Journalism

We’re excited to announce that the News Integrity Initiative at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism has chosen Free Press’ News Voices project as one of its first 10 grantees. Free Press is honored to be among a remarkable group of organizations doing vital work to foster trust between newsrooms and the public and nurture constructive, inclusive public conversations. NII’s $250,000 grant will help support News Voices’ work in North Carolina, where we launched earlier in 2017, and in New Jersey, where we’ve been working since 2015. News Voices builds bridges between journalists and everyday people to improve local news, increase access to credible information, and foster public support for quality journalism. We do that through intensive on-the-ground outreach and in-person conversations, large and small. This grant will help us work with our local and state partners to leverage our local relationships and explore how communities lose trust in the media — and how to rebuild it.

The Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) Voice of the First Amendment Task Force is calling on the Senate Intelligence Committee to ignore a tweet from President Donald Trump seeking an investigation into what he called “Fake News Networks.” The Senate Intelligence Committee is one of several entities investigating allegations of collusion between Russia and some members of the Trump campaign and inner circle. While at first the tweet appears to be just another escalation of the president’s ongoing rhetorical war against news stories with which he disagrees or that he just doesn’t like, the task force believes it must be taken seriously.

"This White House has said that Mr. Trump’s tweets constitute official communications from the president of the United States. So what we have here is the highest elected official in the land seeking a congressional investigation into the content of news reports,” said Dan Shelley, RTDNA Executive Director. “Such an investigation would be a clear violation of the First Amendment.”

[Commentary] Since the election, The New York Times has toughened everything about its coverage of Donald Trump, from the choice of words it uses to describe what he says to the number of reporters assigned to cover and investigate him. Like everyone else, the Times underestimated his chances of being elected. Although it published impressive investigations of his taxes, treatment of women, and real-estate deals, it was only after his surprise victory that the dimensions of Russia’s interference in the election and ties to Trump were examined and revealed.

In recent months, the Times has been in a running one-upmanship battle with The Washington Post, a thrilling journalistic display that has reinforced the importance of the few national news organizations left that still have the muscle to do this kind of reporting. “The role of the press is clearer now than it’s ever been,” said Executive Editor Dean Baquet on CBS’s Face the Nation in February. The quixotic nature of the new administration, the president’s serial lies (the word Baquet was right to use on the front page), and the false narratives that tumble out of the White House daily cry out for this kind of accountability journalism. Without the instrumental, muscular reporting of the Times’s team, we would not know what was going on inside this bizarre and byzantine White House.

[Jill Abramson is a former executive editor of The New York Times, and currently a senior lecturer in the English department of Harvard University]

In August, after a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) ended in murder, Steve Bannon insisted that "there's no room in American society" for neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and the KKK. But an explosive cache of documents obtained by BuzzFeed News proves that there was plenty of room for those voices on his website.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, under Bannon’s leadership, Breitbart courted the alt-right — the insurgent, racist right-wing movement that helped sweep Donald Trump to power. The former White House chief strategist famously remarked that he wanted Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders boiled over with frustration at the press during Oct 5's news briefing, telling CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta that “you have a responsibility to tell the truth.” Acosta, who has been a persistent critic of the administration, asked Sanders whether President Donald Trump believes the First Amendment protecting free speech and press rights is as important as the Second Amendment, which enshrines protections for gun owners. "Absolutely,” Sanders said. “The president is an incredible advocate of the First Amendment. With the First amendment ... with those freedoms also come responsibilities. You have a responsibility to tell the truth. To be accurate.”

Earlier in the day, President Trump tweeted that the Senate Intelligence Committee should investigate “Fake News Networks” to see “why so much of our news is just made up.” Sanders was pressed on whether the president believes the committee should investigate American media organizations. “I don’t know that that’s the case,” she responded. “But I do think that we should call on all media to a higher standard. I think you have a lot of responsibility, and a lot of times false narratives create a bad environment, certainly aren't helpful to the American people, and you have a responsibility to provide and report fair and accurate details. When we don't, that's I think troubling for all of us.”

YouTube recently surfaced videos peddling misinformation, hateful messages and conspiracy theories to users searching about mainstream news events—problems that caused the site to change its search results to promote more authoritative sources. In response to criticism of some search results on social media this week, YouTube is accelerating the rollout of planned changes to its search engine, apparently. On Oct 3 night, the company began promoting more authoritative sources in search results, especially for those about major news events. YouTube doesn’t disclose how it determines which sources are authoritative.

President Donald Trump suggested that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate media companies that he believes are reporting information that is “just made up.” “Why Isn't the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!” the president tweeted from his personal account early Oct 5.

The president's tweet comes one day after leaders of the committee announced that their findings confirm the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. They also warned that Russian operatives may try to continue to interfere in future elections, including the midterms next year and the 2020 presidential election.

[Commentary] Why does President Donald Trump talk endlessly about fake news? For the same reason he talks about voter fraud: to soothe his ego and hoodwink his supporters.

In a world where voter fraud threw the election and a nefarious news media make up stories to embarrass Trump, Trump is actually the popular, effective pick of the American people. That’s a much nicer thing to be than the broadly unpopular and at times fumbling leader of a country in which a majority of voters preferred someone else. The real question is whether Trump actually believes either of these claims. Does he actually believe that, somehow, millions of votes were cast illegally without any evidence of that emerging a year later? And, probably more important, does he actually believe that the news media make up reports? The main question: Who’s he trying to convince, his supporters or himself? And which of those options is more problematic for the country?

In February 2017, four political scientists formed Bright Line Watch. Their mission was a chilling sign of the times, a reflection of the fears that swept across the United States as Donald Trump swept into office. They existed, they said, to “monitor the status of democratic practices and highlight potential threats to American democracy.” The danger was from our new president, and from ourselves.

The third wave of results, which will be presented at a conference on threats to American democracy on Oct 6, contains good news of a sort: Trump’s presidency, at least in the view of these experts, has not done visible damage to the workings of the American political system. The media is more invigorated, more profitable, and more trusted since his election. The firing of FBI Director James Comey led to the appointment — from within Trump’s own administration, no less — of special counsel Bob Mueller. Early in Trump’s presidency, Yuval Levin, the editor of the conservative journal National Affairs, predicted to me that this White House was likelier to be defined by “dysfunction than autocracy,” and so far he’s been right.

For the exhausted, overworked journalists on President Donald Trump’s trail, the duty to document the president and the hypercharged news cycle he drives takes a personal toll. President Trump has contributed to a new and confounding environment for the media. Since the election, dazed journalists and media-watchers have gathered countless times to make sense of that environment, often raising more questions than they’ve been able to answer.