National Public Radio

[Commentary] Racist hate speech on campus has become the de facto litmus test for free speech protections today. But racist hate speech may not be doing what progressive free speech defenders think it is doing.

There is a familiar metaphor used to frame free speech debates — the so-called "marketplace of ideas." Censorship is not the answer, the story goes, but more speech — better speech — is the proper response to racist hate speech. Critiques of the metaphor as it applies to free speech debates are almost as old as the metaphor itself, and a recent one contextualizes it in light of recent campus speech clashes. To these, I add the question of whether we are so sure that the rhetoric of common humanity and rights for all races will prevail. What if it doesn't, at least not anytime soon? It might mean that racist hate speech is not a "necessary evil" that jumpstarts racial justice within a liberal marketplace but is — for the foreseeable future — nothing more than state-sanctioned injury of people of color.

[David Shih is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire.]

If one thing became clear over the course of the 2016 presidential campaign, it's that Donald Trump knows how to keep media attention on himself. If cable television coverage started to stray, a new controversial tweet or remark would draw it back to Trump. And one reason Trump received so much coverage was that people were watching.

The first debate between Trump and Clinton was the most-watched debate ever. "It was the best reality TV show," says Tom Forman. He would know, because he makes reality TV. Forman is the CEO of the production company Critical Content. He brought reality TV hits like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and the controversial show Kid Nation to millions of viewers. "Who knew how it was going to end?" he says. "Constant elimination, a big field that got narrowed over the course of the campaign. And just when you thought it couldn't get any weirder and crazier, somehow it seems to. Like, those were teases I couldn't have written if I tried." Forman talked with NPR's David Greene about how he thinks Trump is approaching public relations during his new presidency — in a way you might expect to see on reality TV.

[Commentary] The right of working journalists to do their jobs should not be up for debate when a new administration takes office (or at any other time). But it disturbingly seems to be. It wasn't just President-elect Donald Trump's collision with a CNN journalist at a news conference. The day before, the president-elect's choice for attorney general wouldn't commit to the outgoing Justice Department's promise not to prosecute journalists for reporting on intelligence cases when a source gives them classified information.

Citizens depend on independent journalists to give them information needed to hold our leaders to account. Those journalists should be free to do their work without fear of personal or legal attacks.

[This message was sent by NPR's Senior Vice President of News and Editorial Director Michael Oreskes to the NPR News staff on Jan 17.]

President-elect Donald Trump has named his campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, to a senior White House job as counselor to the president. Conway has been a trusted adviser and frequent spokesperson for the president-elect. She was the third and final manager of the successful Trump campaign, and credited with bringing some much-needed discipline to both the campaign's message and the candidate himself. There had been some question about whether Conway would end up in the White House. She has spoken openly about the challenge of balancing such a job with raising four children, and suggested she might prefer to serve the incoming president from outside the administration.

The world is entering a new cyber era — one with no ground rules, and with the potential for traditional espionage to be "turbocharged" by the Internet, President Obama said. "Among the big powers, there has been a traditional understanding of, that everybody is trying to gather intelligence on everybody else," President Obama said. "It's no secret that Russian intelligence officers, or Chinese, or for that matter Israeli or British or other intelligence agencies, their job is to get insight into the workings of other countries that they're not reading in the newspapers every day." The informal, unwritten rules of the past are no longer adequate, the President added. "One of the things that we're going to have to do over the next decade is to ultimately arrive at some rules of what is a new game," he said. "And that is the way in which traditional propaganda and traditional covert influence efforts are being turbocharged by the Internet."

Some Democrats and journalists are raising concerns about a new law they say could give incoming President Donald Trump great propaganda powers abroad, through such famous broadcasters as the Voice of America, Radio Marti and Radio Free Europe.

The law strips away a governing board over the government-funded broadcasters, which are intended to provide reliable news reports in countries without a viable independent media and to promote democratic values abroad. Those outlets instead would answer to a chief executive nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The Obama Administration embraced the changes, promoted by congressional Republicans before the November elections. It was passed by the Republican-controlled House and Senate as part of a much larger and essentially unrelated bill, which awaits Obama's signature or veto.

The top question on many consumers' minds: What does this merger mean for me? Pros: 1) The promise of new kind of content and 2) Potential competitor to cable. Cons: 1) Potential risk of exclusivity or self-dealing and 2) Consolidation and risk of higher prices.

George Curry, the legendary columnist, commentator and champion of black journalists, died of sudden heart failure on Aug 20. He was 69.

Curry grew up in Tuscaloosa, where he was childhood friends with Bernard Lafayette, the current chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "This is a tragic loss to the movement because George Curry was a journalist who paid special attention to civil rights because he lived it and loved it," said Lafayette. Curry began his career as reporter for Sports Illustrated and The St. Louis Dispatch. In the 1990s, he was the editor of Emerge, an edgy political and cultural publication with the tag line "Black America's Newsmagazine." Curry was the first African-American to be elected president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. After Emerge folded in 2000, Curry led the news service for the National Newspaper Publishers Association for nine years. He wrote a syndicated column that was published in black newspapers all over the country, and he frequently appeared as a commentator on television and radio news programs.

When nearly 1.1 million net neutrality comments flooded the Federal Communications Commission this spring into the summer, they came from around the country. But the interest in open-Internet topics doesn't spread out evenly across the United States.

San Francisco-based data analysis firm Quid looked at the geographic sources of the public comments and adjusted them based on state populations. California and Washington State are overrepresented, and states in the South and Southwest -- notably the deep South -- didn't engage as strongly with this issue.

When the Federal Communications Commission asked for public comments about the issue of keeping the Internet free and open, the response was huge.

The San Francisco data analysis firm Quid looked beyond keywords to find the sentiment and arguments in those public comments. The map shows that every emergent theme was "pro" net neutrality, or supports the idea of a level playing field for content on the Internet. Taken with the entire body of comments sampled, there weren't enough unique or organic anti-net-neutrality comments to register on the map.

Unlocking the data in the comments -- using technology to show relationships between them and high occurrences of them -- helped amplify some arguments that otherwise weren't getting much play. One cluster focused on preserving net neutrality to maintain a diversity of opinion. The related but separate cluster of arguments associated net neutrality with the American dream.