Journalism

In a conversation with Peter J. Boyer of The Weekly Standard, Steve Bannon said, “I have my hands back on my weapons,” the most important being his conservative website, Breitbart News — a “machine” he promised to “rev up” for what the site’s editor-at-large Joel Pollak described in a hashtag on Twitter as “#War.” The reported target list included President Trump’s opponents “on Capitol Hill, in the media and in corporate America,” Bannon said. If Bannon does move forward with a rival to Fox News, he will face the herculean task required to get a new channel onto cable systems, especially as people increasingly give up cable for online streaming services. If he were to acquire an existing channel, he would still have to persuade cable operators to carry it as Breitbart TV. Bannon could team up with smaller competitors on cable, Newsmax or One America News Network. This much is certain: With Bannon out, expect more informational chaos, more sound and more fury, but signifying what?

President Donald Trump blasted the news media ahead of his return to Washington on Sunday after a 17-day working vacation. "Heading back to Washington after working hard and watching some of the worst and most dishonest Fake News reporting I have ever seen!" the president said.

Stephen K. Bannon, who left his post on Aug 18 as President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, has resumed his role as chairman of Breitbart News, the provocative right-wing website that propelled him to national fame. Hours after his departure from the White House was announced, Bannon led the evening editorial meeting of his former publication, Breitbart said on its website. “The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today,” the editor in chief of Breitbart, Alex Marlow, said in a statement. Bannon’s previous tenure as chairman of Breitbart coincided with the site’s move to the epicenter of the nationalist brand of right-wing conservatism that swept Trump into office last year. His return to the site is likely to reinvigorate Breitbart’s role as a gathering spot for Trump’s most ardent populist supporters.

A new study of millennial public radio listeners suggests that stations should focus on delivering more local and on-demand content to bolster their appeal to the country’s largest generation.

The Millennial Research Project, commissioned by the Public Radio Program Directors Association, found that millennials don’t fit commonly cited stereotypes of being lazy and addicted to technology. It also suggests that their habits are changing how media content is consumed. A common theme from the interviews was that respondents “hold public radio in the highest regard and commonly compare it favorably with the most credible news outlets,” according to an executive summary. But some interviewees also voiced frustrations. Paul Jacobs, VP and GM of Jacobs Media, said that he noticed a shift in perception after the election. Some respondents said they’re “agitated that journalists on public radio are not going far enough, they’re not questioning hard enough, they’re letting people get away with saying things that might not be true,” Jacobs said. “These are perceptions, but they were deeply embedded.” Those respondents “still value public radio,” he said. But “they’re getting a little irritated” and ”they feel there are times when public radio is falling short,” he added.

[Commentary] “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. He believes that journalists must state their biases up front and not pretend to be magically free of the beliefs or assumptions that everyone has. If objectivity is a “view from nowhere,” it may be out of date. What’s never out of date, though, is clear truth-telling. Journalists should indeed stand for some things. They should stand for factual reality. For insistence on what actually happened, not revisionism. For getting answers to questions that politicians don’t want to answer. Can journalism be both impartial and forceful? That’s not only a possibility but, more than ever, a necessity. In dealing with the false-equivalency president they helped to get elected, the news media may have learned something. The best way to be fair is not to be falsely evenhanded, giving equal weight to unequal sides. It’s to push for the truth, and tell it both accurately and powerfully.

President Donald Trump complained that the "fake news" media took his remarks about the violence in Charlottesville out of context, after saying "both" white supremacist groups and counterprotesters were to blame for the violence. "The public is learning (even more so) how dishonest the Fake News is. They totally misrepresent what I say about hate, bigotry etc. Shame!" President Trump tweeted.

President Donald Trump parroted multiple right-wing media talking points during a press conference as he responded to questions about deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville (VA). President Trump, following in the footsteps of right-wing media personalities, mostly from Fox News, called counter-protesters the “alt-left,” suggested that calls to take down Confederate statues is a slippery slope that could lead to demands to take down statues of other historical figures, and defended his failure to condemn white supremacists in his initial response to the violence.

The question of how to cover the alt-right and its leaders has long been a complicated one. It's grown even more so given that President Donald Trump appointed leaders of that movement—including White House adviser Steve Bannon, who previously ran the alt-right media company Breitbart—to his staff. At its core, the mainstream press is grappling with this conundrum: Ignore these groups and risk allowing a potential public threat to go unreported; shine too bright a light on them, and risk amplifying their message—or worse, attracting new acolytes to the cause.

There’s no right approach to covering this growing movement, but one thing is certain: The press has erred on the side of overexposure. It’s positioned the alt-right in the center of President Trump's story, in part because of the shock value of the movement’s actions. This fringe group has taken the country’s implicit history of racism and made it explicit, which is certainly newsworthy. But that's brought unpleasant side effects, namely, giving the leaders of these hate groups coverage disproportionate to their influence. After all, it took a whole lot of mainstream Republicans to help usher President Trump into office. He received the greatest number of primary votes in the history of the Republican party. He also won the general election with 88 percent of Republican party votes, according to exit polls. The right got President Trump elected; the alt-right was merely a subset. But as Trump's comments indicate, he clearly believes it is a crucial subset.

What would possess the president of the United States, after he finally called out white supremacists, to return a day later to the flimsy position that attracted so much criticism in the first place? Part of the answer is that he hates the media and just can't stand to give reporters what they want — or admit that he was wrong.

Take it from someone who knows President Trump pretty well. “I think there's — it's almost like a counterintuitive thing with him, as it relates to the media,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told Stephen Colbert on “Late Show.” “The media's expecting him to do something; he sometimes does the exact opposite.” Scaramucci shared his insight before President Trump doubled down on remarks he delivered over the weekend, when white supremacists protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville clashed with counterprotesters. Though it was a Nazi sympathizer who drove a car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 19 others, the president reiterated his position that “both sides” were to blame for the violence while speaking at an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower in New York. This was President Trump, furious at the media, freelancing in self-destructive fashion.

President Donald Trump fashions himself as a CEO president. But he's feuding with one of America's most famous, most respected and wealthiest business leaders -- Amazon's Jeff Bezos -- mainly because the company is so successful. In his latest attack on Amazon, President Trump said on Twitter that Amazon "is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost." It is true that Amazon has wreaked havoc on the traditional retail industry.