Just a few suggestions of interesting items.

• Skift, a company that focuses on documenting and analyzing trends in the international travel industry, tackled a question that’s been in the news these days: “Do U.S. Airlines Have a Legal Right to Bar Passengers Who Don’t Wear Masks?”

The answer, based on Skift reporting, is a resounding “Yes!”

A vocal group of Americans often likes to speak about their constitutional freedom to do whatever they wish. But on airplanes, like at most private businesses, no such right exists, attorneys say.

Airlines can make any reasonable regulation they want, and create their own consequences for passengers who violate it, Cantor said.

“I know there will be people on Twitter who say, ‘I have constitutional right to fly on a plane,”‘ she said. “Actually you don’t. You don’t have to fly on a plane.”

It might be easier for airlines if Congress or the Federal Aviation Administration created a law or regulation, similar to rules requiring seatbelts or banning smoking. But it is not required, Edwards said.

“If Southwest says, this is how you board our flights, and you refuse to abide by that, you don’t need an act of Congress or the FAA to stop them,” Edwards said. “Even if mask wearing is not particularly effective but it increases confidence, airlines may still require it.”

There’s more, so use the link above to check it out.

• NiemanLab.com, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, offered a useful critique of the mainstream media’s reporting on social and political protests: “It’s time to change the way the media reports on protests. Here are some ideas.”

The article reviews one 2010 study of reporting on protests over several decades “found that the papers depicted protests — even peaceful ones — as nuisances rather than as necessary functions of democracy.”

Why does this matter? The role of protest is to publicize grievances from people who typically exist outside of traditional power structures. It’s why freedom of assembly is written into the Constitution, along with freedom of the press. And the role of journalism is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable to the broader public. But that’s not possible if the way we report on protests is biased from the star

NiemanLab then offers pointed criticism of the media’s use of the passive voice when reporting on protests.

It’s a bias that creeps in, for example, when we use passive voice to describe how people in positions of authority, such as police officers, are behaving but use active voice to describe protestors’ behaviors.

The protest paradigm helps explain why, on May 31, WUSA, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate, tweeted, “Pepper spray caused a short stampede in Lafayette Park during a peaceful march honoring George Floyd” — suggesting that the pepper spray somehow acted of its own accord. (WUSA eventually took down the tweet.)

Instead of reporting these “third person” descriptions, attribute the results. In the illustrations cited in the NiemanLab post, the media finally were forced to report numerous cases of violence originating with the police. It’s useful advice.

• And over at the Lawfare Blog, “The Law of Classified Information: A Primer.”

It’s a review prompted by the controversy over former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s new tell-all book.

The Bolton debacle provides an opportunity to explain how the classification system—a system that affects some 4 million Americans—really functions: what law governs classification, what kinds of information may be classified, who decides what’s classified and how classification is enforced.

Based on the legal considerations, this article suggests Bolton’s legal defense will be “an uphill battle.”