New York Times

A Supreme Court argument about whether North Carolina may bar registered sex offenders from using Facebook, Twitter and similar services turned into a discussion of how thoroughly social media have transformed American civic discourse.

The justices’ remarks, which indicated easy familiarity with the major social media services, suggested that they would strike down the North Carolina law under the First Amendment. Justice Elena Kagan said that President Trump, every governor and every member of Congress has a Twitter account. “So this has become a crucially important channel of political communication,” she said. “And a person couldn’t go onto those sites and find out what these members of our government are thinking or saying or doing.”

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said that social media sites had become, and in some ways had surpassed, the public square as a place for discussion and debate. “The sites that Justice Kagan has described and their utility and the extent of their coverage are greater than the communication you could have ever had, even in the paradigm of public square,” Justice Kennedy said.

The North Carolina law has economic consequences, too, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said. “Take something like LinkedIn, which many, many people in our society today are looking for jobs there, but high school students are permitted to look for jobs and to post their personal data on that site,” she said.

On the morning of Feb 26, the time when many engage in the weekend ritual of reading the news over coffee, a large crowd converged outside The New York Times’s Manhattan headquarters on Eighth Avenue to defend the country’s press. “It’s a New York Sunday tradition,” read a sign held by Norman Cohen, a freelance TV producer, “Coffee, Bagels, and a FREE PRESS.” The protest, which was led by Get Organized BK, was in response to President Trump’s decision on Feb 24 to bar several news organizations from a White House briefing, including The Times. Protesters walked from The Times to the offices of Fox News and The Wall Street Journal, and then to NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza before returning to The Times building. Protesters made it clear that they championed press freedom for all outlets, regardless of political leaning. Some had masking tape over their mouths, symbolizing a muzzling of the press.

The phrase was too toxic even for Nikita Khrushchev, a war-hardened veteran communist not known for squeamishness. As leader of the Soviet Union, he demanded an end to the use of the term “enemy of the people” because “it eliminated the possibility of any kind of ideological fight.”

“The formula ‘enemy of the people,’” Khrushchev told the Soviet Communist Party in a 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s cult of personality, “was specifically introduced for the purpose of physically annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader. It is difficult to know if President Donald Trump is aware of the historic resonance of the term, a label generally associated with despotic communist governments rather than democracies. But his decision to unleash the terminology has left some historians scratching their heads.

Why would the elected leader of a democratic nation embrace a label that, after the death of Stalin, even the Soviet Union found to be too freighted with sinister connotations? By using the phrase and placing himself in such infamous company, at least in his choice of vocabulary to attack his critics, President Trump has demonstrated that the language of “autocracy, of state nationalism is always the same regardless of the country, and no nation is exempt.”

Given the cultural and political rifts that have followed President Trump’s election, and the aggressive way in which President Trump has pursued his agenda, it was natural that some would want to use their international Oscar platforms to make big statements about free speech, diversity and cherished American values. But they were treading on tricky terrain.

First, there was the question of whom they were actually winning over with political oratory delivered amid a bacchanalia of self-celebration and haute couture, some of it costing as much as the average American’s home down payment. And for all the talk of inclusion in the political speechifying leading up to, and during, the Oscars, how inclusive is Hollywood itself? The answer is that despite the big honors that black actors and black-themed films took home, the industry still has a long way to go to improve diversity throughout its ranks. Hollywood’s judgment would go a lot further if it directed some of that political energy back at itself.

Negotiations will Internet service providers have become increasingly commonplace for Netflix as its global ambitions have taken the content streaming service far from its California roots into markets across Europe, Latin America and Asia.

The company’s partnerships with cable and cellphone operators worldwide give it almost instantaneous access to potential new users without having to spend a fortune on advertising and distribution deals in markets where its brand and content are often still relatively unknown. This growing symbiotic relationship will take center stage when Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive, gives the keynote address on the first day of the Mobile World Congress. The conference is an annual trade show in Barcelona, Spain, where executives from across the telecom, media and technology worlds gather to meet and, potentially, sign new deals.

If there were ever a moment for government leaders who believe that true information unearthed by independent news sources is vital to our nation to stand up and say so, this would be it.

-- Jim Rutenberg, New York Times

[Commentary] The Administration doubled down on its antipress aggression, this time declaring it was “going to get worse every day” for these “globalist” and “corporatist” journalists (and other such gobbledygook from the former Goldman Sachs executive Stephen Bannon). And all the while, so many of the most important and credible leaders in the President’s own party more or less kept their traps shut or looked the other way. If there were ever a moment for government leaders who believe that true information unearthed by independent news sources is vital to our nation to stand up and say so, this would be it.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of low-road, New York Post-style gossip: “Page Six reporter.” Whether the New England-bred spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of on-the-record bluster and off-the-record gossip.

He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New York-iest of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, President Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people.”

TVision — which has worked with the Weather Channel, NBC and the Disney ABC Television Group — is one of several companies that have entered living rooms in recent years, emerging with new, granular ways for marketers to understand how people are watching television and, in particular, commercials.

The appeal of this information has soared as Americans rapidly change their viewing habits, streaming an increasing number of shows weeks or months after they first air, on devices as varied as smartphones, laptops and Roku boxes, not to mention TVs. Through the installation of a Microsoft Kinect device, normally used for Xbox video games, on top of participants’ TVs, TVision tracks the movement of people’s eyes in relation to the television. The device’s sensors can record minute shifts for all the people in the room. The company then matches those viewing patterns to shows and commercials using technology that listens to what is being broadcast on the TV. “The big thing for TV advertisers and the networks is: Are you actually looking at the screen or not?” said Dan Schiffman, the chief revenue officer of TVision. “What you looked at is interesting, but the fact that you looked away is arguably the most interesting.”

President Donald Trump intensified his slashing attack on the news media during an appearance before the Conservative Political Action Conference , reiterating his charge that “fake news” outlets are “the enemy of the people.” The opening portion of the president’s free-range, campaign-style speech centered on a declaration of war on the news media — a new foil to replace vanquished political opponents like Hillary Clinton. “They are very smart, they are very cunning, they are very dishonest,” Trump said to the delight of the crowd. “It doesn’t represent the people; it never will represent the people.” President Trump, who once posed as his own public relations man to plant news stories in New York tabloids — and spoke frequently with reporters off the record during the campaign — called for an end to the use of “sources,” meaning anonymous sources. “A few days ago, I called the fake news the enemy of the people because they have no sources — they just make it up,” he said. He added that his “enemy of the people” label applied only to “dishonest” reporters and editors.

President Trump, who suggested revisiting First Amendment protections for the news media during the campaign, refined that attack on Feb 24, urging his supporters to use their free-speech rights to counter hostile press accounts from outlets like CNN, which he called the “Clinton News Network.” “They always bring up the First Amendment,” Trump said of journalists. “Nobody loves it better than me.” After spending 10 minutes listing the shortcomings of the news media, Trump said criticism “doesn’t bother me.”