New York Times

[Commentary] If President-elect Donald Trump keeps up the posture he displayed during the campaign — all-out war footing — the future will hold some very grim days, not just for news reporters but also for the American constitutional system that relies on a free and strong press.

It’s one thing to wage a press war as a candidate, when the most you can do is enforce reporting bans at your rallies, hurl insults and deny interviews and access (all of which are plenty bad). It’s another thing to do it from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where you have control over what vital government information is made public, and where you have sway over the Justice Department, which under President Barack Obama has shown an overexuberance in investigating journalists and the whistle-blowers who leak to them. Imagine what somebody with a press vendetta and a dim view of the First Amendment would do with that kind of power.

When Donald Trump said in February that he would “open up our libel laws” if he became president to make it easier to sue news organizations for unfavorable coverage, the declaration sent shock waves through the media world. But could he actually do it? The simple answer is yes, but it would be complicated. And assuming the established procedures to change laws hold, it would also be extremely difficult. Libel is a matter of state law limited by the principles of the First Amendment. Presidents cannot directly change state laws, so President-elect Trump would effectively have to seek to change the First Amendment principles that constrain the country’s libel laws. There are two potential ways he could do this, according to legal experts. One route is through the Supreme Court. The other is through the Constitution itself.

On Election Night 2016, a private chat sprang up on Facebook among several vice presidents and executives of the social network. What role, they asked each other, had their company played in the election’s outcome?

Facebook’s top executives concluded that they should address the issue and assuage staff concerns at a quarterly all-hands meeting. They also called a smaller meeting with the company’s policy team, according to three people who saw the private chat and are familiar with the decisions; they requested anonymity because the discussion was confidential. Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted. The online conversation among Facebook’s executives, which was one of several private message threads that began among the company’s top ranks, showed that the social network was internally questioning what its responsibilities might be.

Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source — Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook affecting the election was “a pretty crazy idea” — many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.

Deal makers took notice in Oct when Donald Trump declared that he would seek to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner on the grounds that it would radically concentrate power in too few companies. But after an initial period of turmoil, deal advisers say that it is unclear whether a Trump administration — led by an avowedly pro-business real estate mogul — would really make life difficult for mega-mergers.

At the moment, AT&T’s planned takeover of Time Warner, the biggest merger of the year and one that is poised to reshape the world of media and telecommunications, appears to be the most likely candidate for hazing. The president-elect was among the first politicians to criticize the deal, vowing to block it if he became president. President-elect Trump said it was “an example of the power structure I’m fighting.” He also opposed a similar union between Comcast and NBCUniversal in 2013, which he called “poison.” But antitrust specialists and Republican strategists say a Trump administration may not fulfill his campaign promises.

At the end of a stunning and divisive election that left many Americans feeling further apart than ever, there was perhaps one area of common ground: infrastructure.

In a triumphant victory speech, President-elect Donald J. Trump cited the issue as a top priority for his administration. “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,” President-elect Trump said. “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” The sentiment was echoed across the country on Election Day as voters supported dozens of local ballot measures intended to improve public transportation. In Los Angeles, Seattle and Atlanta, voters were poised to approve spending billions of dollars on buses, rail lines and other projects.

Hours after Donald J. Trump won the race for the White House, scores of regulations that have reshaped corporate America in the last eight years suddenly seemed vulnerable. While many questions remain about how President-elect Trump will govern, a consensus emerged in many circles in Washington and on Wall Street about at least one aspect of his impending presidency: President-elect Trump is likely to seek vast cuts in regulations across the banking, health care and energy industries.

The idea of a Trump presidency triggered a sense of dread among many people in the liberal-leaning technology business. Trump is seen as less favorably disposed toward the concentration of power among the handful of large companies that dominate the internet, including Facebook, Google and Amazon, said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate firm. Trump has called for the rejection of AT&T’s bid for Time Warner. Still, analysts expect that he will appoint antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department who will largely follow traditional Republican approaches to the free market. Trump will be under pressure by major telecom and cable firms to roll back aspects of net neutrality. The rule inhibits how broadband providers manage traffic on their networks to ensure any website is equally accessible to consumers. Telecom and cable firms continue to challenge the rules in court and Mr. Trump, with the encouragement of Republicans in Congress, may seek to abandon the regulation.

In media business terms, it is now clear, the 2016 election could not have arrived at a more precarious moment, as industries defined by their futures struggled to handle what was happening in the present. A new business model had not replaced an old one — not yet. There was, for the duration of the campaign, effectively no model at all.

Through this lens, some of the defining narratives about the media and the election start to make a little more sense. Major news organizations, household names trusted for decades, lost a great deal of ownership over audiences. The organizations exist among many contributors in infinite feeds. Their news stories could be more easily brushed aside and ignored as a product of bias or motivated reporting. Once privileged with the leverage to shape narratives, or declare stories important, they now found themselves competing with rivals shaped by new incentives. It seemed that readers and viewers had been prompted, all at once, to ask news outlets: Who are you to assume we trust you?

This has not been your typical presidential election — not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.

Poniewozik: The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next president of the United States. The press covered Donald Trump like a future trivia question (and a ratings cash cow). From the get-go, too much coverage of the race has been informed by a belief, overt or unconscious, that Trump couldn’t win. Last fall, the political press, like their sources, dismissed the polls and stuck to the belief that people would never actually pull the lever for that man. The mind-set stuck well into the primaries — even data-minded Nate Silver succumbed to the siren call of punditry.
Rutenberg: Yes, If you think about it, she received coverage befitting a traditional politician running for president; he received coverage of a billionaire reality-television star who turned politics into performance art and sparked a powerful movement in the process.

As television news gears up for 2016’s big finale, an intense public distrust in the media is threatening the networks’ traditional role as election night scorekeeper. There is a divided electorate, big segments of which are poised to question the veracity of Nov 8’s results. Donald J. Trump has refused to say if he will concede in the event of a projected defeat. And new digital competitors plan to break the usual election-night rules and issue real-time predictions long before polls close.

The era of Tim Russert’s famed whiteboard — when network anchors could serve as the ultimate authority on election results — has faded. And scrutiny on big media organizations on Tuesday, when 70 million people might tune in, is likely to be harsher than ever. In interviews, network executives said that credibility was their first concern, and that they hoped to tune out competing chatter and focus on what they can control: getting it right.

You may be a reliable Democratic voter in a solid-blue city. Maybe you have a graduate degree; maybe you’re a member of an ethnic or religious minority; maybe you are a woman. Any of these would make you a likely Hillary Clinton supporter. So why did you just see an ad for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign on Facebook?

The New York Times has collected an extensive database of political Facebook ads, and data about how they are targeted, from our readers as part of our Political Ad Tracker project. Microtargeted online advertisements can be a powerful tool for political campaigns to tailor a message to specific people they are trying to reach. But the reason you saw a particular campaign ad on Facebook may have nothing to do with your political views, or even your demographic profile. It could depend on whether you live in a swing state and on your internet activity — or be practically random. You can find the reasons you were shown a particular ad, political or otherwise, on Facebook with just a few steps.