Journalism

Google is planning to end its “first click free” policy that enables users of its search engine to bypass paywalls on news websites, a move that could help publishers boost subscriptions, News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said.

Google for years has encouraged publishers to be part of the program, which allows search users to access a limited amount of content on subscription-based news sites free of charge. Some publishers say the policy has hurt subscription growth and say their sites are penalized in Google’s search rankings if they don’t participate in the program. The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp, opted out of the program in 2017 and saw its traffic from Google search fall 38% and from Google News fall 89% compared with a year earlier because its stories were demoted in search results, a spokesman said. Now, Google is ready to end the first-click-free program and allow publishers to choose how users access their sites from its search results. People familiar with the situation said Google will still enable subscription-oriented publishers to give search users a free sample of their stories if they choose to, but they won’t be penalized if they don’t.

The mainstream-media critics over at the Media Research Center have been evaluating “evaluative” statements about President Donald Trump on the three main nightly newscasts — ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News.” Over the summer — June, July and August — 91 percent of such statements have been negative, as opposed to 9 percent positive, the organization has determined. “Analyzing the networks’ spin makes it clear that the goal of all of this heavy coverage is not to promote the President, but to punish him,” write Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella in a posting on NewsBusters, the very prolific blog of the MRC.

For the sake of comparison, Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center earlier this year found that negative Trump coverage swamped positive Trump coverage over his first 100 days in office.

The FBI is reportedly investigating Russian state-owned media outlets in the US for failing to register as agents of a foreign government. Yahoo News reported that news agencies Sputnik and RT are under pressure to register under a law originally passed in 1938 to stymie Nazi propaganda. The reports left some press-freedom advocates bristling at the specter of government intrusion. They worry it sets a dangerous precedent for the US government to openly brand certain news outlets as “propaganda.”

But requiring Russian state-owned media to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, is not as “Big Brother” as it sounds. FARA doesn’t add up to press censorship in this case: Outlets like Sputnik and RT aren’t conventionally seen as “the press,” and the law in no way prohibits their activities. FARA does, however, require adherents to disclose “informational material” which could, in theory, include news output.

The FBI recently questioned a former White House correspondent for Sputnik, the Russian-government-funded news agency, as part of an investigation into whether it is acting as an undeclared propaganda arm of the Kremlin in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). As part of the probe, the bureau has obtained a thumb drive containing thousands of internal Sputnik e-mails and documents — material that could potentially help prosecutors build a case that the news agency played a role in the Russian government “influence campaign” that was waged during last year’s presidential election and, in the view of US intelligence officials, is still ongoing.

The e-mails were turned over by Andrew Feinberg, the news agency’s former White House correspondent, who had downloaded the material onto his laptop before he was fired in May. He confirmed that he was questioned for more than two hours on Sept. 1 by an FBI agent and a Justice Department national security lawyer at the bureau’s Washington field office. Feinberg said the interview was focused on Sputnik’s “internal structure, editorial processes and funding.” “They wanted to know where did my orders come from and if I ever got any direction from Moscow,” Feinberg said. “They were interested in examples of how I was steered towards covering certain issues.”

[Commentary] All across America, I’ve spoken with journalists who are committed, working their butts off and forever looking for new ways to keep their organizations going financially. There’s no shortage of the will to do solid journalism, to help people better understand what’s happening in their towns and cities. But with the death of traditional newspaper funding and the ongoing corporate consolidation of American local press, the situation can seem grim.

A new study in the American Economic Review, with an intriguing and persuasive methodology, finds that Fox News could influence how Americans vote, perhaps even tipping elections. Emory University political scientist Gregory Martin and Stanford economist Ali Yurukoglu estimate that watching Fox News directly causes a substantial rightward shift in viewers’ attitudes, which translates into a significantly greater willingness to vote for Republican candidates. They estimate that if Fox News hadn't existed, the Republican presidential candidate’s share of the two-party vote would have been 3.59 points lower in 2004 and 6.34 points lower in 2008. For context, that would've made John Kerry the 2004 popular vote winner, and turned Barack Obama's 2008 victory into a landslide where he got 60 percent of the two-party vote. "There is a non-trivial amount of uncertainty" about those estimates, Yurukoglu cautions. "I personally don't think it's totally implausible, but it is higher than I would have guessed prior to the research." And even if the effect were half as large as estimated, that’d still mean that Fox News is having a very real, sizable effect on elections.

[Commentary] Many in the craft are fond of saying something like “the presidency is broken,” “the president’s conduct is unprecedented” or that we face a “constitutional crisis.” . At a moment of peril on many fronts, the craft is collapsing into rote condemnation of a president who won a large majority of electoral college votes. Probably because of the deep and wide contempt for the media elites who have appointed themselves the guardians of a tradition they know little of and respect less: liberty.

As of August 2017, two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans report that they get at least some of their news on social media – with two-in-ten doing so often, according to a new survey from Pew Research Center. This is a modest increase since early 2016, when (during the height of the presidential primaries) 62 percent of US adults reported getting news from social media. While a small increase overall, this growth is driven by more substantial increases among Americans who are older, less educated, and nonwhite. For the first time in the Center’s surveys, more than half (55 percent) of Americans ages 50 or older report getting news on social media sites. That is 10 percentage points higher than the 45 percent who said so in 2016. Those under 50, meanwhile, remain more likely than their elders to get news from these sites (78 percent do, unchanged from 2016).

The gap between the share of Americans who get news online and those who do so on television is narrowing.

As of August, 43 percent of Americans report often getting news online, just 7 percentage points lower than the 50 percent who often get news on television, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in August. This gap between the two news platforms was 19 points in early 2016, more than twice as large. The share of Americans who often get news from TV – whether from local TV news, nightly network TV news or cable news – is down from 57 percent in early 2016. At the same time, the portion of Americans often getting news online, either from news websites/apps or social media, grew from 38 percent in early 2016 to 43 percent today. What’s more, the decline in television news use occurs across all three types of TV news asked about in the survey – local, network and cable – but is greatest for local television news. As of August 2017, 37 percent of Americans said they often get local TV news, compared with 46% in early 2016.

The country of Azerbaijan is suing two French journalists for defamation in France for describing the oil-rich state as a “dictatorship.” The move could set an important precedent, in France at least, for foreign governments seeking to curb freedom of the press beyond their shores. The targets of the lawsuit, which critics have decried as an attempt to “export censorship,” are investigative filmmaker Laurent Richard and TV presenter and reporter Elise Lucet.