Journalism

[Commentary] The most distressing aspect of the recent period of aggression toward freedom of speech and press in this country is the willing rejection of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s starting premise: that overcoming the natural and, in his terms, “logical” impulse to persecute others who disagree with or are different from us is the hallmark of a civilized society. When you relish intolerance, you are reversing course on one of the most profound tenets of modern thought. So that when a president stokes the fears and prejudices that exist beneath the surface, he models a different—and divisive—kind of behavior for citizens.

In this way, just as our unparalleled protections of speech and the press have over decades laid the foundation for a broader ethos of tolerance, so can the lack of respect for these same rights quickly send us careening backward toward a pathos of intolerance that reaches far beyond speech, infecting all of our decision-making.

[Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University’s 19th president in 2002.]

[Commentary] Months ago, when we started planning this issue and framing our subject as “The Year That Changed Journalism,” we thought we might be accused of hyperbole. Now it’s understatement that has us worried. The world of journalism is a fundamentally different place as a result of the election of Donald J. Trump. In this issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, we’ve set out to catalogue what’s changed—and to chart where we’ll go from here.

The News Integrity Initiative (NII), the $14 million news project launched earlier in 2017 out of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, on Oct 4 announced its first 10 grantees. The projects are getting a combined $1.8 million to focus on projects that build trust between newsrooms and the public, make newsrooms more diverse and inclusive, and make public conversations more fruitful and less polarized.

President Donald Trump lambasted the "the fake news media" in a tweet early Oct 4, saying it is "out of control." "Wow, so many Fake News stories today. No matter what I do or say, they will not write or speak truth. The Fake News Media is out of control!" the president said.

“Sixteen versus literally thousands of people,” President Trump said, noting the difference in the official death tolls. “You can be very proud.” “Every death is a horror,” he said “But if you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina, and you look at the tremendous hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here with, really, a storm that was just totally overpowering — nobody has ever seen anything like this.” The president in an earlier tweet on Oct 4 slammed some of the coverage and said he had a "great day" on the island.

Americans are increasingly confident in the news media and less so in President Donald Trump’s administration after a tumultuous year in US politics that tested the public’s trust in both institutions, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released Oct 3. The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the percentage of adults who said they had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November. Earlier in 2017, President Trump branded the entire industry as the “enemy of the American people.”

The percentage of those who said they had “hardly any” confidence in the press dropped to 45 percent from 51 percent over the same period. Confidence in Trump’s administration moved in the opposite direction. Reuters/Ipsos, which tracked confidence in major institutions every couple of months after the 2016 presidential election, found in late January that 52 percent of Americans had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the new president’s executive branch. That dropped to 51 percent in the May survey and to 48 percent in the latest poll. Trump took office in January. In comparison, 57 percent of Americans expressed similar levels of confidence in former Democratic President Barack Obama’s outgoing administration in November.

The arc of Anthony Scaramucci’s career is long and strange, and lately it has bent toward ignominy. After being fired by President Donald Trump, sued for divorce and turned into a late-night piñata for his foul-mouthed speaking habits, Scaramucci is trying to mount a comeback with a media venture he is calling The Scaramucci Post.

So far, the project’s contours are vague. “It’s going to start out experiential on the net,” Scaramucci, an American flag pinned to his lapel, said during a launch party at the Hunt & Fish Club on West 44th Street. He was invited to elaborate. “We’re going to create traffic and content and an experience using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” Scaramucci said. (The @ScaramucciPost Twitter account, with its caveat that “Follows ≠ Job Offers,” has been something of a mystery in political circles.) The publication is so devoted to its social media strategy that it has no journalists, no articles and no website — apparently by design. “You’ll find that if you don’t have a website, guess what? You don’t have any server charges,” Scaramucci said. Later, he conceded that he had “no idea what the Scaramucci Post is.”

[Commentary] Italy’s antitrust chief Giovanni Pitruzzella feels so overwhelmed by the amount of information on the internet that he has called for government regulation to fight fake news. Pitruzzella builds his case by contrasting the First Amendment with the European Convention on Human Rights, which he argues provides no constitutional protection of “fake news.” This is due to an interpretation of the limits of protected speech that says that the distribution of “fake news,” in Pitruzzella’s words, violates Europeans’ “right to be pluralistically informed.” Yes, our digital era and the explosion of speech and communication on social media are unique.

But the introduction of the printing press in the 15th century and its impact on the world in the ensuing centuries may serve as an instructive analogy from which Pitruzzella may take a lesson or two. In the 16th and 17th century, access to the press triggered waves of fake news and dissemination of wild conspiracy theories about witches and millenarian crazes. Religious fanaticism was printed side-by-side with scientific discoveries. During the first century after Gutenberg, print did as much to spread lies and false information as enlightened truth.

[Flemming Rose is a WorldPost contributor and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Jacob Mchangama is director of the Copenhagen-based think tank Justitia.]

In the crucial early hours after the Las Vegas mass shooting, it happened again: Hoaxes, completely unverified rumors, failed witch hunts, and blatant falsehoods spread across the internet. But they did not do so by themselves: They used the infrastructure that Google and Facebook and YouTube have built to achieve wide distribution. These companies are the most powerful information gatekeepers that the world has ever known, and yet they refuse to take responsibility for their active role in damaging the quality of information reaching the public.

BuzzFeed’s Ryan Broderick found that Google’s “top stories” results surfaced 4chan forum posts about a man that right-wing amateur sleuths had incorrectly identified as the Las Vegas shooter. This is playing an active role in the spread of bad information, poisoning the news ecosystem. The machines have shown they are not up to the task of dealing with rare, breaking news events, and it is unlikely that they will be in the near future. More humans must be added to the decision-making process, and the sooner the better.

In an era when Americans’ choices about whom to turn to and trust for news are often divided along political lines, a new Pew Research Center study of media coverage of the early days of the Trump administration finds those preferences can be significant. Seven-in-ten stories from outlets with a left-leaning audience and 62% from those with a more mixed audience included at least two of nine types of sources evaluated, such as a member of the administration, a member of Congress, or an outside expert. That was true, however, of less than half the stories (44%) from outlets with a right-leaning audience. In particular, outlets whose audience leans right of center were less likely to include Trump and his administration, outside experts or interest groups as sources. They were also about half as likely to include voices from both Democratic and Republican members of Congress (7% of stories vs. 14% for outlets with a left-leaning audience and 15% for outlets with a more mixed audience).

Compared with the three prior presidencies, coverage of Trump’s early days in office moved further away from a focus on the policy agenda (31% of stories, compared with 50% for Obama, 65% for Bush and 58% for Clinton) and toward character and leadership. And the evaluations of President Trump were far more negative and less positive than those of his predecessors.

Mark Zuckerberg had just returned from paternity leave, and he wanted to talk about Facebook, democracy, and elections and to define what he felt his creation owed the world in exchange for its hegemony. A few weeks earlier, in early September, the company’s chief security officer had admitted that Facebook had sold $100,000 worth of ads on its platform to Russian-government-linked trolls who intended to influence the American political process. Now, in a statement broadcast live on Facebook on September 21 and subsequently posted to his profile page, Zuckerberg pledged to increase the resources of Facebook’s security and election-integrity teams and to work “proactively to strengthen the democratic process.”

There are real consequences to our inability to understand what Facebook is. Not even President-Pope-Viceroy Zuckerberg himself seemed prepared for the role Facebook has played in global politics this past year. In which case, how can we be assured that Facebook is really safeguarding democracy for us and that it’s not us who need to be safeguarding democracy against Facebook?