New York Times

President Donald Trump used his first full day in office on Jan 21 to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.

In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, President Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago. He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved. Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements. He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when President Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.

Before the term “fake news” became an all-purpose insult for news coverage a person doesn’t like, it had a more specific meaning: stories invented from whole cloth, designed to attract social shares and web traffic by flattering the prejudices of their intended audience. Think of untrue claims like the Donald Trump endorsement by Pope Francis or the investigation of the Clinton Foundation for running a pedophile sex ring. In the immediate aftermath of the election, there was even some speculation that these types of stories were enough to swing the result toward Donald J Trump.

Some new research from two economists throws at least a bit of cold water on the theory that false news was a major influence on the election result. They offer some hard data on how pervasive voters’ consumption of fake news really was during the 2016 election cycle. The research also reveals some disturbing truths about the modern media environment and how people make sense of the incoming gush of news.

There’s a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating.

In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the country to register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.

These moves may sound incremental, and perhaps not immediately alarming. China has been restricting the web forever, and Russia is no bastion of free speech. So what’s so dangerous about blocking apps? Here’s the thing: It’s a more effective form of censorship.

It was early fall 2016, and Donald J Trump, behind in the polls, seemed to be preparing a rationale in case a winner like him somehow managed to lose. A few weeks later, Cameron Harris, a new college graduate with a fervent interest in Maryland Republican politics and a need for cash, sat down at the kitchen table in his apartment to fill in the details Trump had left out. In a dubious cyberart just coming into its prime, this bogus story would be his masterpiece.

Harris started by crafting the headline: “BREAKING: ‘Tens of thousands’ of fraudulent Clinton votes found in Ohio warehouse.” It made sense, he figured, to locate this shocking discovery in the very city and state where Trump had highlighted his “rigged” meme. Within a few days, the story, which had taken him 15 minutes to concoct, had earned him about $5,000. That was a sizable share of the $22,000 an accounting statement shows he made during the presidential campaign from ads for shoes, hair gel and web design that Google had placed on his site. The money, not the politics, was the point, he insisted.

The New York Times has deftly adapted to the demands of digital journalism, but it needs to change even more quickly, according to an internal report that recommends the company expand training for reporters and editors, hire journalists with more varied skills and deepen engagement with readers as a way to build loyalty and attract the subscriptions necessary to survive.

The report, released to The Times newsroom, culminates a year of work by a group of seven journalists who were asked by Dean Baquet, the executive editor, to conduct a review of the newsroom and determine a blueprint for its path forward. Titled “Journalism That Stands Apart,” and known internally as the 2020 report, the document provides a set of broad principles to accelerate the transformation while maintaining a commitment to high-quality journalism.

President Barack Obama largely commuted the remaining prison sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst convicted of an enormous 2010 leak that revealed American military and diplomatic activities across the world, disrupted the administration, and made WikiLeaks, the recipient of those disclosures, famous. The decision by President Obama rescued Manning, who twice tried to commit suicide in 2016, from an uncertain future as a transgender woman incarcerated at the male military prison at Fort Leavenworth (KS). She has been jailed for nearly seven years, and her 35-year sentence was by far the longest punishment ever imposed in the United States for a leak conviction. Now, under the terms of President Obama’s commutation announced by the White House, Manning is set to be freed on May 17 of 2017, rather than in 2045.

In recent days, the White House had signaled that President Obama was seriously considering granting Manning’s commutation application, in contrast to a pardon application submitted on behalf of the other large-scale leaker of the era, Edward J. Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who disclosed archives of top secret surveillance files and is living as a fugitive in Russia. “Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” said White House spokesman Joshua Earnest. “Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary, and has sought refuge in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy.”

In the months after Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate and prominent Republican donor, purchased The Las Vegas Review-Journal in late 2015, one local journalist was particularly relentless in criticizing the new ownership. Jon Ralston, perhaps the state’s most prominent political reporter and columnist, referred to The Review-Journal as “The Adelson News,” suggesting Adelson was unduly influencing Nevada’s largest newspaper. In “The End of Vegas Journalism, Chapter 5,091” Ralston shared his opinions about the “journalism bankruptcy” of the city’s papers.

Then PBS abruptly canceled Ralston’s television show, “Ralston Live,” saying it did not have the financial resources to continue. Ralston had a different take, saying that his pointed commentary about the state’s elite “ruffled feathers.” Whatever the reason, Ralston said he should try to figure out what happened or move forward in his career.

Ralston will set off on his own with The Nevada Independent, a nonprofit, donation-based news website that he hopes will add more journalistic heft to the coverage of state politics.

Human Rights Watch released its annual report on threats to human rights around the world, and for the first time in the 27 years it has done these surveys, the United States is one of the biggest. The reason: the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Eight days before Trump is to be sworn in as president, the human-rights advocacy group declared that his path to power, in a campaign marked by “misogynistic, xenophobic and racist rhetoric,” could “cause tremendous harm to vulnerable communities, contravene the United States’ core human rights obligations, or both.” This is not the first time Human Rights Watch has cast the United States as a bad actor. After the terrorist attacks in September 2001, it took the administration of President George W. Bush to task for waterboarding and other interrogation techniques widely considered to be torture. But Kenneth Roth, the organization’s executive director, said in an interview: “This is a more fundamental threat to human rights than George Bush after 9/11. I see Trump treating human rights as a constraint on the will of the majority in a way that Bush never did.”

In its final days, the Obama Administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally-intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the NSA may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches. The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the NSA will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people. Patrick Toomey, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, called the move an erosion of rules intended to protect the privacy of Americans when their messages are caught by the NSA’s powerful global collection methods. He noted that domestic internet data was often routed or stored abroad, where it may get vacuumed up without court oversight.

At 2:30 p.m. on Jan 12, Rep Maxine Waters (D-CA) was on the floor of the House of Representatives, arguing for the importance of the Securities and Exchange Commission, when she was cut off on C-SPAN.

Instead, viewers heard the jangling music of a feed from RT, a state-run Russian television network that has been accused of helping its government interfere in the American election. Some on social media immediately assumed that the interruption, which lasted about 10 minutes, had nefarious implications. C-Span, in a statement, had a simpler explanation: It was probably a technical error. C-Span’s television broadcast continued uninterrupted. Noting that RT is among the news feeds it regularly monitors, it said: “We don’t believe we were hacked. Instead, our initial investigation suggests that this was caused by an internal routing error. We take our network security very seriously and will continue with a deeper investigation, which may take some time.”