Alyssa Rosenberg

Lester Holt’s interview with President Donald Trump made huge, splashy headlines when the President confirmed that he always intended to fire FBI Director James Comey, and that he was thinking of the investigation into Russia’s influence on the 2016 election when he did it. Holt’s wasn’t the only interview with Trump that aired during the week. Trump’s conversation with Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro was less explosive, but from a Trump watcher’s perspective, it was more revealing. The interview was a near-perfect example of what President Trump would like his relationship with the media to be. And it was proof of why no respectable news organization can give it to him. Making Trump comfortable means allowing him to seal any cracks or flaws in his facade, rather than eliciting any revelations or new insights from him. Trump wants the press to perform public relations, not journalism. And as long as people like Pirro are willing to flatter him, Trump will never understand why real journalists can’t give him what he wants without losing who we are.

Whatever Facebook plans to pay its 3,000 new hires, it’s hard to think that it will be enough. Getting in the door at a huge, influential tech company may, in the abstract, sound like an exciting opportunity. But the new positions, which the social media giant will be adding over the course of the next year, involve a new and grinding kind of work: These people will join 4,500 existing Facebook employees in reviewing the grimmest and grisliest content posted to the site to determine what should be allowed to stay up and what should be deleted.

[Commentary] I care deeply about cultural literacy, the idea that we should all have access to a shared set of core concepts that will not only make it easier for children to learn to read and write, but that will give Americans at least some common language and ideas we can use to understand each other across our differences. Schools are an obvious place where Americans get access to this common pool of information and ideas. And once we leave school and go out into the world, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowments are institutions that work to make sure that access continues.

If you want to create a genuine national culture, you actually have to reach all Americans, rather than losing yourself in idiotic and racist delusions about defeating “bad hombres” by force or outbreeding the competition. And you have to create compelling, high-quality content that can persuade Americans across the political spectrum, rather than mediocre trash that preys on audiences who feel under-served by mainstream media. The Trump administration shows no rhetorical sign that it understands this — or that the public broadcasting system and other federal arts and humanities institutions could have value to conservatives who want to try to meet their high standards.

[Commentary] It’s official: Refusing to meet the press is in. President-elect Donald Trump has gone ages without a news conference. And now, CBS’ Glenn Geller, ABC’s Channing Dungey, Fox’s Gary Newman and Dana Walden and NBC’s Bob Greenblatt — the people in charge of programming at these networks — have announced that they won’t hold news conferences for reporters and critics at the Television Critics Association press tour in January.

They claim they want critics to focus on the new series they’ll be presenting and promise that they’ll reinstate the sessions this summer. Amazon and Netflix won’t be presenting either new content or making executives available either. The press tour, which happens twice a year in January and July, is one of the few opportunities for reporters from all over the country to meet with the people who make television, and the people who decide what television gets made.