David Uberti

The Federal Trade Commission has outlined a far-reaching vision for protecting consumers’ privacy online, but the plan faces numerous challenges.

A growing mosaic of state-level internet privacy proposals in lieu of a nationwide framework could provide new protections for consumers and additional question marks for businesses. Lawmakers in Virginia are nearing passage of data protection legislation in a rapid-fire legislative session slated to conclude in Feb. Washington state officials are considering compromises over enforcement of a potential privacy law for the third time. States including NY, MN, OK, and FL are pushing ahead with similar proposals of their own.

A decade after co-founding Politico, Jim VandeHei is back in startup mode. The mastermind behind Politico’s rapid expansion, who wakes up around 3:30 am nowadays, decamped along with newsletter-extraordinaire Mike Allen and money man Roy Schwartz, setting up their own shop, just two Metro stops away, that aims to cover collision points between politics, tech, media, and business. “Collectively, we’ve all made a mess of media,” VandeHei says, chastising cheap ads and clickbait content. “So if you can fix that, you can create an addiction.” The man certainly proved to be an effective pusher in his past life, despite Politico’s skeptics. The news organization grew into a Washington juggernaut by moving product that political and industry insiders didn’t know they were previously craving. Axios aims to similarly capitalize on white-shoe Washington and other small, but elite, groups of news consumers.

Whereas all modern presidents have spun information—even lied—the reality TV star President-elect Donald Trump actively obstructs a fact-based public debate like no other before him. Whereas all have attempted to take their messages directly to supporters, Trump has a unique gift for using tools that do so almost instantaneously. Whereas all have sought to limit press access to suit their political ends, Trump’s relationship with the truth has called the very value of access into question. And whereas all have railed against the press in the face of negative coverage, Trump has portrayed the media as a political foil he’s actively trying to defeat.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, Columbia Journalism Review spoke with political journalists who will cover the incoming administration and reporters and historians who’ve chronicled its predecessors. They collectively painted a foreboding picture of journalism in the Trump era, even if some claimed to hold out hope that journalists will weather the coming storm.

To say the media missed some seismic shift in American political culture goes too far. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; President Barack Obama’s approval rating is sky high; and the winning GOP candidate this cycle received fewer votes than his losing predecessor in 2012. National journalists filed so many dispatches from Trump country that the genre coalesced into a recurring joke on Twitter. That reporting came in addition to strong and copious accountability work that exposed Trump as a grifter who jokes about sexual assault and Clinton as a uninspiring politician surrounded by a shady personal network.

This is a column about reviewing campaign journalism, however, so here goes: The performance of “the media” in 2016 was…mixed.

The combination of Ailes’s departure, a transforming conservative media, and a possible Donald Trump presidency doesn’t bode well for the status quo. If Fox’s own history is any indication, such political crossroads carry with them the potential for massive change within media markets.

Which individuals or outlets emerge in this new environment could play a leading role in redefining conservatism in the years after Trump un-defined it—for better or worse. In the meantime, with millions of TV viewers and 62 million monthly uniques on its website, Fox has an immense upper hand in driving discussion on the right side of the political spectrum. The question going forward is how long the network can maintain Ailes’s audience—his political coalition—in the more competitive market he helped create.

The National Counterterrorism Center preempted a scoop by The Intercept, a site whose stable of reporters, led by Glenn Greenwald, has consistently been a thorn in the intelligence community’s side.

After being approached for comment on The Intercept’s in-depth report on the size and growth of the nation’s terrorism database, the NCTC released a few details on the topic to the Associated Press. The AP beat The Intercept by a matter of minutes with its more narrowly focused story, a later version of which referenced The Intercept’s reporting.

The situation sparked the latest flare-up between an increasingly adversarial national-security press and an increasingly secretive intelligence apparatus.

[Commentary] Friction between reporters and government is inherent in journalism. Yet it has reached a fever pitch in Washington, many journalists and experts say -- former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in 2014 called the Obama Administration “the most secretive White House that I have ever been involved in covering.”

Nearly three of four journalists who cover the federal government believe public information officers are tightening press controls. More than three quarters of local, state, and national political reporters, meanwhile, said the public is not getting the full truth because of it.