Government & Communications

CNN and its president, Jeff Zucker, are in the middle of their most intense bout yet: an unlikely public fight with the leader of the free world. It is rare that a single news organization attracts the level of ire mustered by President Donald Trump, who over the weekend posted on Twitter a video that portrayed him wrestling a figure with the logo of CNN for a head. But the president’s denunciations — in stinging tweets and slashing speeches, in phrases like “fraud news” and “garbage journalism” — have far outstripped his criticisms of other prominent news outlets, like The New York Times or The Washington Post. And his attacks have spawned a cottage industry of Trump supporters who have declared a digital war of sorts against CNN, including gotcha videos of network employees and threatening messages sent to anchors’ cellphones.

White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. President Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.

President Donald Trump took his fight with the news media to the world stage on July 6, hammering CNN and his political enemies in the press as “fake news” at a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw. President Trump gave the first question of the press conference to Daily Mail editor David Martosko, a Trump ally who has been considered for various administration posts. That led CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta to allege a set-up. Martosko asked President Trump about the controversy that exploded around CNN July 5, when the network published a story claiming to know the identity of the man who created a video the President tweeted, which showed him tackling a wrestler with the CNN logo emblazoned over his face. President Trump didn’t miss a beat, saying that the network “has some pretty serious problems.” “They have been fake news for a long time,” President Trump said. “They’ve been covering me in a very dishonest way.”

At the press conference, President Trump also slammed NBC, noting that he once pulled big ratings for the network, which aired his program “The Apprentice." Then-NBC president Jeff Zucker now heads CNN. “NBC is equally as bad, despite the fact that I made them a fortune, they forgot about that,” President Trump said. “But I will say that CNN has really taken it too seriously and I think has hurt themselves very badly. Very, very badly. What we want to see in the United States is honest, beautiful, free, but honest press. We want fair press. We don’t want fake news, and by the way, not everybody is fake news. Bad thing. Very bad for our country.”

The Reddit user said he never intended his anti-CNN meme — you know, the one tweeted by President Donald Trump in which the now-president beats up CNN in a wrestling match — to become a call for violence against journalists. #CNNBlackmail was the top trending Twitter topic July 5, thanks to the efforts of a furious Trump Internet, who had concluded that the user’s apology was forced by a “threat” from CNN. Their evidence? A story CNN itself published, detailing its attempts to contact and identify the anonymous Reddit user ahead of their apology, whose offensive posting history suddenly became part of a national news story.

The part of the article that infuriated the Trump Internet — and people on both sides of the political spectrum, who questioned the ethical standards of the network’s decision — had to do with how CNN described its reasoning for not identifying the Redditor by name. Reporter Andrew Kaczynski wrote that CNN had spoken with the person behind the account, and would not identify the user because “he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology,” who had promised not to continue flooding the Internet with offensive memes. But, he wrote, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

[Commentary] Is the President an enemy of free speech or merely exercising it in a way that liberals dislike? Personal experience has taught me that the line between these two things is vanishingly thin. Horrible things have been said about President Trump, true. He could argue that he's simply fighting back, yes. But fighting fire with fire inevitably leads to more fire, and while I'm sympathetic towards some of Trump's agenda, I look upon the state of politics in this era with despair. It is not unreasonable for journalists to say "enough is enough."

[Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph.]

[Commentary] Remember when we used to obsess about every presidential tweet? When every story was about us? When Donald Trump’s war with the media was, really, the only thing that mattered? We need to stop. Stop reporting on every tweet with the volume of a declaration of war; stop letting the president and his staff frame every misstep and scandal as a media story; stop treating Trump’s war with the press as if it’s the most important thing happening in this country. It’s not. Our response to each of Trump’s media-bashing episodes comes off as if we’re hearing them for the first time. Can you believe he said that? Could this be the thing that finally does him in? Does he have no respect for the First Amendment? The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.

