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August 2017

President Trump is sabotaging himself by attacking the media after Charlottesville

What would possess the president of the United States, after he finally called out white supremacists, to return a day later to the flimsy position that attracted so much criticism in the first place? Part of the answer is that he hates the media and just can't stand to give reporters what they want — or admit that he was wrong.

Take it from someone who knows President Trump pretty well. “I think there's — it's almost like a counterintuitive thing with him, as it relates to the media,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told Stephen Colbert on “Late Show.” “The media's expecting him to do something; he sometimes does the exact opposite.” Scaramucci shared his insight before President Trump doubled down on remarks he delivered over the weekend, when white supremacists protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville clashed with counterprotesters. Though it was a Nazi sympathizer who drove a car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 19 others, the president reiterated his position that “both sides” were to blame for the violence while speaking at an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower in New York. This was President Trump, furious at the media, freelancing in self-destructive fashion.

President Trump vs. Amazon: So much for the businessman president

President Donald Trump fashions himself as a CEO president. But he's feuding with one of America's most famous, most respected and wealthiest business leaders -- Amazon's Jeff Bezos -- mainly because the company is so successful. In his latest attack on Amazon, President Trump said on Twitter that Amazon "is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost." It is true that Amazon has wreaked havoc on the traditional retail industry.

Waiting on Redl

The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration still lacks official leadership in the Trump administration, following Senate difficulties to advance even a committee vote earlier in August on NTIA administrator-nominee David Redl. But NTIA is still chugging along with career staff dating to the Obama administration, such as NTIA chief of staff Glenn Reynolds and spectrum management associate administrator Paige Atkins. Both attended a NTIA-convened spectrum meeting in Colorado.

Reynolds referred to Redl's absence as "the elephant in the room" and assured meeting participants that their work would be "used and emphasized and studied by both the career staff and by the political leadership that we fully expect to get on board in the near future." He also lamented what he judged as tight budget constraints and "difficult decisions" on prioritizing. NTIA staffers are, in the meantime, looking to telecom-savvy administration officials such as the National Economic Council's Grace Koh and Office of Science and Technology Policy's Kelsey Guyselman: "We're working with them to keep the trains moving until we have our new political leadership on board," Reynolds said. Reminder: Redl, Guyselman and Koh all worked together recently as GOP telecom staffers for House E&C.

Hope Hicks to serve as interim White House communications director

Longtime aide to President Donald Trump Hope Hicks will take over the role as interim director of communications while the West Wing looks for someone to fill the position permanently.

News of Hicks's appointment comes just over two weeks after the firing of Anthony Scaramucci, who spent a mere 10 days as Trump's communications director. “Hope Hicks will work with White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and all of the communications team and serve as the Interim White House Communications Director. We will make an announcement on a permanent communications director at the appropriate time,” a White House official said. Hicks, the president's director of strategic communications, worked for the Trump Organization before the president entered the 2016 Republican primary, and she served as a spokesperson during the presidential campaign. Scaramucci, a former hedge fund manager, was pushed out on July 31, the same day then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly took over as White House chief of staff.

Lawsuit over false online data revived after US top court review

A federal appeals court revived a California man's lawsuit accusing Spokeo of publishing an online profile about him that was filled with mistakes.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 in favor of Thomas Robins, 15 months after the US Supreme Court asked it to more closely assess whether he suffered the "concrete and particularized" injury needed to justify a lawsuit. Spokeo sells data aggregated from various databases to users including employers and people seeking romantic partners. Robins sued after learning that his profile, which carried someone's else's photo, said he was married with children, affluent, in his 50s and employed, and had a graduate degree. He said all of this was wrong, and accused Pasadena, California-based Spokeo of willfully violating the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act, with potential damages of $1,000. The case was significant because Robins tried to pursue a class action, which if successful could expose Facebook, Alphabet's Google and other online data providers to mass claims in similar lawsuits.

Exploring the Ideological Nature of Journalists’ Social Networks on Twitter and Associations with News Story Content

The present work proposes the use of social media as a tool for better understanding the relationship between a journalists’ social network and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask: what is the relationship between the ideological leaning of a journalist’s social network on Twitter and the news content he or she produces? Using a novel dataset linking over 500,000 news articles produced by 1,000 journalists at 25 different news outlets, we show a modest correlation between the ideologies of who a journalist follows on Twitter and the content he or she produces. This research can provide the basis for greater self-reflection among media members about how they source their stories and how their own practice may be colored by their online networks. For researchers, the findings furnish a novel and important step in better understanding the construction of media stories and the mechanics of how ideology can play a role in shaping public information.

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