Media Matters for America

[Commentary] There is unlikely to be another presidential campaign like the one that made Donald Trump our 45th president last year. But there are lasting lessons for local broadcasters to be derived from it: 1) their lock on the presidential spend may not be as strong as they might think; and 2) as sellers they have to get as smart about Big Data and targeted advertising as the buyers.

A Media Matters analysis of morning shows on cable news networks from January 1 to March 31 found that white men make up an overwhelming percentage of guest appearances on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC's morning shows. The study found that black, Latino, Asian-American and Middle Eastern voices are critically underrepresented, and women make up only a quarter of guest appearances. Guests on cable morning shows were overwhelmingly white. Black, Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian-American guests were routinely underrepresented on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC’s morning shows. On MSNBC, 89 percent of guests who appeared on Morning Joe during the time period were white. Of all the guests who appeared on Fox & Friends, 85 percent were white. And 83 percent of guests who appeared on CNN’s New Day were white. Additionally, white men comprised 72 percent of total guest appearances on MSNBC's Morning Joe, 66 percent of all guest appearances on CNN's New Day, and 65 percent of guest appearances on Fox & Friends.

[Commentary] The White House’s petulant decision to ban several major news outlets from a media gaggle with press secretary Sean Spicer ignited justifiable outrage among journalists. And the outcry was noticeably bipartisan. “This is an attempt to bully the press by using access as a weapon to manipulate coverage,” warned Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page director for The Wall Street Journal. Now that outrage needs to be institutionalized. It needs to be backed up by the power and prestige of the country’s largest news organizations. In other words, it’s time for institutions to take collective action and fight back.

While some conservative media figures are speaking out against the Trump administration’s efforts to manipulate coverage and damage the institution of the press, many more can’t get enough of the way he treats journalists with utter contempt and grinds them into the dirt. And those opinions are mimicked by their audiences. Seventy-three percent of Republican voters approve of the way he talks about the media, according to a recent poll. Nearly four out of five trust President Trump more than the press to tell the truth.

But those views are wildly out of step with the rest of the American public, which overwhelmingly disapproves of Trump’s conduct and trusts him less than the media. This divide is the result of extremely successful efforts by Republican activists, politicians, and conservative media outlets to convince conservatives that the mainstream press is liberal and deceitful and that only avowed right-wing sources can be trusted to provide the facts.

Moments after President Donald Trump concluded a press conference at which he unleashed numerous attacks on the press, his fundraising committee circulated a “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey” urging supporters to “do your part to fight back against the media’s attacks and deceptions.”

Trump and his administration have engaged in an unprecedented war on the press. The president routinely singles out legitimate outlets and reporters as “fake news,” and his chief strategist has labeled the press the “opposition party.” During his February 16 press conference, Trump was particularly "combative" with reporters, turning the event -- which was ostensibly to announce a new labor secretary nominee -- into a “screed against the media.” The e-mail blast from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, which presumably is also an attempt to build its email list, calls his supporters “our last line of defense against the media’s hit jobs” and urges readers to fill out a “Mainstream Media Accountability Survey” in order to “do your part to fight back against the media’s attacks and deceptions”.

Newt Gingrich has a new proposal for the Trump Administration’s efforts to delegitimize and weaken critical journalists: turn White House press briefings into a “town hall” format where presumably hand-picked citizens would join the “total left-wing propagandists” in the press corps, while banning the most critical reporters from asking questions.

Gingrich, a former speaker of the House, Fox News contributor, and sometime adviser to President Donald Trump, has urged the new administration to use the power of the White House to shatter the credibility and influence of the press. He previously said the administration should respond to critical coverage from CNN by blackballing a reporter for months and including more “courteous,” less “adversarial” journalists from local outlets, in addition to “propaganda organizations” like CNN and The New York Times.

[Commentary] On Jan 20, Donald Trump will swear the oath of office and become president of the United States. His ascent would not have been possible without the years of vitriol that the right-wing media directed at his predecessor. That hatred of President Barack Obama, and the related scorched-earth efforts to smother his agenda, prepared the way for Trump. Many Republican voters became, in the words of one conservative writer, “just increasingly divorced from reality” after spending years in the right-wing echo chamber.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is pushing back on reported efforts by the Trump Administration to privatize it, saying the proposal would have a “devastating effect” and that “the entire public media service would be severely debilitated.” CPB is a private nonprofit corporation that receives almost all of its funding from the federal government and distributes those funds as grants to public television and radio stations and their programs. It is the “single largest source of funding for public television and radio programming.” According to CPB’s statement, “The federal investment in public media is vital seed money -- especially for stations located in rural America, and those serving underserved populations where the appropriation counts for 40-50% of their budget. The loss of this seed money would have a devastating effect.”

A Media Matters analysis found that Google AdSense-linked advertisements were still running on countless hyperpartisan websites peddling fake news nearly a month after Google announced it would ban these types of sites from using its online advertising service. Ads linked to Google AdSense create key revenue streams that make fake news content profitable and enable purveyors of fake news to thrive.

On November 14, Google announced that it would “ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service” in order to target fake news purveyors’ revenue sources. Online publishers can earn money through Google’s AdSense program by hosting advertisements on their websites while Google serves as a middleman between publishers and advertisers. Google’s new policy expanded its existing ban on misleading advertisements, “including promotions for counterfeit goods and weight-loss scams, … to the websites its advertisements run on.” Despite Google’s announcement nearly a month ago, a Media Matters search of more than 40 fake-news-peddling websites found that a majority were still displaying ads linked to Google AdSense.

[Commentary] In the last two weeks, which include the media's meltdown over FBI Director James Comey’s unprecedented decision to insert the bureau into the election process, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and NBC Nightly News set aside a total of 25 minutes to cover the e-mails. That compares to their grand total of three minutes for covering policy during that span. For the entire 2016 year, however, the networks have devoted zero minutes to in-depth policy discussions of climate change, drugs, poverty, guns, infrastructure, social injustice, or the deficit. But they dedicated 125 minutes to Clinton e-mails.

What’s been utterly depressing is the collective decision to relentlessly cover a story that had already been beaten to death nine different times and from every conceivable angle. That and the fact that lazy email mania bumped aside actual, important news that Americans deserve to know about.