The media’s impulse, which is understandable, is to keep the focus on his threats to the press, and not to let them become normalized. But we have reached the point at which the media response has become counterproductive and even beneficial to the president and his lackeys in the White House, who have turned the West Wing into a megaphone for Trump’s faux media war and reporters in the White House briefing room into photo-op foils. It’s amazing, and absurd, that we turn over live television to the press secretary to air the administration’s latest broadside against the press, and let senior administration officials go off the record to attack our own outlets. Every time President Trump fires a shot in his war against the media, there’s an opportunity for a more serious, nuanced argument about why everyone benefits from a free and vigorous press: Airing a president and his policies to open discussion and scrutiny results in better government.

[Commentary] On Election Night 2016, a few hours before the results were fully in, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I’m staying at 18F”. I felt it was important, to me, to make a decision based on principle before I knew the outcome. Earlier in July, I decided to leave government service.

They may seem completely unrelated to most, but I’ll try to explain why to me they were evidence of the same dangerous “denormalization” of our government. The first thing that happened was the release of the written testimony of the former FBI Director, James Comey. For anyone in public service to ask for the personal loyalty of anyone else in government is an affront to our core values. For the President to ask it of the FBI Director is beyond “not normal." The second thing that occurred that very same day is that the technology and design organization I have worked for since before its public launch, 18F (and the larger service we created for it and its sibling organizations, the Technology Transformation Service), is being reorganized via administrative order into the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service.

Access Now and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are among those signing onto an amicus brief supporting Facebook in its efforts to protect the anonymity of its users and alert them if they are under investigation. According to Access Now, the government, which is investigating Trump inauguration protests that turned violent, has requested that Facebook unmask the identities of three users under a gag order, which means the company can't tell the people in question about the warrants. "First, the non-disclosure order is both a prior restraint and a content-based restriction on speech and is therefore subject to the most demanding First Amendment scrutiny," the groups write. "Second, the underlying warrants are apparently calculated to invade the right of Facebook's users to speak and associate anonymously on a matter of public interest."

There are a lot of insights to be drawn from the latest media maelstrom involving President Trump: about his sensitivity to criticism, his impulsivity, the way he talks about women and the ease with which he can still hurl the basest of insults. But the episode is also a striking example of how a presidency born of television lives there still, no matter what else might be going on In Real Life (IRL, as the internet calls it).

It’s a cable news-Twitter presidency. So is it any wonder that one of the great, early standoffs of the new administration is not between the president and Congress or the president and a foreign leader, but between the president and the hosts of a morning news show? As one of those hosts, Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, told me on Friday, “He should be a lot more worried about NATO and building a relationship with Angela Merkel than he is with cable news hosts.”

[Commentary] I left the White House that day with dramatically mixed emotions. I remain convinced that we should help a government initiative that can do real good, despite my deep concerns about the current administration’s policies. I saw only a sliver of all that went on that day, given the many concurrent sessions, but I wish I’d seen more evidence that the leadership of the tech industry can actually help government do a better job, given that so many of those who seem to be engaging have a lot invested in the status quo. I guess in some way that means that I leave this event not that far from where I started, remembering that “No one is coming. It is up to us.”

[Jennifer Pahlka is Founder and Executive Director of Code for America]

When a dozen and a half CEOs of the world’s biggest tech companies descended on the White House in June, it turned a spotlight on one of the bigger mysteries of a mysterious White House: They were convened by the Office of American Innovation, the new operation being run by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Announced with much fanfare by the president in March, the office was set up to bring “new thinking and real change” to the country’s toughest problems, according to Trump, in part by drawing on the lessons of the private sector. Since then, observers have been wondering just what it was, or even if it was. It didn’t help that the sweep of its briefing was almost comically broad, from upgrading federal government’s $82 billion worth of information technology, to spurring the creation of new jobs, changing how the country thinks about apprenticeships and "unleashing American business." Not to mention working with sometimes-antagonist Chris Christie’s commission on tackling the United States' opioid epidemic. (And all this while Kushner is also supposed to be tackling Middle Eastern peace.) But over the past few weeks, its responsibilities have started to come into focus. It now has a staff, which worked behind the scenes to bring in the impressive roster of tech CEOs who attended the summit—Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, IBM’s Ginni Rometty and more. It spurred the decision by the Veterans Administration to buy a new, multibillion-dollar computer system. And it had a hand in Trump’s executive order on apprenticeships, issued before the meeting.