Journalism

CNN is reporting that it has severed ties with commentator Jeffery Lord on Aug 10 after he tweeted “Sieg Heil!” at a liberal activist on Twitter. Lord, a columnist for conservative magazine The American Spectator, tweeted the Nazi victory salute at Angelo Carusone, president of the liberal group Media Matters for America. “Nazi salutes are indefensible,” a CNN spokesperson said, according to the network. “Jeffrey Lord is no longer with the network.” In the opinion piece that eventually led to his ouster from CNN, Lord took issue with a Media Matters campaign to get Fox's Sean Hannity fired from his network. Media Matters urged its supporter to pressure advertisers on Hannity’s program to withdraw their support. Lord argued in his piece that this was a “fascist game” and an effort to end Hannity’s “free speech.”

[Commentary] Recent statement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions mark a serious intervention in a delicate, decades-long balancing act between the federal government and professional journalists.

A change in the policy about press subpoenas could have grave consequences for the government and press alike. A subpoena is the legal tool that forces an individual to testify or produce evidence. When subpoenas are issued to journalists (or their communications providers) in leak investigations, it is most often for the purpose of identifying a leaker: Match the relevant reporter’s telephone records to an individual with access to the classified information — or better yet, force the reporter to testify directly as to the source — and you’ve got your leaker. But you’ve also compromised the press’s ability to protect their sources, undermining their ability to do their job. Reporters who refuse to reveal their sources in compliance with such subpoenas risk contempt charges.

While the Constitution limits government intrusion on the freedom of speech and of the press, the law does not offer absolute protection for journalists against revealing their sources. Congress has not enacted robust protections and the Supreme Court has not interpreted the First Amendment as itself embodying such a privilege — nothing approximating a broad “press privilege” relieving reporters from revealing sources. Such a privilege is protected at the state level in nearly all states. But no such privilege has been recognized uniformly at the federal level.

[Murillo is a third-year student at Harvard Law School, where she is an editor of the Harvard Law Review]

“What makes Trump different is that he’s systematically trying to delegitimize the news as an institution because they won’t cover him the way he wants to be covered. That’s what’s different here.”
-- Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute

As a media correspondent for The Times, I cover the intersection of journalism and politics, a juncture that has seen its share of pileups in 2017. The president labeled the mainstream media “the enemy of the American people.” The White House briefing turned into a daily grudge match over the nature of transparency and truth. Alarms are sounding about an erosion of press freedoms once thought sacrosanct in a democracy. The White House press secretary plays a central role in that debate.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who at 34 is among the youngest people to hold the title, must manage the message of her administration and liaise with dozens of reporters, while also acting as a frequent vessel of President Donald Trump’s anti-media ire. “I’ve grown up with the press, in the press,” she told me, referring to her upbringing as the daughter of Mike Huckabee, the Republican former governor of Arkansas and a two-time presidential candidate. “I’ve never seen the level of hostility that this press corps has to the president.”

The New York Times has issued a correction after publishing a climate report on Aug 8 it said was "leaked" to the paper by a scientist -- only to learn the report had been online for months. Under the front-page sub-headline, "Fears of Suppression," the article claimed the draft report had "not been made public" by the Trump administration but "a copy of it was obtained by The New York Times." The report was available on the Internet Archive non-profit website at the start of the year, however. It was also available on The National Academies of Sciences Public Access Records Office website, which is accessible to the public. The Times issued a correction on page A17 of its Aug 9 edition. "An article on Tuesday about a sweeping federal climate change report referred incorrectly to the availability of the report," the paper wrote. "While it was not widely publicized, the report was uploaded by the nonprofit Internet Archive in January; it was not first made public by The New York Times."

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders slammed the Times for not reaching out to the White House press office for comment before publishing the Tuesday report. "It’s very disappointing, yet entirely predictable to learn The New York Times would write off a draft report without first verifying its contents with the White House or any of the federal agencies directly involved with climate and environmental policy," Huckabee Sanders said.

Mozilla, the creators of the popular Firefox web browser, are launching a new program to counter fake news stories. Fabricated news, made to mislead or turn a profit, is a growing problem in online communities. The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Russia used social media to propagate misinformation campaigns throughout the 2016 presidential race. "Misinformation devalues the open web," said Katharina Borchert, Mozilla chief innovation officer. "We see this as a threat to the fabric of our society."

