New York Times

In the morning, President-elect Donald Trump was the media-bashing firebrand many of his supporters adore, denouncing The New York Times as a “failing” institution that covered him inaccurately — “and with a nasty tone!” Eight hours later, after a lunchtime interview with editors and reporters for The Times — one that was briefly canceled, after President-elect Trump quarreled over the ground rules, then restored — the mood of the president-elect, it seemed, had mellowed.

“The Times is a great, great American jewel,” he declared as he prepared to leave the gathering in the newspaper’s 16th-floor boardroom, where portraits of former presidents adorn the walls. “A world jewel,” added President-elect Trump, who was seated next to Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the paper’s publisher. “And I hope we can all get along.” In an extraordinary 75-minute meeting — parrying, debating and, at times, joking with the leaders of a publication that has long been an object of Trump’s fascination and frustration — the president-elect’s chameleonlike approach to the news media was on full display. He dismissed his earlier talk of strengthening libel laws, telling the assembled journalists, “I think you’ll be OK.” He expressed interest in improving his relationship with the paper, saying, “I think it would make the job I am doing much easier.” “To me,” President-elect Trump said at one point, “it would be a great achievement if I could come back here in a year or two, and have a lot of folks here say, ‘You’ve done a great job.’”

A small group of superrich Americans — President-elect Donald Trump among them — has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented legal assault on the media. Can they succeed?

The new president will be a man who constantly accuses the media of getting things wrong but routinely misrepresents and twists facts himself. There are signs, too, of new efforts to harness the law to the cause of cowing the press. President-elect Trump’s choice for chief adviser, Stephen Bannon, ran the alt-right Breitbart News Network before joining Trump’s campaign last summer. Breitbart announced recently that it was “preparing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against a major media company” for calling Breitbart a “ ‘white nationalist’ website.” Even if Breitbart is bluffing, the threat will discourage other news outlets from using that term to describe it, and that will in turn help Breitbart and Bannon seem more acceptable to the mainstream. President-elect Trump was right about one thing: You don’t have to win every case to advance in the larger legal war.

It had all the trappings of a high-level rapprochement: President-elect Donald Trump, now the nation’s press critic in chief, inviting the leading anchors and executives of television news to join him for a private meeting of minds. On-air stars like Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer headed to Trump Tower for the off-the-record gathering, typically the kind of event where journalists and politicians clear the air after a hard-fought campaign. Instead, the president-elect delivered a defiant message: You got it all wrong.

President-elect Trump, whose antagonism toward the news media was unusual even for a modern presidential candidate, described the television networks as dishonest in their reporting and shortsighted in missing the signs of his upset victory. He criticized some in the room by name, including CNN’s president, Jeffrey Zucker, according to multiple people briefed on the meeting who were granted anonymity to describe confidential discussions. It seemed the meeting was being used as a political prop, especially after Trump-friendly news outlets trumpeted the session as a take-no-prisoners move by a brave president-elect.

[Commentary] Since the election, I have been on the phone with many Times readers around the country to discuss their concerns about The Times’s coverage of the presidential election. The number of complaints coming into the public editor’s office is five times the normal level, and the pace has only just recently tapered off. My colleague Thomas Feyer, who oversees the letters to the editor, says the influx from readers is one of the largest since Sept. 11.

Many people are commenting on the election, but many are venting about The Times’s coverage. Readers are also taking to the comments section of Times articles to talk about it, says the community editor, Bassey Etim. From my conversations with readers, and from the e-mails that have come into my office, I can tell you there is a searing level of dissatisfaction out there with many aspects of the coverage.

[Liz Spayd is the public editor for the New York Times]

After more than a week of accusations that the spread of fake news on Facebook may have affected the outcome of the presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg published a detailed post describing ways the company was considering dealing with the problem.

Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chairman and chief executive, broadly outlined some of the options he said the company’s news feed team was looking into, including third-party verification services, better automated detection tools and simpler ways for users to flag suspicious content. “The problems here are complex, both technically and philosophically,” Zuckerberg wrote. “We believe in giving people a voice, which means erring on the side of letting people share what they want whenever possible.” The post was perhaps the most detailed glimpse into Zuckerberg’s thinking on the issue since Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in the Nov. 8 election. Within hours of his victory being declared, Facebook was accused of affecting the election’s outcome by failing to stop bogus news stories, many of them favorable to Trump, from proliferating on its social network. Executives and employees at all levels of the company have since been debating its role and responsibilities.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL), a conservative from Alabama who became a close adviser after endorsing him early in his campaign, to be the attorney general of the United States. While Sen Sessions is well liked in the Senate, his record as United States attorney in Alabama in the 1980s is very likely to become an issue for Democrats and civil rights groups expected to give it close scrutiny. While serving as a United States prosecutor in Alabama, Sessions was nominated in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship. But his nomination was rejected by the Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee because of racially charged comments and actions. At that time, he was one of two judicial nominees whose selections were halted by the panel in nearly 50 years.

The appointment of Sen Sessions is expected to bring sweeping change to the Justice Department as it operated under Loretta E. Lynch and her predecessor, Eric H. Holder Jr., who, when he was nominated to be the first black attorney general, pledged to make rebuilding the civil rights division his top priority. Several former Justice officials predicted that Sen Sessions would reverse the emphasis on civil rights and criminal-justice reform that Holder put in place.

President-elect Donald J. Trump has selected Rep Mike Pompeo (R-KS), a hawkish Republican from Kansas and a former Army officer, to lead the CIA. Rep Pompeo, who has served for three terms in Congress and is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, gained prominence for his role in the congressional investigation into the 2012 attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. He was a sharp critic of Hillary Clinton on the committee. If confirmed by the Senate, Rep Pompeo would take control of a spy agency that has been remade in the years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with a relentless focus on manhunts, counterterrorism and targeted killing operations. Over the past year, the CIA has undergone a bureaucratic reorganization under its director, John O. Brennan, an effort Rep Pompeo would decide whether he wants to continue.

On the intelligence committee, Rep Pompeo has taken a particularly hard-line stance on how to treat National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. After Snowden's allies began a campaign to get him pardoned, the entire House Select Committee on Intelligence wrote a letter to President Barack Obama urging against a pardon. The letter said Snowden was no whistle-blower, but rather a "serial exaggerator and fabricator." At that time, Rep Pompeo issued his own press release, calling Snowden a "liar and a criminal," who deserves "prison rather than pardon."

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.”