Callum Borchers

A one-digit mistake by CNN has armed President Donald Trump with new ammunition for another fusillade against the media. CNN reported Dec 7 that Donald Trump Jr. received an email on Sept. 4, 2016, that granted special access to WikiLeaks documents. The network said in an online article that the email had been “described to CNN by multiple sources.” But The Washington Post obtained the email itself and reported in the afternoon of Dec 7 that the message was actually dated Sept. 14, 2016 — a difference that sets Trump Jr.’s receipt 10 days later. The date matters.

President Donald Trump treated “Bill” — as in Clinton — like a four-letter word during his campaign for the White House, but now Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai is invoking the 42nd president's name in a positive way to help sell a plan to repeal a major Internet regulation. “We're going to return to President Clinton's framework, which existed from 1996 all the way until 2015,” Ajit Pai said Nov 27 on “Fox & Friends.” “Under that light-touch, market-based framework, we saw tons of investment in infrastructure.

The perception that President Donald Trump has a vendetta against CNN might not factor into a court's ruling on the AT&T-Time Warner deal, but it could backfire in a different way on a president who styles himself as a champion of American business. “The U.S. has made an enormous effort over the past decades to advocate sound antitrust policies abroad,” said Anu Bradford, an antitrust specialist at Columbia Law School.

The photo is clear: Sen Al Franken (D-MN) is touching the chest of journalist Leeann Tweeden while Tweeden slept on the plane ride home from a USO tour in 2006. Nevertheless, many news outlets have cautiously reported the act preserved on camera as an accusation, informing audiences that Tweeden alleges or says Franken groped her. Some women's rights advocates chafe at the media's delicate approach, which has been pretty consistent across a range of editorial perspectives.

[Commentary] Some supporters of U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore have come right out and said they do not believe four women who claim the Alabama Republican pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his 30s.

For President Donald Trump, it is critical that Alex Jones and other backers in the conservative media continue to look on the bright side — and continue to tell the president's base to do the same.

Despite these reversals and shortcomings, Trump's base is standing by him. No single factor can fully explain loyalty, but positive spin in the conservative press is surely a big one. The message Trump voters have heard over and over is that their man deserves a long leash. So far, they seem willing to give him one. But things could change if commentators like Jones, Limbaugh and Hannity were to turn on Trump. The White House seems to understand the stakes.

A recent tweet from the Associated Press indicates it learned of a meeting between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Russian President Vladimir Putin not from Tillerson's team but from Putin's. What's more, after allowing US journalists to accompany him to the Osobnyak Guest House in Moscow for a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Tillerson ditched reporters before meeting Putin at the Kremlin. Throughout the day, Russia drove US media coverage by pushing out a steady stream of information (or disinformation) that the State Department was slow to match.

Counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway likes to say that the Trump administration and the media share “joint custody” of the country, as if the president and the press are a divorced couple. That might be an apt comparison (Jon Stewart also has likened Trump and the media to ex-lovers), but the White House seems totally uninterested in an amicable split. Witness White House press secretary Sean Spicer's reprimand of American Urban Radio correspondent April Ryan on Tuesday (“please stop shaking your head"), which offended many reporters, and his characterization over the weekend of Politico's Tara Palmeri as “an idiot with no real sources,” which offended even Breitbart News.

. Spicer's characterization of Palmeri as an “idiot” is particularly telling because he wrote it in an email to Breitbart. He didn't just blurt it out, in other words; he typed it, had a chance to reconsider — before anyone else would have read the insult — yet decided to leave it in his message and hit “send” anyway. Credit the White House with being authentic in this department, but remember that President Trump has bragged about being able to fake cordiality. His go-to explanation, when asked about his history of hobnobbing with — and donating money to — Democratic politicians is that he was not always genuine. President Trump is not playing the same game with the media, and voters have noticed. In a Monmouth University poll, 81 percent of respondents said President Trump has a worse relationship with the press than previous presidents did. Here's the survey result that President Trump should worry about: 58 percent said his bad relationship with the media has hurt his image.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump contended in his conversation with Time's Washington bureau chief, Michael Scherer, that although some of his assertions are not precisely true, they are substantially true. Ironically, the substantial-truth defense is borrowed from the news media — the “opposition party,” according to the White House — which sometimes uses it to win libel cases.

Trump's argument was similar to the one presented by the A&E cable channel in a 2011 libel case brought by a Colorado prisoner named Jerry Lee Bustos. On an episode of “Gangland,” A&E labeled Bustos a member of the Aryan Brotherhood gang. In fact, Bustos was not a member. In Trump's case, the question is: What's the difference between saying something bad happened in Sweden Feb. 17 when the truth is that something bad happened Feb. 20? Now, let's remember that Trump spoke Feb. 18 — before the riot. He didn't misstate the date of a past incident; he referred to an incident that hadn't occurred, then got lucky (if you can call it that) when an incident two days later fit his extremely vague description. Let's also remember that a defense that can save you in federal court might not — and perhaps should not — save you in the court of public opinion. People rightfully expect media companies to report precise truth, not merely substantial truth. It is reasonable to hold the president to the same standard.

President Trump's impending budget proposal is expected to include deep cuts to public media, among other things, which would surely delight Republican lawmakers who have been trying, on and off, to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for five decades. If Republican lawmakers are hoping to cripple political coverage by NPR and PBS, however, stopping the flow of taxpayer dollars to the CPB might not have the desired effect.

NPR relies on the corporation for less than 1 percent of its revenue, and PBS depends on the agency for less than 7 percent, according to data from 2014, the most recent year for which audited financial statements for all three entities were available. Because the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has low overhead costs, it distributes almost all of the taxpayer money it receives, in the form of grants. From its $445 million appropriation in 2014, the corporation paid out $441.7 million, or 99.3 percent. Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would primarily affect local public broadcasters, not PBS and NPR. The CPB noted this when the wrote, "The federal investment in public media is vital seed money — especially for stations located in rural America, and those serving underserved populations where the appropriation counts for 40 to 50 percent of their budget. The loss of this seed money would have a devastating effect. These stations would have to raise approximately 200 percent more in private donations to replace the federal investment." In other words, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would mean hurting the local TV and radio stations that a whole lot of Republican voters watch and listen to.