The Mozilla Information Trust Initiative (MITI) will increase funding for research on misinformation, the first findings to be released later in 2017. The company hopes to leverage Firefox's size and reach to get data about news browsing habits. MITI will also tailor products to amplify actual news over fake news, expand an effort to increase digital news literacy and fund designers to work on software to provide on-the-fly visualizations of the problem.

In the wake of an ongoing, expensive libel lawsuit that could drag on for years, Mike Masnick, the founder of Techdirt, announced that his website would accept more than $250,000 in donations "to further reporting on free speech." In a lengthy post, Masnick explained that the Freedom of the Press Foundation, along with other companies and organizations—including Automattic, the Charles Koch Foundation, Union Square Ventures, and a charity founded by Craigslist founder Craig Newmark—will "enable us to focus even more reporting resources on covering threats to free speech in the US and around the globe, and to tell the stories of the chilling effects created when free speech is attacked."

Masnick underscored that the money was not for the company’s legal defense, but for continued journalistic operations in this field. He acknowledged that the Koch Foundation, which has historically supported numerous conservative political causes, is an unlikely partner with some of the other donors. "[The Koch Foundation has] a history of supporting free speech efforts," Masnick said. "We reached out to folks widely across the entire political spectrum in the belief that free speech is not a partisan issue."

A Q&A with Tom Rosenstiel, an author, researcher, media critic, and the current executive director of the American Press Institute.

“What makes Trump different,” Rosenstiel said, “is that he’s systematically trying to delegitimize the news as an institution because they won’t cover him the way he wants to be covered. That’s what’s different here.”

Asked, "Is this the future of political media in this country? Where candidates circumnavigate the press and peddle their own propaganda via social media?" Rosenstiel said, "I hope not. The current pattern is more media. There are more and more channels, more and more sites, more and more voices; we're more segmented than ever. The traditional press has not disappeared, but it's competing with more and more alternatives. I think the risk here is that everyone is in their own narrow reality and we don't have a common set of facts and a common ground on which to govern — to the degree that an independent press that is committed to facts and verification diminishes, that encourages this pseudo-reality in which everyone is operating with a set of facts that are self-serving and self-fulfilling but completely unreal. So the risk of losing an independent press, even if that press is very heterogeneous, is that you lose an institution that is dedicated to getting the facts right. Whether they're partisan or not, they're at least dedicated to getting the facts right. If we lose that, we're in a very dangerous place."

The war between the White House and the press is escalating 200 days into the administration, with President Donald Trump launching daily attacks on the press and an emboldened news media becoming increasingly transparent about its hostility towards the president.

Trump’s aides and outside allies are astonished by how quickly the mainstream press has taken to ridiculing the administration or engaging in what they see as petty score-settling. Top mainstream media figures and news outlets are tweaking President Trump for taking a 17-day “working vacation,” writing stories about the personal lives of administration officials that are meant to cast them as hypocrites, and adopting a sneering tone that Trump’s allies say is unprecedented. “Both sides could stand to dial it back, but I don’t think this is a relationship that can be repaired,” said former Trump adviser Barry Bennett. Tensions have exploded since last week’s briefing room showdown between Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller, who relishes sparring with the news media, and CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta, who has become one of the leading administration critics in the White House press corps. Both sides believe they won the exchange.

Trump’s allies say that social media has finally pulled back the curtain on reporter biases. “It is as if they can no longer report without their personal bias,” said Katrina Pierson, a spokesperson for the pro-Trump group America First Polices. “In other words, newspapers have become essentially opinion blogs instead of public information and education. The Twitter feed of some so-called journalists tells you everything you need to know.” But some media experts say the reaction from the press has been fair, usually coming in response to one of Trump’s attacks.

[Commentary] The Justice Department should be taking a hard look at leaks right now; that is a proper role and aim for the department, at least with respect to those leaks that are illegal and damaging to important government interests. Yet the press conference was disturbing nonetheless — less for the reasons so many media figures reached for the smelling salts than because of the not-so-subtle sheen of politics coloring the entire episode. There are big costs to certain types of leaks, and we are paying those costs every day. And for that reason, the current flood of leaks, whatever public purposes they might also be serving, is deeply disturbing and corrosive of important values we expect to presidency to protect.