Columbia Journalism Review

[Commentary] This week, countless American Journalists have been weighing the costs of joining the Women’s March in Washington (DC) or one of the many sister demonstrations being held on January 21. Staffers coast to coast, from The San Francisco Chronicle to The New York Times, have received specific edicts against attending.

Others likely know the tried-and-true rule, handed down from standard-setting organizations like The Associated Press: Journalists are not allowed to join protests or demonstrations, in order to avoid appearance of bias. According to the AP’s guidelines, staffers “must refrain from declaring their views on contentious public issues in any public forum…and must not take part in demonstrations in support of causes or movements.” The longstanding and rarely questioned rule was designed to protect the credibility of reporters and their news organizations, and to many, it looks like common sense. But it has arguably become just another barrier to entry in an industry already struggling with a pronounced lack of diversity.

[Shaya Tayefe Mohajer is a (recently laid-off) journalist in Los Angeles. ]

Whereas all modern presidents have spun information—even lied—the reality TV star President-elect Donald Trump actively obstructs a fact-based public debate like no other before him. Whereas all have attempted to take their messages directly to supporters, Trump has a unique gift for using tools that do so almost instantaneously. Whereas all have sought to limit press access to suit their political ends, Trump’s relationship with the truth has called the very value of access into question. And whereas all have railed against the press in the face of negative coverage, Trump has portrayed the media as a political foil he’s actively trying to defeat.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, Columbia Journalism Review spoke with political journalists who will cover the incoming administration and reporters and historians who’ve chronicled its predecessors. They collectively painted a foreboding picture of journalism in the Trump era, even if some claimed to hold out hope that journalists will weather the coming storm.

[Commentary] Dear Mr President Elect:
In these final days before your inauguration, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how we see the relationship between your administration and the American press corps. While you have every right to decide your ground rules for engaging with the press, we have some, too. It is, after all, our airtime and column inches that you are seeking to influence. We, not you, decide how best to serve our readers, listeners, and viewers. So think of what follows as a backgrounder on what to expect from us over the next four years:

Access is preferable, but not critical.
Off the record and other ground rules are ours—not yours—to set.
We decide how much airtime to give your spokespeople and surrogates.
We believe there is an objective truth, and we will hold you to that.
We’ll obsess over the details of government.
We will set higher standards for ourselves than ever before.
We’re going to work together.
We’re playing the long game.

[Commentary] While Donald Trump might represent an alien being to political reporters, his modus operandi is unsettlingly familiar to those who have covered corporate media. Trump’s behavior is not that of a “normal” president, or even a regular politician per se, but of a loud, competitive, digitally attuned, populist media organization.

For Trump, the medium is not just the message, it is the office, too. His chief of strategy Steve Bannon was most recently editor in chief at Breitbart, and will essentially be editor in chief to Trump as president. Jared Kushner, the son-in-law with Trump’s ear, owned The New York Observer. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who put Gawker out of business by backing the multimillion-dollar lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan, is also in the trusted inner circle of supporters. Rupert Murdoch apparently talks to Trump two or three times a week—an extraordinary level of access to an incoming president by a media owner, if true. To cover him, and his presidency, we need to understand the platform on which he stands as not just a vector but a political ideology.

[Emily Bell is Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.]

[Commentary] Relations between the White House press corps and the president are almost always adversarial, but in President-Elect Donald Trump, we have something new. Based on the campaign and the transition, the press is highly adversarial to Trump and he is happy to return the favor. As two former White House spokesmen for two very different presidents, we sat in the same West Wing office that is equidistant from the Oval Office and the briefing room where the White House press corps gathers daily.

Despite the rancor that exists today between the media and Trump, we believe there are ways to make their relationship beneficial to the public they both serve. So, what to do differently?

