New York Times

We’re witnessing the stirrings of a national popular movement aimed at defeating the policies of President Donald Trump. It is a movement without official leaders. In fact, to a noteworthy degree, the formal apparatus of the Democratic Party has been nearly absent from the uprisings. Unlike the Tea Party and the white-supremacist “alt-right,” the new movement has no name. Call it the alt-left, or, if you want to really drive Mr. Trump up the wall, the alt-majority. Or call it nothing. Though nameless and decentralized, the movement isn’t chaotic. Because it was hatched on social networks and is dispatched by mobile phones, it appears to be organizationally sophisticated and ferociously savvy about conquering the media. The protests have accomplished something just about unprecedented in the nearly two years since Trump first declared his White House run: They have nudged him from the media spotlight he depends on. They are the only force we’ve seen that has been capable of untangling his singular hold on the media ecosystem.

Experts said they had not seen data to conclude that consumers had changed their habits to protect their mental health, but added that the news ecosystem had changed drastically over the past five years, accelerating the sense of information overload. How then best to cope with the velocity and quantity of news?

Some have found comfort in positive news, said Seán Dagan Wood, editor in chief of Positive News, a website and quarterly print magazine that highlights “quality independent reporting that focuses on progress and possibility.” For those glued to the news, Curtis W. Reisinger, a clinical psychologist at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks (NY) recommended not reading or watching any just before bedtime because thoughts of how to respond to it can disrupt sleep. Better to watch sports or entertainment rather than the “worry content” of news, he said.

During his first 11 days in office, President Donald Trump has provided news outlets with plenty of material, at all hours of the morning and night. But his maelstrom of activity — the bold executive orders, the fiery Twitter posts, the brazen speeches — has also exposed, and perhaps exacerbated, ideological differences. For those devouring news about the administration, the choice of narratives has become starker, with brighter lines drawn around the content. For the readers and viewers, it’s follow the narrative of your choice, and be wary of the great chasm between. Over the weekend, as protesters descended on airports across the country in response to President Trump’s immigration ban, fissures began to emerge even among right-wing news organizations. On Jan 30, the divide only widened. And not everyone behaved predictably.

[Commentary] Donald Trump is not just a President who is unusually obsessed with media. He is an aspiring media mogul who happens to be president. When Steve Bannon told The New York Times that the media should “keep its mouth shut,” he was being disingenuous. President Trump doesn’t want the media to keep its mouth shut. He wants to silence his critics, co-opt their distribution, and broadcast the story of his stardom. After winning with the instincts of a media impresario, he will lead using the strategy of a media empire. President Trump is poised to enact his agenda through extraordinary means — by broadcasting an alternative reality in which he seeks a monopoly on his own narrative and facts. It is 20th-century strongman meets 21st Century Fox.

In conversations with dozens of entertainment and media executives and academics from hit-making industries over the past few years, I have learned that there are three overarching rules of popular entertainment. Each applies to President Trump.
First, every successful franchise is fundamentally a hero myth.
Second, as critical as it is to write stories that move people, distribution is more important than content.
Third, the dark history of 20th-century entertainment is that media blockbusters seek to become monopolies. The White House wants to establish a political media monopoly, which seeks dominion over its own set of facts, by demonizing critical news sources (even those within the government) and promoting sycophantic alternatives.

As a businessman, Donald J. Trump was a serial fabulist whose biggest-best boasts about everything he touched routinely crumbled under the slightest scrutiny. As a candidate, Trump was a magical realist who made fantastical claims punctuated by his favorite verbal tic: “Believe me.” Yet even jaded connoisseurs of Oval Office dissembling were astonished by the torrent of bogus claims that gushed from President Trump during his first days in office.

