Joe Concha

The Trump administration is more trusted than the news media among voters, according to a new Emerson College poll. The administration is considered truthful by 49 percent of registered voters and untruthful by 48 percent. But the news media is less trusted than the administration, with 53 percent calling it untruthful and just 39 percent finding it honest. The numbers split along party lines, with nearly 9 in 10 Republicans saying the Trump administration is truthful, compared with more than 3 in 4 Democrats who say the opposite. The Emerson poll found that 69 percent of Democrats think the news media is truthful while 91 percent of Republicans consider the Fourth Estate untruthful. The poll was conducted Feb 5-6 with a sample of 617 registered voters and a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.

The Trump administration will continue to use the term "fake news" to push back on what Sebastian Gorka, a deputy assistant to President Trump, described as media outlets' "monumental desire" to "attack a duly elected president." "There is a monumental desire on behalf of the majority of the media — not just the pollsters — the majority of the media to attack a duly elected president in the second week of his term," Gorka said. "That's how unhealthy the situation is, and until the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say 'fake news.' " The president and senior members of the administration have dubbed national outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN as "fake news" in critiques both before and after the Jan. 20 inauguration.

Fake news did not change the result 2016 presidential election, according to a study by researchers at Stanford and New York University. The study shows that fake news stories favorable to Republican nominee Donald Trump far outnumbered similar stories about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. But only 8 percent of voters actually read those stories, and even fewer recall or believed what they were reading, researchers said. Favorable but fake Trump news was shared 30 million times on Facebook during the campaign, while fake pro-Clinton news was shared about 7 million times.

"Our data suggest that social media were not the most important source of election news and even the most widely circulated news stories were seen by only a small fraction of Americans,” lead researchers Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow wrote. In order for fake news to have a real effect on the election, it would have had to have been as persuasive as 36 television ads, the study concludes. Fake news became so prominent in 2016, Politifact named it "the lie of the year," a dubious award usually reserved for humans. "Because of its powerful symbolism in an election year filled with rampant and outrageous lying — PolitiFact is naming Fake News the 2016 'winner.'”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said at his first press briefing that future briefings will include four "Skype seats" for reporters who are outside of the Washington (DC) area. Spicer did not specify how it would be decided which outlets would be brought in via Skype, the world's largest video call service owned by Microsoft. He did say those eligible for consideration need to live more than 50 miles from Washington. Spicer added that the technology would open up briefings to a “diverse group” of journalists who can’t afford to travel to DC.

“Maybe we solicit talk radio and regional newspapers to submit questions — because they can't afford to be in Washington — but they still have a question," Spicer said in an interview Jan 8. "Maybe we just let the American people submit questions that we read off as well,” he added.

The public editor of The New York Times says she should have been more restrained in criticizing some of newspaper's reporters' tweets during a recent interview. "In retrospect, I should have held back more, not knowing what the context was for the tweets. I think that's a fair criticism," Liz Spayd said. "But I stand by my view that journalists should be careful, sometimes more careful than they are, with what they say on social media," she maintained. "That includes how it can be interpreted."

On Dec 2's "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Carlson asked Spayd about tweets by Times journalists including Eric Lipton, Peter Baker and Michael Barbaro that appear to be more opinion than straight news reporting. Carlson slammed the Tweets during his interview with Spayd, claiming the reporters were anti-Donald Trump and didn't care to hide their feelings about the president-elect. "We tried to keep this guy from getting elected, but did anyways," Carlson said in characterizing the tweets. "Yes, I think that's outrageous. I think that that should not be. They shouldn't be tweeted," Spayd responded. Progressive journalists and professors took to Twitter to complain about Spayd's comments.

President-elect Donald Trump's plan not to pursue an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server is not being received well at Breitbart News. "Broken Promise: Trump ‘Doesn’t Wish to Pursue’ Clinton Email Charges," reads the lead story headline on Breitbart.com. Breitbart openly supported Donald Trump during the campaign, with almost all stories and editorial being favorable to the Republican nominee. Its former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, served as CEO of Trump's campaign and was recently named as a senior advisor in his White House.

President-elect Donald Trump will meet with anchors and executives from the country's five biggest television networks Nov 21 at Trump Tower. The top five networks from a ratings perspective are NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and CNN. MSNBC, the cable news arm of NBC News, will also attend. The meeting was arranged by Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who also served as Trump's campaign manager for the final few months of the White House race. The conversation has been deemed off the record.

President Barack Obama held similar meetings with television executives and anchors in 2008 before and after the election, including one two months before his victory with then-Fox News chairman and CEO Roger Ailes and 21st Century Fox Executive Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

[Commentary] 240 days. That’s how long it's been since Hillary Clinton last held this thing called a press conference. How long is 240 days? With the NFL preseason set to kick off this week, let's put it this way: You can play not one, but two NFL regular seasons back-to-back in that period of time. December 4, 2015. That was the date that the Democratic nominee last spoke to the embedded press corps that follows her every move and knows the campaign better than anyone.

So many interviews we've seen of Clinton during this campaign consist on one theme: Her always being asked to respond to something her opponent said or did. And when each interview is done, viewers watching at home walk away still having little idea what Clinton's campaign is actually about other the need to defeat Trump. But while going on Fox News and facing hard questions is noteworthy (Clinton has only done so three times since 2014), it's not a press conference... something the media seems to be letting her skate on despite not holding one in 2016.