[Mike McCurry and Ari Fleischer are former presidential press secretaries. McCurry served as press secretary to Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1998, and is now a Distinguished Professor of Public Theology at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, DC. Fleischer was press secretary for George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003. ]

[Commentary] President-elect Donald Trump operates his Twitter feed as a virtual Statler and Waldorf, reigning judgment on the media and individual journalists like a Muppet in the rafters. Trumpian tweets often appear soon after a negative story has run about him or his business, especially in the case of cable news, hinting at the president-elect’s viewing habits (lots of CNN). Occasionally, Trump dispenses plaudits for a piece, but he is more likely to hiss and boo, heckling journalists from his perch. American presidents have long made their media preferences known. Richard Nixon spent Sunday afternoons watching the NFL; Barack Obama snagged advanced screeners of HBO’s Game of Thrones. But never have we had a leader so interested—some might say obsessed—with journalistic critiques. At CJR, we’ve combed through Trump’s 189 (and counting…) tweets since the election, focusing on those that highlight his touchy takes on the press.

Alexander Stille, a professor at the Columbia Journalism School, traces the current bunkered state of the US media landscape back to Reagan’s abolition of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. When the doctrine was introduced in 1949, there were limited broadcast licenses. Regulators, concerned with ensuring the public was exposed to a certain plurality of views, stipulated that radio and TV license-holders had to operate in the public interest. If a TV guest advocated against smoking, the channel then had to provide an opportunity for rebuttal by, for example, someone from the smoking industry. “Broadcasting tried to do as little editorializing as possible because it was complicated and messy and their licenses might be at stake if they were seen to have lurched too far in one direction,” says Stille. “That meant that broadcasting was incredibly bland and centrist.”

Cable television changed that. It created the possibility of hundreds of channels, which gave rise to the idea that a plurality of viewpoints could be presented by multiple, partisan channels. Stille says that line of thought is flawed. “People don’t consume news by watching five different channels. They have their channel that they tend to watch. So what we’ve had is that people have gotten further dug into their own news environment.”

[Commentary] While the promise of virtual reality has been present in research labs, the gaming industry, and science fiction for over 30 years, it’s only now that we have the computational power, screen resolution, and refresh rate to use VR in a small and inexpensive portable headset. This past year, a wide range of virtual reality headsets has entered the market. VR content is being created by movie studios, gaming companies, and journalists, and the largest technology enterprises in the world are investing significantly in virtual and augmented reality R&D. As Facebook and others begin researching and developing technologies that could augment our lives in significant ways, a new space is opening up for journalism. Journalism inside these new virtual worlds will require an entirely different set of skills and approaches, and will challenge three core journalistic concepts: representation, witnessing, and accountability.

[Taylor Owen is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia and the founder and editor of the international affairs site OpenCanada.org.]

Innovation comes in many forms. Popular imagination often bends toward the idea of isolated genius: Thomas Edison toiling away at Menlo Park, discovering 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; Steve Jobs sketching the smooth contours of the iPod. For many of today’s media leaders, innovation means looking beyond the horizons of their internal headquarters. From virtual reality to advertising technology to, yes, television for dogs, the major media players we analyzed have cast a wide net in their attempts to reach new audiences and develop groundbreaking products. The following graphics showcase the investments and acquisitions of 15 leading media companies and social networks, revealing strategies and some surprising results.

Some of the hardest-hitting documentaries in recent years have been forced to delay release or cough up hefty fees for attorneys, among them "Bananas!", a 2009 documentary about Nicaraguan plantation workers for Dole Food Co. who were sickened by a pesticide banned in the US; "Citizenfour", which followed Edward Snowden as he began to leak documents about US surveillance programs; and "Crude", which dealt with a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit against Chevron Corp. that claimed the oil giant despoiled the Amazonian jungle in Ecuador. Many in the documentary film world expect further assaults on free speech in the current divisive political climate. With a president-elect who has threatened to loosen libel laws and sue over reporting he doesn’t like, indie filmmakers are steeling themselves for open season.