“We’ve never seen anything this bizarre in our lifetimes, where up is down and down is up and everything is in question and nothing is real,” said Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity. It was not just Trump’s debunked claim about how many people attended his inauguration, or his insistence (contradicted by his own Twitter posts) that he had not feuded with the intelligence community, or his audacious and evidence-free claim that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote only because millions of people voted for her illegally. But for students of Trump’s long business career, there was much about President Trump’s truth-mangling ways that was familiar: the mystifying false statements about seemingly trivial details, the rewriting of history to airbrush unwanted facts, the branding as liars those who point out his untruths, the deft conversion of demonstrably false claims into a semantic mush of unverifiable “beliefs.” Trump’s falsehoods have long been viewed as a reflexive extension of his vanity, or as his method of compensating for deep-seated insecurities. But throughout his business career, Trump’s most noteworthy deceptions often did double duty, serving not just his ego but also important strategic goals.

[Commentary] A healthy democracy needs trusted news sources to which all citizens can turn. Given the new administration’s hostility to dissenting voices and willingness to strong-arm corporations, we need independent and responsible media outlets more than ever before. I believe that CNN could once again be the place Ted Turner envisioned and built years ago. A strong independent CNN that answers to no one but the public would be a powerful force to safeguard our democracy.
[Jessica Yellin is a former chief White House correspondent for CNN.]

Stephen K. Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for awhile,” Bannon said during a telephone call. “I want you to quote this,” Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

“The elite media got it dead wrong, 100 percent dead wrong,” Bannon said of the election, calling it “a humiliating defeat that they will never wash away, that will always be there.” “The mainstream media has not fired or terminated anyone associated with following our campaign,” Bannon said. “Look at the Twitter feeds of those people: they were outright activists of the Clinton campaign.” “That’s why you have no power,” Bannon added. “You were humiliated.”

At least six journalists were charged with felony rioting after they were arrested while covering the violent protests that took place just blocks from President Donald Trump’s inauguration parade in Washington on Jan 20. The journalists were among 230 people detained in the anti-Trump demonstrations, during which protesters smashed the glass of commercial buildings and lit a limousine on fire. The charges against the journalists — Evan Engel, Alexander Rubinstein, Jack Keller, Matthew Hopard, Shay Horse and Aaron Cantu — have been denounced by organizations dedicated to press freedom. All of those arrested have denied participating in the violence.

“These felony charges are bizarre and essentially unheard of when it comes to journalists here in America who were simply doing their job,” said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of Pen America. “They weren’t even in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were in the right place.” Carlos Lauria, a spokesman and senior program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, called the charges “completely inappropriate and excessive,” and the organization has asked that they be dropped immediately. “Our concern is that these arrests could send a chilling message to journalists that cover future protests,” Lauria added.

[Commentary] When President Donald Trump declared that reporters are “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” it was not the first time he had disparaged the press. Nor was it out of character when his press secretary threatened “to hold the press accountable” for reporting truthful information that was unflattering to President Trump. Episodes like these have become all too common in recent weeks. So it’s comforting to know that the Constitution serves as a reliable stronghold against Trump’s assault on the press. Except that it doesn’t.

The truth is, legal protections for press freedom are far feebler than you may think. Even more worrisome, they have been weakening in recent years. Journalists have few constitutional rights when it comes to matters such as access to government sources and documents, or protection from being hounded by those in power for their news gathering and reporting. In those respects, journalists are vulnerable to the whims of society and government officials. America’s press freedom, in other words, is something of a mishmash. We cannot simply sit back and expect that the First Amendment will rush in to preserve the press, and with it our right to know. Like so much of our democracy, the freedom of the press is only as strong as we, the public, demand it to be.

[RonNell Andersen Jones is a law professor at the University of Utah. Sonja R. West is a law professor at the University of Georgia.]

The Trump White House sent a message to the media: Be nice.

At his first formal briefing on Jan 23, Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, told reporters that the Administration sometimes does “the right thing,” adding: “And it would be nice, once in a while, for someone just to report it straight up.” It was an oddly plaintive appeal from an Administration that tends to attack the press, not bemoan it. And it was a sharp contrast from Spicer’s appearance 48 hours prior, when he blasted the news media as “shameful,” made false claims about the attendance for Trump’s inaugural and prompted speculation that his relationship with the White House press corps had been irreparably damaged after a single day.