Journalism

[Commentary] Anyone who doubts the value of local newspapers in the 21st century should consider this: They may be the only institution capable of stopping the spread of fake news online. That’s because fake news is a local phenomenon, or rather, a rootless digital scourge masquerading as a homegrown local product. It then gets repackaged and distributed on the national level — ironically (but not coincidentally) replicating the lifecycle of real news.
[Erik Sass is editor of Publishers Daily]

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] News organizations are still struggling to diversify their ranks. Minority groups only accounted for about 13 percent of newspaper jobs in 2015, according to one industry survey. Tied into that equation is a socioeconomic component that anyone who works in today’s precarious news industry is well aware of: holding a newspaper job often means coming from an affluent household, especially as both undergraduate and graduate degrees, along with a slew of prestigious internships, become the price of admission for scant openings.

Despite all the upheaval over the past year, the unchanging nature of newspaper op-ed pages doesn’t surprise Jack Shafer, a Politico media columnist. “A newspaper is not a Twitter feed. It’s not skywriting,” Shafer says. The editorial status quo will remain as long as the people who control the pages hail from the same classes and ideological backgrounds they’ve always known. “We can argue whether Bret Stephens or Paul Krugman’s ideas are worthy of placement in The New York Times,” Shafer says. “but [A.J.] Liebling said it best. The freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

[Commentary] Journalism has a class problem. We know this. The best internships are for students with the resources to work unpaid or with low pay in some of the most expensive cities in the country. Conferences are expensive and often hosted in expensive cities making it difficult for smaller newsrooms to send reporters. The bulk of the jobs are clustered in major metropolitan areas. That’s not to say people without means don’t make it into journalism. They do. But it’s a longer, rougher road with far fewer people making it to the end....

Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

[Heather Bryant is the founder and director of Project Facet, an open source software project to help manage the editorial process and facilitate collaboration between newsrooms. ]

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.”

The latest RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey finds the minority workforce in TV news rose to 24.4%. That’s up more than a full point from a year ago… and is the second highest level ever in TV news.

The minority workforce at non-Hispanic TV stations rose to the highest level ever. The minority workforce in radio is up 2.3… but still well below the level in 2014. Women numbers were mixed in both TV and in radio. Still, as far as minorities are concerned, the bigger picture remains unchanged. In the last 27 years, the minority population in the U.S. has risen 12.1 points; but the minority workforce in TV news is up just over half that at 6.6. And the minority workforce in radio is less than 1 point higher.