Government & Communications

A Q &A with UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon.

Ars editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin talked to UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon about how the Trump administration has been removing scientific and environmental data from the Web. Lindsey is part of a group called Environmental Data Governance Initiative (EDGI), which is working on ways to rescue that data and make it available to the public. Lindsey told us how EDGI got started in November 2016, within days of the presidential election. Its founders are scientists and academics whose main goal was to make sure that researchers and citizens would continue to have access to data about the environment. They organized data rescue events around the country, where volunteers identified vulnerable climate information on websites for several government agencies, including the EPA, DOE, and even NASA. The Internet Archive helped by creating digital records of all the at-risk pages.

Cybersecurity specialists are warning that President Donald Trump’s voter-fraud commission may unintentionally expose voter data to even more hacking and digital manipulation. Their concerns stem from a letter the commission sent to every state, asking for full voter rolls and vowing to make the information “available to the public.” The requested information includes full names, addresses, birth dates, political party and, most notably, the last four digits of Social Security numbers. The commission is also seeking data such as voter history, felony convictions and military service records.

Digital security experts say the commission’s request would centralize and lay bare a valuable cache of information that cyber criminals could use for identity theft scams — or that foreign spies could leverage for disinformation schemes. “It is beyond stupid,” said Nicholas Weaver, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

More conservative outlets now have official seats in the White House briefing room according to a new seating chart the White House Correspondents' Association unveiled June 30. Conservative television networks Newsmax and One America News now have seats, though One America News' is shared with the BBC. Other changes enacted since the last time the seating chart was adjusted in 2015 include the Daily Mail's US website getting a seat, as well as the Huffington Post and the Spanish-language television network Univision getting shared seats. While the first row remains the same, populated by the major television networks and wires, USA Today has moved up to the second row, switching spots with AP Radio. For the past two administrations the WHCA, not the White House, has determined the seating in the briefing room, though White House officials have previously suggested they may seek to make changes in the future.

A day after defending his use of social media as befitting a “modern day” president, President Donald Trump appeared to promote violence against CNN in a tweet. President Trump, who is on vacation at his Bedminster (NJ) golf resort, posted on Twitter an old video clip of him performing in a WWE professional wrestling match, but with a CNN logo superimposed on the head of his opponent. In the clip, Trump is shown slamming the CNN avatar to the ground and pounding him with simulated punches and elbows to the head. Trump added the hashtags #FraudNewsCNN and #FNN, for “fraud news network.” The video clip apparently had been posted days earlier on Reddit, a popular social media message board. The president's tweet was the latest escalation in his beef with CNN over its coverage of him and his administration.

President Donald Trump, who has reveled in his confrontational style with the news media, sparked fierce debate July 2 over whether he is inciting violence against journalists by posting a doctored video clip showing him bashing the head of a figure representing CNN. President Trump’s latest provocation in his war with the media brought denunciations from Democrats, and some Republicans, who warned that the president’s conduct could endanger reporters as he seeks to undermine public trust in reporting about his administration.

“Violence & violent imagery to bully the press must be rejected,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) wrote in one of the many comments from elected officials posted on Twitter. Presidential historians suggested that Trump’s social media attacks are lowering the bar on what constitutes appropriate presidential conduct in fighting perceived media enemies. HW Brands, a historian at the University of Texas, said Republican President Richard Nixon also felt mistreated, but “Nixon didn’t air his grievances as publicly as Trump does. We’ve never seen anything quite like the ongoing performance of President Trump.” Meanwhile, White House aides and supporters defended the president’s Twitter post as a pointed but harmless barb at what he sees as a hostile press corps. Some said the reaction demonstrated the inflated self-regard of reporters and their inability to take a joke.

As President Donald Trump faces growing backlash for tweeting a video attacking CNN, Twitter told the network that the president's tweet did not violate the social media platform’s terms and conditions. President Trump tweeted an old video clip on July 2 of him beating up an individual at a wrestling event, with a CNN logo superimposed over the man's face. Twitter told CNN it had reviewed the tweet. The video is the latest in a series of attacks on the media by the president made on Twitter. Earlier this week, Trump issued a highly personal and graphic attack on MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, in which he called her “crazy,” “low I.Q.” and referenced her allegedly bleeding from a facelift.

Cable news outlets are pulling huge ratings and reporters are becoming overnight celebrities as the attacks between President Donald Trump and the media enter strange new territory. The White House has agitated for the fight, believing that every day it spends feuding with the media exposes further press bias and energizes the conservative base. But Trump’s claim that MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift" unified the media, with anchors from Fox News to CNN expressing outrage at the president’s tweets and pointing to them as evidence that the press should not treat Trump like a normal president.

It seems clear, at this point, that the White House would prefer not to hold regular press briefings. But President Trump and his aides do not want to be the ones to pull the plug. They want journalists to do it. , making the briefing situation so untenable that reporters might bail first. If successful, Team Trump will achieve its desired outcome while avoiding the blame. The apparent strategy has three prongs: Turn off the cameras; Stop answering questions; Show the media at its worst.

[Commentary] The newly constituted Federal Communications Commission is conservative and deregulatory, but in a way you would expect had any of the establishment Republicans won the White House last November. When Trump won, I worried that he would stack the FCC with nut-job loyalists so that he could follow through with his threats against the media. Luckily, that didn't happen.

[Commentary] In hindsight, it’s easy to say CNN shouldn’t have gone with such a flimsy, improperly vetted story. Unfortunately, journalism isn’t a hindsight business. Journalism happens in real time, against a deadline clock, and in a competitive atmosphere. Only ombudsmen, press critics and libel attorneys get to second-guess what they do. As the Supreme Court noted in the landmark libel case Times v. Sullivan, the First Amendment is of little use unless we provide “breathing space” for controversial reports that end up containing unintentional mistakes—like the CNN story—as long as they’re made without malice.