Journalism

Asked by New York Times reporters about emails revealing that he had agreed to a meeting to hear damaging information about Hillary Clinton proffered by an intermediary for the Russian government, Donald Trump Jr revealed the emails to the public instead. The move was cheered by some of the president’s supporters. They called it a clever way to upend a narrative emerging in the news media that Donald Trump Jr. — whose public explanations of the meeting had evolved several times since The Times revealed it — had not been forthcoming.

Still, political veterans from both parties said that while the pre-emptive publication might register as a short-term win, it could have long-term implications for the Trumps’ ability to shape coverage. Reporters seek comment ahead of an article’s publication to ensure a piece is fair; if the subject leaks the story to a competitor — or, in this case, leaks the information himself — it can be tough to re-establish trust. “You get one mulligan to do it this way, and he just took it,” said Ari Fleischer, a press secretary to President George W. Bush. “He will not get that consideration from the press corps again,” Fleischer said. “The next time something comes up, reporters are going to jam him in, 10 seconds before they hit the ‘send’ button, because they won’t trust him not to do the same thing again.”

If Congress grants an exception to legacy news publishers to pressure Google and Facebook, it might lead to the kind of concessions publishers have won in Europe. In the US, pressure on Facebook and Google has been successful in helping publishers gain traction, but the culture of European publishing and the vigor of its regulatory environment is totally different from the free-market roots of the US news industry.

Whatever the outcome, a larger question remains about the right relationship between journalism and the most powerful companies in the world. This is a long-term issue, which is unlikely to be settled by one group or cartel gaining regulatory concessions but, rather, by a more profound change in the regulatory and commercial environment.

[Commentary] At first glance, a new report from Pew Research looks devastating for President Trump’s favorite punching bag, the nation’s news media. One might think that the message Trump has been hammering home is really getting through. After all, Pew’s polling clearly shows that a big chunk of the American public buys his message that the press is a negative force in our society. Amy Mitchell, Pew’s director of journalism research, said the growing partisan divide in attitudes about the news media mirrors a Pew study done earlier in 2017 in which Democrats showed a growing appreciation of the press’s watchdog role; but appreciation for that role plummeted among Republicans. If journalism is to do its job fully, and as the founders intended, it can’t speak primarily to one side of the political aisle. I don’t have the answers to that problem, though I’m planning to explore them in the coming weeks. In the meantime, it’s important to acknowledge what this report doesn’t show: That Trump’s traitorous-media-scum message is moving the needle as he intends. And that — although in a grasping-at-straws way — is good news.

[Commentary] Fake news has been dominating real news since 2016’s US presidential election. Its effect has been debated and politicized, and in the process, the term itself has lost its original meaning and become something of a partisan insult. But an underlying question still needs answering: Can people distinguish legitimate sources of information from fake ones?

A majority of Americans are confident that they can, according to surveys. But it might be more difficult than it seems in an increasingly fragmented media landscape, with countless information sources tailored to every ideological taste. To find out how well-informed people can tell true from false, I conducted a study on a sample of about 700 undergraduates at the University of British Columbia. These were primarily political science students interested in current events, who said they frequently read and watch news, on and offline. I thought that they would easily spot fake news websites. I was wrong.

[Dominik Stecula is a PhD candidate in political science and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.]

Republicans and Democrats offer starkly different assessments of the impact of several of the nation’s leading institutions – including the news media, colleges and universities and churches and religious organizations – and in some cases, the gap in these views is significantly wider today than it was just a year ago.

The national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted June 8-18 among 2,504 adults, finds that partisan differences in views of the national news media, already wide, have grown even wider. Democrats’ views of the effect of the national news media have grown more positive over the past year, while Republicans remain overwhelmingly negative. About as many Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents think the news media has a positive (44%) as negative (46%) impact on the way things are going in the country. The share of Democrats holding a positive view of the news media’s impact has increased 11 percentage points since last August (33%). Republicans, by about eight-to-one (85% to 10%), say the news media has a negative effect. These views have changed little in the past few years. While a majority of the public (55%) continues to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country these days, Republicans express increasingly negative views. A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years.

President Donald Trump tweeted July 10 that former FBI Director James Comey “leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION” when he provided the New York Times with information about his meetings with the president. There’s no evidence that is true. The president’s tweet apparently came from a segment on Fox & Friends, which was a misleading interpretation of a report from the Hill newspaper on the contents of Comey’s memos. "James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!" the President tweeted.

The Hill said that, based on interviews with unnamed “officials familiar with the documents,” more than half of Comey’s memos contained classified information. Because of this, the circumstances of the creation and storage of the memos that did contain classified information could have run afoul of FBI protocols. But the report does not claim that Comey actually leaked classified information to the New York Times or anyone else. The president retweeted this misleading Fox & Friends video concerning these allegations less than 10 minutes before his outburst.

[Commentary] What might have been, decades ago, a compact between an audience and a trusted source of information—we’ll tell you who this gif-making guy is if you need us to—sours into something repugnant. At the same moment the president claims that the press is dangerous, has too much power … a press outlet (out of an overabundance of corporate caution) does something that looks like a dangerous abuse of power. This inversion plunks us all into the darkest possible timeline—the one where a president can “jokingly” hint at violence against reporters and his adherents feel empowered to threaten it more overtly.

On July 7, President Trump spent more than two hours with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the meeting of the G20 countries in Hamburg, and afterward Putin (as Machiavellian a leader as anyone could ask for) joked about the journalists who hurt the president. Presidents have more power than reporters (especially in Russia, where 82 journalists have been killed since 1993, most of them covering politics, corruption, and crime). But the fix is now in: The president says you can’t trust the press and the press says you can’t trust the president. If Machiavelli is right, that’s a recipe for an apocalypse.

Apparently, China’s government has told telecommunications carriers to block individuals’ access to virtual private networks by Feb. 1, thereby shutting a major window to the global internet. Beijing has ordered state-run telecommunications firms, which include China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, to bar people from using VPNs, services that skirt censorship restrictions by routing web traffic abroad. The clampdown will shutter one of the main ways in which people both local and foreign still manage to access the global, unfiltered web on a daily basis.

In keeping with Chinese President Xi Jinping’s “cyber sovereignty” campaign, the government now appears to be cracking down on loopholes around the Great Firewall, a system that blocks information sources from Twitter and Facebook to news websites such as the New York Times and others.

A group of news organizations will begin an effort to win the right to negotiate collectively with the big online platforms – Facebook and Google -- and will ask for a limited antitrust exemption from Congress in order to do so.

It’s an extreme measure with long odds. But the industry considers it worth a shot, given its view that Google and Facebook, regardless of their intentions, are posing a bigger threat economically than President Trump is (so far) with his rhetoric. That’s how David Chavern, the chief executive of the News Media Alliance, put it. The Alliance, the main newspaper industry trade group, is leading the effort to bargain as a group. But it has buy-in across the spectrum of its membership, bringing together competitors like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, as well as scores of regional papers like The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, which face the gravest threats.

Rachel Maddow says someone tried to dupe her into airing a bogus scoop about collusion between President Trump's campaign and Russia, presumably intending to debunk the story later and tarnish Maddow's reputation in the process. Having avoided the trap, the MSNBC host hopes to serve as a cautionary tale for others in the media. “Heads up, everybody,” Maddow said on the air July 6. “Somebody for some reason appears to be shopping a fairly convincing fake NSA document that purports to directly implicate somebody from the Trump campaign in working with the Russians on their attack on the election. It is a forgery.”