New York Times

Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election? Much of that remains unclear, because the Internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information.

For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case. If you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth.

Gawker Media, which filed for bankruptcy after losing a lawsuit brought by the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, has settled the case, bringing to a close a multiyear saga that led to the demise of the company as an independent news organization. The settlement, which court documents indicate is for $31 million, comes less than eight months after a jury awarded Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, $140 million in damages in an invasion of privacy case lawsuit over Gawker.com’s publication of a video that showed Bollea having sex with a friend’s wife. Gawker will forgo its appeal of that judgment.

The significant financial pressure from the judgment — and the revelation that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was financing the lawsuit and others against the company — forced Gawker to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sell itself through an auction, which Univision won in August with a bid of $135 million.

The decision by ABC News to hire George Stephanopoulos in 1996 tripped alarms throughout American journalism. “Government-to-press switcheroos do not bode well for news objectivity,” The Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg wrote at the time. In The New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel called Stephanopoulos’s move another step in “the progressive collapse of the walls that traditionally separated news from propaganda,” which had been erected “to guard against all kinds of partisan contamination.” Network news executives brushed it off as sanctimony from graybeards who didn’t get it. Their hiring of political operatives — who were becoming telegenic stars in their own right — continued apace. It took 20 years, but the warnings have come true — the contamination has spread and the patient is looking sickly. But the moment will be wasted if it does not prompt the networks to reset the boundaries between their newsrooms and their paid political operatives, if not end these arrangements altogether.

Scholastic has been providing child-friendly election coverage to teachers and classrooms for nearly a century, starting with the 1924 race between Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis. It introduced its children’s press corps program in 2000, and for the last five presidential elections, Scholastic has sent precocious young political reporters to cover rallies, debates and stump speeches around the country. 2016's press corps includes children in 22 states and the District of Columbia. The children cover their local areas, and their reports appear on the Scholastic News website and occasionally in its classroom magazines, which reach about 25 million students. Many of the young reporters say it is exhilarating to witness history unfolding before their eyes. But this election has presented challenges, as the race has devolved into one of the most vicious contests in the nation’s history. Even the most grizzled, jaded campaign veterans have been shocked by the barrage of insults and controversies that have defined this year’s race. Kaitlin Clark, 12, of New Hampshire, said that when she was in a news media pen at a rally for Donald Trump. “You could feel that the crowd didn’t really want us there,” she said.

After six months of pursuit, the Gannett Company said that it was withdrawing its offer to acquire the owner of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, a deal that would have extended Gannett’s national footprint and furthered consolidation in the newspaper industry.

Gannett, the publisher of USA Today, had made several efforts to acquire the former Tribune Publishing Company, now known as Tronc. The first two were rejected during the spring. Gannett said that the acquisition was an attractive opportunity but “in the end the terms were not acceptable.” Tronc shares plunged nearly 20 percent on the morning of Nov 1 on the news. Gannett shares were up 1.3 percent in early morning trading.

For much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Trump and the Russian government.

And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Trump. The FBI’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue. Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.

“When the company that controls the pipes, so to speak, owns this very, very large content provider, it can cause a whole bunch of different horribles for consumers.”
-- Sen Al Franken (D-MN)

[Commentary] On the face of it, there is something Strangelovian about the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

A company that controls the signal to the wireless devices of more than 130 million people, and to televisions in some 25 million households, buys a major movie studio and one of the biggest collections of cable channels in the country — potentially attaining a dominant position from which to control the information flow to a large percentage of Americans. A cultural-political Doomsday Machine is born. Mass media hegemony, or some such, follows. Or does it? Like a lot of news consumers, I’ve been struggling to get my head around this deal, which would give AT&T control of the Warner Bros. movie studio and cable networks including CNN, HBO and TBS. It would be gargantuan, carrying an $85 billion price tag. And it would further concentrate media ownership into a few powerful hands, playing to fears of a big corporate media takeover of the wild and woolly web, which has been so central to this year’s great political upheaval. But it’s all very fuzzy.

What is it about this proposed merger that has both the left and the right, on the presidential trail and on Capitol Hill, so suspicious of it, if not downright opposed? Are the stakes really so high and the potential damage so great?

“When the company that controls the pipes, so to speak, owns this very, very large content provider, it can cause a whole bunch of different horribles for consumers,” said Sen Al Franken (D-MN).

Is AT&T’s $85 billion bid for Time Warner the triumph of hope over experience? It is certainly true that the last two mega-mergers involving Time Warner fell far short of their promise. After the 1989 marriage of Time Inc. and Warner Communications, for instance, it took seven years for investors to see any real gains in the combined companies’ stock. But even that painful deal paled in comparison to the 2001 merger of AOL and Time Warner. That was the worst combination in corporate history, at least until 2008, when Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial, the toxic mortgage lender.

This time it’s different, contends Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive. He called the merger “a perfect match of two companies with complementary strengths who can bring a fresh approach to how the media and communications industry works for customers, content creators, distributors and advertisers.” There’s something for all investors in this corporate marriage, AT&T says: Those seeking earnings growth will benefit as well as investors on the hunt for income. For one thing, the company expects the combination to begin adding to earnings the year after it closes — a quick turnaround by traditional standards. And it also says the takeover will improve its so-called dividend coverage. That’s the measure of how much excess cash AT&T has to cover its 5.3 percent dividend. Company executives always make promises when they announce big deals. But talk is cheap, delivery costly.

In many ways, President Barack Obama is America’s first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity. Those efforts were in part led by a founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who believed in the Illinois senator’s campaign so much that he left the start-up to join Obama’s strategy team. After he was elected, he created a trifecta of executive positions in his administration modeled on corporate best practices: chief technology officer, chief data scientist, chief performance officer. He sat for question-and-answer sessions on Reddit, released playlists of his favorite songs on Spotify and used Twitter frequently, even once making dad jokes with Bill Clinton. He stoked deep and meaningful connections with scores of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

President Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals. Even his tech-specific fumbles seem unlikely to mar his permanent record: The rocky debut of HealthCare.gov, the online insurance marketplace that cost more than $600 million to build and crashed almost immediately after it went live, was later brushed off as a technical difficulty. And his administration’s pressure on Silicon Valley companies to aid its cybersecurity efforts hasn’t seemed to dampen their enthusiasm for him. Obama used his ties to the tech sector to foster diplomacy: Last year, he took Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, with him to Cuba as an economic endorsement of the revolutionary powers of start-ups to change the world.