Journalism

Propaganda and other forms of “junk news” on Twitter flowed more heavily in a dozen battleground states than in the nation overall in the days immediately before and after the 2016 presidential election, suggesting that a coordinated effort targeted the most pivotal voters, researchers from Oxford University reported. The volumes of low-quality information on Twitter — much of it delivered by online “bots” and “trolls” working at the behest of unseen political actors — were strikingly heavy everywhere in the United States, said the researchers at Oxford’s Project on Computational Propaganda. They found that false, misleading and highly partisan reports were shared on Twitter at least as often as those from professional news organizations.

But in 12 battleground states, including New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida, the amount of what they called “junk news” exceeded that from professional news organizations, prompting researchers to conclude that those pushing disinformation approached the job with a geographic focus in hopes of having maximum impact on the outcome of the vote. The researchers defined junk news as “propaganda and ideologically extreme, hyperpartisan, or conspiratorial political news and information.” The researchers also categorized reports from Russia and ones from WikiLeaks — which published embarrassing posts about Democrat Hillary Clinton based on a hack of her campaign chairman’s email — as “polarizing political content” for the purposes of the analysis.

President Donald Trump charged that Facebook has “always” been opposed to him, suggesting it is part of a network of “collusion” along with national newspapers and cable news networks that have covered his White House critically. President Trump did not elaborate much on his comments, but his accusations — as always, communicated by tweet — come at a time when Facebook is the target of scrutiny by congressional and federal investigators, who are probing Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The President tweeted, "Facebook was always anti-Trump.The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion?..But the people were Pro-Trump! Virtually no President has accomplished what we have accomplished in the first 9 months-and economy roaring."

Report for America is now accepting applications for three reporting positions based in rural Appalachia. West Virginia Public Broadcasting, the Lexington Herald-Leader, and the Charleston Gazette-Mail will each take one Report for America journalist for a year-long assignment. The project, which has similarities to Teach for America or Americorps, doesn't accept government funding.

Report for America is a project by The Groundtruth Project and Google News Lab. It also gets support from the Solutions Journalism Network, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Lenfest Institute for Journalism, and the Knight Foundation. The three reporting positions covering Appalachia also include support from the Galloway Family Foundation.

Paul Horner, a writer of “fake news” who claimed to influence the 2016 election with his widely discredited stories, was found dead outside Phoenix (AZ). He was 38. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Mark Casey said that Horner’s body was discovered in his bed on Sept. 18. The county’s medical examiner found no signs of foul play, Casey said, adding that Horner had a history of prescription drug abuse and that “evidence at the scene suggested this could be an accidental overdose.”

Horner gained international attention during the 2016 presidential election for his widely circulated and wildly unsubstantiated stories on Facebook that were designed to intentionally rile people up. He circulated a story that erroneously claimed President Barack Obama was gay and a radical Muslim, and another saying protesters were paid thousands of dollars to protest at then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign rallies.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced a major initiative to support the role of strong, trusted journalism as essential to a healthy democracy. The initiative is anchored by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy, a panel of thinkers and doers from diverse backgrounds committed to creating more informed and engaged communities. This nonpartisan commission will explore causes for the erosion of trust in democratic institutions, in particular the press. It will also identify new thinking and solutions around rebuilding trust.

The Knight Commission will be chaired by Jamie Woodson, executive chairman and CEO of Tennessee’s State Collaborative on Reforming Education, and Tony Marx, president of The New York Public Library, the largest public library in the nation and the most used library system in the world. It will be run by the Aspen Institute, with $2 million in support from Knight. The initiative also includes the Knight Prototype Fund, which fosters accurate information in media and announced a new round of winners in June 2017, and Newsmatch, a partnership with Democracy Fund to support nonprofit news and investigative news outlets with matching grants during the end-of-year giving period; Newsmatch was initially launched by Knight in December 2016. Knight plans to build on the initiative further with the help of the commission and other partners.

Before Twin Falls (ID) reporter Nathan Brown got into the office, a friend texted him, telling him to check the Drudge Report. At the top, a headline screamed: “REPORT: Syrian ‘Refugees’ Rape Little Girl at Knifepoint in Idaho.”

The Twins Falls story aligned perfectly with the ideology that Stephen Bannon, then the head of Breitbart News, had been developing for years, about the havoc brought on by unchecked immigration and Islamism, all of it backed by big-business interests and establishment politicians. Bannon latched onto the Fawnbrook case and used his influence to expand its reach. During the weeks leading up to his appointment in August 2016 to lead Donald J. Trump’s campaign for president, Twin Falls was a daily topic of discussion on Bannon’s national radio show, where he called it “the beating heart” of all that the coming presidential election was about. He sent his lead investigative reporter, Lee Stranahan, to the town to investigate the case, boasting to his audience that Stranahan was a “pit bull” of a reporter. “We’re going to let him off the chain,” he said.

[Commentary] The truth is that there are very few things that each party won’t condemn when the other side does it but defend when their own side does it. But it’s the job of the press to sort out what’s meaningful from what isn’t. In the context of a campaign, both sides will toss any criticism of their opponent that’s handy up against the wall to see what sticks. And in that metaphor, the media is the wall. Something sticks when the individuals who make decisions at newspapers, television networks and other media outlets decide that the story in question deserves extended coverage. Kushner’s e-mails are probably going to get the appropriate level of attention — which is to say, about 1/1000th of the coverage Clinton’s e-mails got. The story will be around for a couple of days, it’ll be a little embarrassing for him, and then everyone will move on. Which is exactly what should have happened to the Clinton e-mail story, given everything we know now. It was at worst a misdemeanor, but it was treated by the media like the Crime of the Century.

The real lesson that the story of Kushner’s e-mails carries is about the media’s mistakes in 2016. We live with the consequences of those mistakes every day.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is getting into recording daily news briefings as his next job. In short podcasts (three to 15 minutes each), Biden will introduce articles on anything from health care to climate change. The briefings will be available as an Alexa skill on the Amazon Echo and also on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Assistant. The program is called Biden’s Briefing and will feature Biden-curated content from media partnerships with Axios, Bloomberg, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, MSNBC, New York Review of Books, Politico, Slate, Vice, Wired, and other publications. Biden’s criteria for choosing the articles is that they have to be thought-provoking and informative.

Before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had even wrapped up their respective bids to secure the nomination for president, Kremlin-funded media outlet RT was plotting to promote its election coverage in the United States. RT hoped to take over at least two Twitter accounts or handles for its media coverage: @NotHillary and @NotTrump. Their goal, RT told Twitter’s advertising department, was to use the accounts to push their 2016 election coverage, but neither handle or username has any identifying information tracing the owner back to the Russian government-funded media organization.

Twitter denied the request. The company declined to comment on the record on the specific accounts “for privacy and security reasons.” RT says that the company’s interest in the dormant accounts was part of an ultimately doomed project to take advantage of a unique moment in American political history.

The Majority of America's largest newspapers continue to employ digital subscription strategies that prioritize traffic, ad revenues, and promotion—despite the ongoing collapse of display ad rates. Even as they’ve added paying Web subscribers by the hundreds of thousands, daily newspapers have decisively rejected an all-in approach featuring “hard” website paywalls that mimic their print business models. Instead, most are employing either “leaky” paywalls with unlimited “side doors” for non-subscribers or no paywalls at all, according to a CJR analysis of the nation’s 25 most-visited daily newspaper sites.