said.

Seelig did not respond to requests for an interview.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 19/05/2025
A few things I read while researching that were helpful to understanding the moment we're in. I thought this @jameeljaffer.bsky.social piece on media capitulations was very powerful. I'm also a sucker for a Learned Hand quote. www.nytimes.com/2025/02/04/o...
Judge Learned Hand, revered for his eloquent and consequential defense of free speech at the height of World War I, came to fear, later in his life, that Americans had placed too much faith in lawyers and legal institutions. In 1944, at a celebration of what was then known as “I am an American Day,” which extolled American citizenship, he told an audience of more than a million people in Central Park:
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.
I remembered Hand’s “The Spirit of Liberty” speech while watching some of the largest American media institutions and technology companies prostrate themselves, one after another, before Donald Trump, offering obscene sums of money to settle feeble or frivolous lawsuits that one would have expected them to contest. The First Amendment gives American publishers and platforms rights that are the envy of their counterparts around the world. That today so many of these organizations evidently lack the will or courage to exercise them is frightening and dispiriting.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 31/03/2025
Axon (called Taser Intl back then) picked up the theory in the 2000s, blaming it after deaths involving Tasers and other law enforcement force. The company pushed it aggressively to law enforcement and medical examiners, suing MEs if they blamed Tasers and funding experts that believed in the idea
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
Almost 10 years ago, I sued the Missouri Dept of Corrections for refusing to allow me to be a press witness for executions after I had done reporting that they were not big fans of. The courts sided with us and the state agreed to settle rather than continue trying to fight. Good luck to the AP
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
and I *think* that this is the court case being referenced: casetext.com/case/matter-...
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 15/01/2025
okay I've continued reading and came across this reference to a NY Post lawsuit:
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
when I eat too much popcorn at the alamo drafthouse
Daniel Day-Lewis in the Phantom Thread, saying "kiss me my girl, before i'm sick"
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 14/01/2025
People in the top half of the piece: The audience should NOT be laughing at Serious Cinema Directors in the bottom half of the piece: Yeah it's a mix of comedy and drama and I think it's funny www.nytimes.com/2025/01/14/s...
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 08/01/2025
@matthewschafer.bsky.social not vital at all, but I've been reading the Power Broker, & this passage about public records had me curious about the state of open records laws back in the 1930s. I know NY's (and the Feds') laws came about in 60s/after. Know anything written about open records pre-60s?
Moses' methods—the methods with which he swayed politicians to his side—required secrecy. An authority gave him secrecy, for unlike the records of conventional governmental agencies, which were public, subject always to inspection, an authority's records were corporate records, as private as those of a private corporation.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 12/12/2024
*snaps suspenders and begins opening statement in a foghorn leghorn voice* now I may be a simple, freewheeling, small-town lawyer…
A WSJ push alert that says “the freewheeling, small town lawyer who landed the biggest case in America: defending luigi Mangione”
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 10/12/2024
Tom Cotton? The NYTimes writer?
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
In an attempt to limit the paper trail, states often pay executioners and sometimes drug suppliers in cash. The federal judge was probing whether the state had complied with tax laws in these payments, and was dismissed shortly after.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
. @jimmyjenkins.bsky.social reports that AZ's governor (D) has abruptly cut off an investigation by a former federal judge into the state's lethal injection practices and plans to resume executions. They did not like what the judge was looking into and what he found www.azcentral.com/story/news/p...
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 26/11/2024
This courtroom sketch really looks like a Scooby Doo villain pointing at the Mystery Gang, explaining that they would have gotten away it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids: www.reuters.com/world/us/i-c...
A courtroom sketch of Rudy Giuliani pointing and looking somewhat unhinged during an outburst
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 15/11/2024
This is Penelope. Right now she smells like Fritos
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 14/11/2024
It took 4 years for the Louisville PD to investigate one of their cops shooting pepper balls at journalists. The PD claimed the investigation was exhaustive... turns out they had not even interviewed the journalists. (Which the police chief claimed they did) www.courier-journal.com/story/news/c...
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 11/04/2024
In court, DOJ & BOP assured that the facility was "properly registered as a bulk manufacturer." The company is not properly registered to make drugs for use in humans or animals since it never registered with the FDA. DOJ declined to answer if they would be correcting this record
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 11/04/2024
The first batch of execution drugs that the company manufactured ended up failing quality assurance testing. The Bureau of Prisons wasn't quite sure what to make of the failed test, but the company said it "spent some money on something related to filters" and made another batch.
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Chris McDaniel @csmcdaniel.bsky.social · 11/04/2024
The facility has never been inspected by the FDA. It's unclear if they adhere to Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP), since they don't actually normally make drugs. Here's how they describe their normal business in a state license application we got through an open records request
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