New York Times

Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was being resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been outright banned. The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities such as Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China, Italy and South Korea. Greyball was part of a broader program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The VTOS program, including the Greyball tool, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

[Commentary] As the forces of reaction outpace movements predicated on the ideal of progress, and as traditional norms of political competition are tossed aside, it’s clear that the internet and social media have succeeded in doing what many feared and some hoped they would. They have disrupted and destroyed institutional constraints on what can be said, when and where it can be said and who can say it. Even though in one sense President Trump’s victory in 2016 fulfilled conventional expectations — because it prevented a third straight Democratic term in the White House — it also revealed that the internet and its offspring have overridden the traditional American political system of alternating left-right advantage. They are contributing — perhaps irreversibly — to the decay of traditional moral and ethical constraints in American politics.

The influence of the internet is the latest manifestation of the weakening of the two major American political parties over the past century, with the Civil Service undermining patronage, the rise of mass media altering communication, campaign finance law empowering donors independent of the parties, and the ascendance of direct primaries gutting the power of party bosses to pick nominees. Two developments in the 2016 campaign provided strong evidence of the vulnerability of democracies in the age of the internet: the alleged effort of the Russian government to secretly intervene on behalf of Trump, and the discovery by internet profiteers of how to monetize the distribution of fake news stories, especially stories damaging to Hillary Clinton.

[Tom Edsall teaches political journalism at Columbia University]

As the media class struggles to understand an election result few foresaw, some have blamed a quirk of modern technology. So media and tech companies are pivoting, selling us a whole suite of offerings aimed at bursting the bubbles they helped to create.

In his manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg spoke of the need to grow local news outlets (which have seen their prospects plummet even further as Facebook tightens its grip as a leading source of news) and present people with a range of perspectives. Whether those sentiments make their way into every feed remains to be seen — after all, Facebook became an internet superpower by serving up easy, compulsively clickable content. Some Americans are interested in peeking outside their filter bubbles right now, which gives tech companies an incentive to cater to their desires. Will they feel the same way when they’re winning again?

“FAKE NEWS,” a Twitter post declared. “Prejudice-based,” another said. “Cleverly orchestrated lies,” a news article asserted. President Donald Trump’s harangues against the American news media appear to have inspired a new genre of commentary in China’s state media, whose propagandists spiced up social media posts and news articles with Trumpian flourishes this week. People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the ruling Communist Party, mimicked Mr. Trump’s characteristic bluster — and his fondness for capital letters — on March 3 in denouncing Western news coverage of a Chinese lawyer and human rights advocate who said he had been tortured.

All presidents lunch with major news anchors. But a recent White House gathering was different. The President kept his guests 30 minutes beyond the allotted hour, was gracious and spoke so much that he left his lunch untouched — a recognition, those close to him say, that he must sell himself to the Washington news media because he believes the people who work for him cannot. President Trump, after all, had conceded only the day before on national television that “in terms of messaging, I would give myself a C or a C-plus.” In the same interview, on “Fox & Friends,” the President described his press secretary, Sean Spicer, as “a fine human being.” The language struck close Trump associates as a dismissive turn from a man who relishes hyperbole.

Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax Media and a longtime friend of President Trump, said that the President was experiencing “a lot of angst” about his negative coverage. A master media manipulator and storyteller, candidate Trump went without a traditional press secretary during the presidential campaign, preferring to field queries on his own. Now he is increasingly taking command of his administration’s message making, and privately expressing frustration with a White House press office under siege amid leaks and infighting.

Large portions of the Republican caucus embrace a kind of policy nihilism. They criticize any piece of legislation that doesn’t completely accomplish conservative goals, but don’t build coalitions to devise complex legislation themselves. The roster of congressional Republicans includes lots of passionate ideological voices. It is lighter on the kind of wonkish, compromise-oriented technocrats who move bills. The years of lock-step Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda is well known and rooted in ideology. But the aversion to doing the messy work of making policy really goes back further than that.

The last time congressional Republicans have done the major lifting of making domestic policy was President George Bush’s first term, a productive time that included an expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, the No Child Left Behind education law, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that reshaped securities law, and tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. But that’s now a decade and a half ago. Only 51 of the 238 current House Republicans were in Congress then — meaning a significant majority of Republican House members have never been in Congress at a time when their party was making major domestic policy. “The vast bulk of the Republican conference were elected on howls of protests against Obama’s agenda, but governing is a very different skill,” said Michael Steel, who was a top aide to former Speaker of the House John Boehner, and is now a managing director at Hamilton Place Strategies. “It requires a different kind of muscle, and that muscle has atrophied.”

“It has been held impermissible,” Federal Judge J. Paul Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional. Public officials are not required to give reporters perfectly equal access, of course, and exclusive interviews and selective leaks are commonplace and lawful. But First Amendment experts said the allocation of government resources like press passes and access to public forums like news conferences must be based on neutral criteria rather than discrimination based on what the journalists had written.

A ruling issued on Feb 27 by a federal judge in Manhattan, in a case brought by a freelance journalist without a lawyer, may interest the White House. The judge said that the New York Police Department may have violated the First Amendment by revoking the press credentials of the journalist, Jason B. Nicholas. The ruling was preliminary, and the Police Department said it had legitimate reasons for its actions. But Judge J. Paul Oetken’s decision was timely, following as it did the exclusion of several news organizations from a Feb 24 meeting.. “It has been held impermissible,” Judge Oetken wrote, “to exclude a single television news network from live coverage of mayoral candidates’ headquarters and to withhold White House press passes in a content-based or arbitrary fashion.”

Feb 24’s developments at the White House crossed that legal line, said Jameel Jaffer, the director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “That was unconstitutional,” he said. “If you exclude reporters from briefings that they otherwise have a right to attend because you don’t like their reporting, then you have engaged in viewpoint discrimination.” Viewpoint discrimination by the government in a public forum is almost always unconstitutional.

In a sign that President Donald Trump’s criticism of the news media may be having a ripple effect overseas, a government spokesman in Cambodia has cited the American leader in threatening to shutter foreign news outlets, including some that receive money from Washington. The spokesman, Phay Siphan, said that foreign news groups, including the United States-financed Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, should “reconsider” how they broadcast — or risk a government response if their reports are deemed to spread disinformation or threaten peace and stability.

The White House decision to bar several news outlets, including The New York Times, CNN and Politico, from a briefing last week, Phay Siphan said in a Facebook post, “sends a clear message” that President Trump “sees that news broadcast by those media outlets does not reflect the truth, which is the responsibility of professional journalists.” “Freedom of expression,” he wrote, “is subject to the law and must respect the state’s power.”

Ward Chamberlin Jr., a leading architect of the nation’s public broadcasting system who revitalized PBS stations in New York and Washington and nurtured the career of the documentarian Ken Burns, died in Bedford (MA). He was 95.

Chamberlin’s four-decade television career began circuitously. A corporate lawyer at the time, he was working for the nonprofit International Executive Service Corps, where Frank Pace, a former Army secretary, was the president. When Pace was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to be the first chairman of the newly minted Corporation for Public Broadcasting early in 1968, he recruited Chamberlin to join him as chief operating officer. Pace promptly asked Chamberlin to determine what challenges and opportunities public broadcasting presented and gave him the latitude to meet them. Chamberlin proceeded to pioneer an enduring decentralized network model of independent public stations. He remained chief operating officer until he retired in 2003. He was also senior vice president of the Public Broadcasting Service, executive vice president and managing director of WNET in New York and president of WETA in Washington, which he transformed into the third most prolific producer of original programming after WNET and WGBH in Boston.