New York Times

President-elect Donald J. Trump has offered the post of national security adviser to Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, potentially putting a retired intelligence officer who believes Islamist militancy poses an existential threat in one of the most powerful roles in shaping military and foreign policy. General Flynn, 57, a registered Democrat, was President-elect Trump’s main national security adviser during his campaign. If he accepts President-elect Trump’s offer, as expected, he will be a critical gatekeeper for a president with little experience in military or foreign policy issues. General Flynn stunned former colleagues when he traveled to Moscow in 2015 to appear alongside Russian President Vladi­mir Putin at a lavish gala for the Kremlin-run propaganda channel RT, a trip General Flynn admitted he was paid to make and defended by saying he saw no distinction between RT and US news channels such as CNN.

Well before the 2016 American election threw Facebook’s status as a digital-era news source into the spotlight, leaders, advocacy groups and minorities worldwide have contended with an onslaught of online misinformation and abuse that have had real-world political repercussions. And for years, the social network did little to clamp down on the false news.

Now Facebook, Google and others have begun to take steps to curb the trend, but some outside the United States say the move is too late. “They should have done this way earlier,” said Richard Heydarian, a political analyst in the Philippines, one of Facebook’s fastest-growing markets. “We already saw the warning signs of this years ago.” The impact of Facebook and other social media platforms on international elections is difficult to quantify. But Facebook’s global reach — roughly a quarter of the world’s population now has an account — is difficult to deny, political experts and academics say.

Since Election Day, President-elect Donald Trump has refused to let reporters accompany him to the White House, accused the media of inciting protests and tweeted accusations that The New York Times fabricated stories about his transition.

As a candidate, he vilified journalists by name and blacklisted news outlets that displeased him. So when President-elect Trump ducked out to dinner one night without informing the journalists assigned to cover him, it struck White House reporters as a small but significant omen that cordial relations between the president and his press corps, a hallmark of the West Wing, were under threat. Is it a big deal if a president goes to dinner and the press doesn’t know? In a word, yes, according to former administration officials, journalists and a group of press advocacy organizations that issued an open letter to President-elect Trump arguing that Americans “deserve to know what the president is doing.”

Social media companies are under increasing scrutiny for the amount of hate speech that thrives on their platforms, especially since the presidential election. Now, Twitter has unveiled several new measures to curb the online abuse, though the changes are unlikely to be far-reaching enough to quiet the company’s critics. Twitter said it was making it easier for its users to hide content they do not wish to see on the service and to report abusive posts, even when those messages are directed at other users. The company has given its support teams training to better identify mistreatment on Twitter.

Gwen Ifill, a groundbreaking journalist who covered the White House, Congress and national campaigns during three decades for The Washington Post, The New York Times, NBC and, most prominently, PBS, died at a hospice in Washington. She was 61.

In a distinguished career, Ms. Ifill was in the forefront of a journalism vanguard as a black woman in a field dominated by white men. She achieved her highest visibility most recently, as the moderator and managing editor of the public affairs program “Washington Week” on PBS and the co-anchor and co-managing editor, with Judy Woodruff, of “NewsHour,” competing with the major broadcast and cable networks for the nightly news viewership. They were the first all-female anchor team on network nightly news. She and Ms. Woodruff were the moderators of a Democratic primary debate between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, reprising a role that Ms. Ifill had performed solo between sparring vice-presidential candidates in the 2004 and 2008 general election campaigns. She also wrote “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” a book published the day President Obama was inaugurated in 2009.

Google and Facebook have faced mounting criticism over how fake news on their sites may have influenced the presidential election’s outcome. Those companies responded by making it clear that they would not tolerate such misinformation by taking pointed aim at fake news sites’ revenue sources. Google kicked off the action saying it will ban websites that peddle fake news from using its online advertising service. Facebook updated the language in its Facebook Audience Network policy, which already says it will not display ads in sites that show misleading or illegal content, to include fake news sites. Taken together, the decisions were a clear signal that the tech behemoths could no longer ignore the growing outcry over their power in distributing information to the American electorate.

Breitbart, the website at the center of the self-described alternative online media, is planning to expand in the United States and abroad. The site, whose former chairman became the chief executive of Donald J. Trump’s campaign in August, has been emboldened by the victory of its candidate. Breitbart was always bullish on President-elect Trump’s chances, but the site seems far more certain of something else, as illustrated by a less visible story it published on election night, declaring a different sort of victory: “Breitbart Beats CNN, HuffPo for Total Facebook Engagements for Election Content.” It was a type of story the site publishes regularly. In August: “Breitbart Jumps to #11 on Facebook for Overall Engagement.”

On social platforms, all media had become marginal; elsewhere, much of the media was in structural collapse. Growing distribution systems belonged to technology companies and their users. Publishers had become mere guests, their own distribution systems, like printed newspapers, stagnant or shrinking. So a news organization’s ranking in that online world — one in which the importance of legacy was diminished — meant something. Faith in the importance of social metrics was a common trait among pro-Trump media, and for obvious reasons. They were clear indicators of support, participation and success, though exposed to no methodology. They were relative to other media and, by proxy, to politics.

Donald J. Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, resigned from his role as a CNN political commentator, ending a television deal that had attracted scrutiny and harsh criticism about the cable channel’s journalistic ethics.

Lewandowski, who joined CNN as a paid contributor days after being fired by Trump in June, has expressed interest in a senior adviser role in the White House, apparently. His name has also been mentioned as a potential chairman of the Republican National Committee. Lewandowski has been frequently spotted this week at Trump Tower in Manhattan, chatting with senior aides and attending meetings. Even as he defended Trump in front of millions of viewers on CNN talk shows, Lewandowski stayed in regular contact with the candidate and flew on the Trump campaign jet. He also received tens of thousands of dollars in severance from the Trump campaign, payments that were set to continue through the end of 2016. The arrangement raised concerns about whether CNN was effectively paying a Trump campaign strategist to spin its viewers.

President-elect Donald Trump chose Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and a loyal campaign adviser, to be his White House chief of staff, turning to a Washington insider whose friendship with the House speaker, Paul Ryan, could help secure early legislative victories. President-elect Trump named Stephen Bannon, a right-wing media provocateur, his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist, signaling an embrace of the fringe ideology long advanced by Bannon and of a continuing disdain for the Republican establishment.

The dual appointments — with Bannon given top billing in the official announcement — instantly created rival centers of power in the Trump White House. Bannon’s selection demonstrated the power of grass-roots activists who backed Trump’s candidacy. Some of them have long traded in the conspiracy theories and sometimes racist messages of Breitbart News, the website that Bannon ran for much of the past decade.

There is talk of Breitbart bureaus opening in Paris, Berlin and Cairo, spots where the populist right is on the rise. A bigger newsroom is coming in Washington, the better to cover a president-elect whose candidacy it embraced.

Mainstream news outlets are soul-searching in the wake of being shocked by Donald Trump’s election. But the team at Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news website that some critics have denounced as a hate site, is elated — and eager to expand on a victory that it views as a profound validation of its cause. “So much of the media mocked us, laughed at us, called us all sorts of names,” said Alexander Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “And then for us to be seen as integral to the election of a president, despite all of that hatred, is something that we certainly enjoy, and savor.”