Elections and Media

Greg Gianforte, the Montana Republican charged with assaulting a reporter the night before he won a seat in the House of Representatives, formally apologized to the reporter and said he would donate $50,000 to a journalism nonprofit as part of a settlement.

Gianforte wrote in a letter to the reporter, Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, that his actions on May 24 were “unprofessional, unacceptable and unlawful.” In the apology, Gianforte promised to donate $50,000 to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an advocacy group for press freedoms and journalists’ rights. “As both a candidate for office and a public official, I should be held to a high standard in my interactions with the press and the public. My treatment of you did not meet that standard,” wrote Gianforte, who won Montana’s lone seat in the House on May 25. “You did not initiate any physical contact with me, and I had no right to assault you.”

Jacobs accepted the congressman-elect’s apology, he said. “I hope the constructive resolution of this incident reinforces for all the importance of respecting the freedom of the press and the First Amendment and encourages more civil and thoughtful discourse in our country,” Jacobs said.

A team of veteran Republican operatives is taking its talent for under-the-radar political muckraking to an unlikely place: The liberal-leaning, Democratic-donating, Donald Trump-hating tech epicenter of Silicon Valley. The newest startup setting up shop in the Bay Area is Definers Public Affairs, a Washington (DC)-based outfit that seeks to apply the dark science of political opposition research to the business world. Their mission: To arm companies with ammunition to attack their corporate rivals, sway their government overseers and shape the public’s opinion on controversial issues.

To the GOP-led political venture, Silicon Valley is a natural target for their so-called “oppo” efforts. The tech industry is characteristically hyper-competitive, with boardroom squabbles, takeover attempts, and legal wars over employees and patents and regulations. Definers hopes to supply some of its future tech clients with the gossip, dirt and intel to win those fights. But the firm’s new Oakland-based operative — Tim Miller, who previously served as communications director to GOP presidential contender Jeb Bush — plans to do it with a decidedly Republican bent. The region’s tech heavyweights have long struggled to form relationships with GOP candidates and causes, so Miller and crew are pitching a way for those companies to leverage the power — or outrage — of the country’s most influential, vocal conservative groups to defeat their political or corporate enemies.

Facebook provides little information on how political parties use ads to reach undecided voters on the site. And concern has been growing since the American presidential election about the company’s role in campaigns, including about how politically charged fake news is spread online. Now, as voters head to the polls across Europe, groups in Britain, Germany and elsewhere are fighting back, creating new ways to track and monitor digital political ads and misinformation on the social network and on other digital services like Twitter and Google.

Here are 5 other questions that remain unknown about this story and the ongoing threat that national security officials say Russia poses to the integrity of American elections.
1. How widespread are these attacks?
2. Can the federal government do more?
3. Why do these leaks keep happening?
4. Why can't the US stop these cyberattacks?
5. Will this change Trump's tune?

CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC spend much of their prime-time hours dissecting President Donald Trump's every move and people on all sides of the political spectrum can't seem to get enough. Ratings are up at all three networks. Even with the same material to cover, the ABC, CBS and NBC nightly wraps were down a collective 4 percent in viewership for the season that ended in May. That fits a typical pattern, where news ratings generally rise during an exciting election year and fall when a new president becomes immersed in the day-to-day grind of governing.

Apparently, Russian Military Intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing e-mails to more than 100 local election officials just days before November 2016’s presidential election. The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed US government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.

While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A US intelligence officer who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too big a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive. The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into US voting systems than was previously understood.

The Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet, prosecutors announced in a press release June 5. Court documents filed by the government don't specify which media outlet received the materials allegedly leaked by Winner, but NBC News reported that the material went to the Intercept online news outlet. The Intercept published a top secret NSA report June 5 that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company. Details on the report published by The Intercept suggest that it was created on May 5, 2017 — the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on whether Winner is accused of sharing the report published by the Intercept. In June, Winner allegedly “printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information” before mailing the materials to an unnamed online news outlet a few days later, according to prosecutors.

[Commentary] After 2016’s election, Facebook came in for a drubbing for its role in propagating misinformation — or “fake news,” as we called it back then, before the term became a catchall designation for any news you don’t like. The criticism was well placed: Facebook is the world’s most popular social network, and millions of people look to it daily for news. But the focus on Facebook let another social network off the hook. I speak of my daily addiction, Twitter.

Though the 140-character network favored by President Trump is far smaller than Facebook, it is used heavily by people in media and thus exerts perhaps an even greater sway on the news business. That’s an issue because Twitter is making the news dumber. The service is insidery and clubby. It exacerbates groupthink. It prizes pundit-ready quips over substantive debate, and it tends to elevate the silly over the serious — for several sleepless hours this week it was captivated by “covfefe,” which was essentially a brouhaha over a typo.

Shifting from his previous blanket denials, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that “patriotically minded” private Russian hackers could have been involved in cyberattacks in 2016 to help the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump. While Putin continued to deny any state role, his comments to reporters in St. Petersburg were a departure from the Kremlin’s previous position: that Russia had played no role whatsoever in the hacking of the Democratic National Committee and that, after Donald Trump’s victory, the country had become the victim of anti-Russia hysteria among crestfallen Democrats. Raising the possibility of attacks by what he portrayed as free-spirited Russian patriots, Putin said that hackers “are like artists” who choose their targets depending how they feel “when they wake up in the morning.”

Cable TV is home to a set of news channels that have become a destination for political news. In fact in 2016, cable news topped Americans’ list of most helpful source types for news and information about the presidential election. Financially, these channels have generally set themselves apart from other news media by their comparatively robust business model. In prime time, combined average viewership for the three major news channels (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) increased by 55% percent to 4.8 million viewers. Total revenue across the three channels was projected to increase by 19 percent in 2016, to a total of nearly $5 billion