Journalism

Winners in the 11th annual Mirror Awards competition honoring excellence in media industry reporting were announced June 13 at a ceremony in New York City, hosted by Syracuse University’s SI Newhouse School of Public Communications. “Today” show contributing correspondent Jenna Bush Hager emceed the luncheon event, which was held at Cipriani 42nd Street. The winners, chosen by a group of journalists and journalism educators, are:

Best Profile: Sarah Esther Maslin, “A light in the underworld” for Columbia Journalism Review
Best Single Story: Soraya Chemaly and Catherine Buni, “The secret rules of the internet” for The Verge
Best Commentary: Eric Alterman, “How False Equivalence Is Distorting the 2016 Election Coverage” for The Nation
John M. Higgins Award for Best In-Depth/Enterprise Reporting: Gabriel Sherman for New York magazine

Senate Republicans shocked the Capitol with an apparent crackdown on media access that immediately drew criticism from reporters and lawmakers.

Reporters were told they would no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission. And would need permission from senators, the Senate Rules Committee, the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms or the Senate Radio and TV Gallery, depending on location, before conducting an on-camera interview with a senator anywhere in the Capitol or in the Senate office buildings, according to a Senate official familiar with the matter. The new restrictions would break years of precedent, which previously set that “videotaping and audio recording are permitted in the public areas of the House and Senate office buildings,” according to the Radio and TV Gallery website.

A Senate Democratic aide said the decision to substantially curtail the access of television reporters was made unilaterally by Senate Rules Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). Chairman Shelby said "no additional restrictions have been put in place by the Rules Committee," adding that the committee "has been working with the various galleries to ensure compliance with existing rules."

A Q&A with Mark Lloyd, professor of communications at USC’s Annenberg School and former associate general counsel and chief diversity officer at the Federal Communications Commission from 2009-2012.

In the interview, Lloyd discusses media consolidation, saying, "The big challenge is that we have an FCC that is not really even looking at the impact of media consolidation on what it means to local communities, on what it means to whether or not folks in those local communities actually get the service that they need. So one of the things that I wrote about before, which is sort of obscure and sort of hard to figure out, is that there is this rule that local radio stations actually have to be in the local radio stations that they operate; it’s called the main control room....what’s happening now is not only that these rules are sort of vague and not really particularly well enforced; it’s that we have an administration that has sent signals to the broadcasters, to the telecommunications companies that provide Internet service, that these rules will not be enforced. They’ve been sent a very clear signal: you can do what it is that you want to do if you have a license to operate, if you are a broad band provider, you can do whatever you want, we’re not going to enforce net neutrality, whether it’s determined to be legal or not legal. This FCC is not going to enforce it."

Facebook may soon help its users do something unfamiliar on the platform: pay for news. The social-media giant is building a feature that would allow users to subscribe to publishers directly from the mobile app, apparently. The feature, long-requested by publishers, is expected to roll out by the end of 2017. Many details remain up in the air, but discussions have centered around making the feature available only on stories published natively to Facebook through its Instant Articles product. Talks have also focused on how to structure the arrangement, with Facebook leaning toward a metered-payment model, which would allow users to read some articles for free each month before prompting them to pay.

President Doanld Trump doubled down on his tweet in which he called former FBI director James Comey “a leaker” following Comey’s testimony. The president took questions during a Rose Garden newser June 9. As is standard, the president took two questions from the US press. The first reporter called on was Dave Boyer of the Washington Times, who was caught off guard. “Come on, Dave,” said President Trump. “Thank you, Mr. President. Apologies.” Boyer asked Trump why he feels vindicated by James Comey’s testimony. “No collusion, no obstruction. He’s a leaker,” said Trump.

The president then scanned the crowd before calling on the second US reporter. “Should I take one of the killer networks that treat me so badly as fake news? Should I do that? Go ahead, Jon. Be fair, Jon.” “Oh, absolutely,” said ABC’s Jon Karl.

Watergate unfolded in a much simpler time in the media industry. There were three major news networks and PBS; a major paper or three in every city; and a political dynamic in which leaders duked it out by day and dined together at night. They did so on a solid foundation of agreed-upon facts and a sense of right and wrong that was shared if not always followed. The Trump-Russia scandal is breaking during a time of informational chaos, when rival versions of reality are fighting for narrative supremacy.

The causes are legion: The advent of right-wing talk radio and Fox News; the influence of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit; and the mainstreaming of conspiracy sites like InfoWars, which had almost five million visitors in the last month. By allowing partisans to live in their separate informational and misinformational bubbles, and, in some cases, to allow real news to be rendered as false — and false news to be rendered as true — they have all contributed to the calcification of the national divide. Mainstream journalism, a shiny and ascendant conveyor of truth during Watergate, is in a battered state after decades of economic erosion, its own mistakes and the efforts of partisan wrecking crews to discredit its work, the most recent one led by the president himself. All of it gives the Trump White House something Nixon never had: a loyal media armada ready to attack inconvenient truths and the credibility of potentially damning witnesses and news reports while trumpeting the presidential counternarrative, at times with counterfactual versions of events.

[Commentary] Last month, a Harvard study reported that in Trump’s first 100 days, about 80 percent of mainstream press coverage reflected negatively on the new president. And the sheer amount of negative news was unprecedented. When we consider negative vs. positive coverage of an elected official, we’re asking the wrong question.

The president’s supporters often say his accomplishments get short shrift. But let’s face it: Politicians have no right to expect equally balanced positive and negative coverage, or anything close to it. If a president is doing a rotten job, it’s the duty of the press to report how and why he’s doing a rotten job.

CNN is asking questions about the White House’s decision to place their reporter in the back of a White House press briefing.

“We were in the equivalent of Siberia, no pun intended, when it comes to where we were seated,” CNN’s Jim Acosta told Wolf Blitzer. “That could be seen as an oversight on the part of the White House staff but it could also be seen as retaliation over the reporting we’re doing over here at CNN.”

CNN reporters are typically seated with other cable news networks at the front of press events so that their cameras have an unobstructed view for stand up live shots. The White House has occasionally changed seating arrangements in the past for various reasons, however during the June 9 event President Donald Trump specifically called out the cable news networks for treating him "so badly." "Should I take one of the killer networks that treat me so badly as fake news?" President Trump asked, before calling on ABC’s Jon Karl.

[Commentary] Objectivity is an ethos built on the “shall nots” rather than the things that journalists might stand for. We shall not have insights independent of those we quote; we shall not take sides, even in things as fundamental as a better community; we shall not have feelings; we shall not be biased. Objectivity says, in essence, that journalists are not human. So how did we get to this place in journalism, and what do we do about it? I’ll describe this evolution in three stages. They are arbitrary. History, like life, rarely fits so neatly.

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.