New York Times

[Commentary] The prospect of a president using antitrust law to punish political opponents is deeply disturbing. So when news emerged this week that the Justice Department had said that Time Warner or AT&T would have to sell properties like CNN or DirecTV before the department would approve their merger, it was widely taken as Mr. Trump’s revenge against CNN, the news network he loves to hate. It seemed to fit a classic “dirty tricks” narrative.

But should we so quickly conclude that the Justice Department is doing something wrong? Maybe not.

We demonstrate that exposure to the news media causes Americans to take public stands on specific issues, join national policy conversations, and express themselves publicly—all key components of democratic politics—more often than they would otherwise. After recruiting 48 mostly small media outlets, we chose groups of these outlets to write and publish articles on subjects we approved, on dates we randomly assigned.

Apparently, the Justice Department has called on AT&T and Time Warner to sell Turner Broadcasting, the group of cable channels that includes CNN, as a potential requirement for approving the companies’ pending $85.4 billion deal. The other possible way for the merger to win approval would be for AT&T to sell its DirecTV division, apparently.

China does not allow its people to gain access to Facebook, a powerful tool for disseminating information and influencing opinion. As if to demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness, outside its borders China uses it to spread state-produced propaganda around the world, including the United States. So much do China’s government and companies value Facebook that the country is Facebook’s biggest advertising market in Asia, even as it is the only major country in the region that blocks the social network.

The Russians are running a reality show through Facebook and Twitter, and their contestants are all of us. Over the past few days, I reached out to several reality show producers, asking them to compare the Russian digital influence campaign to the world of unscripted TV. The more they told me about reality shows, the more the metaphor seemed to explain Russia’s trolling campaign — how it worked, what it aimed to do and why campaigns like it will be so difficult to fight.

The British satellite broadcaster Sky warned that it may shut down its 24-hour news channel if the property becomes an obstacle to the company’s effort to sell itself to Rupert Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox.  In a regulatory filing with the Competition Markets Authority in Britain, Sky wrote that the regulator should not “simply assume the ‘continued provision of Sky News’” if ownership of the channel posed a problem for the $15 billion transaction.

[Commentary]  With the offshore world so expansive and so in need of transparency, it often falls to journalists and those with access to leaked data to shine light on these secret dealings. Privacy is not an absolute right when the public interest is at stake. And so, journalists must face a difficult question before seeking to publish information that comes from hackers or other unauthorized leaks: Does this information directly affect the well-being of society?