November 2017

President Donald Trump on Nov 3 pressured the Department of Justice — and specifically the FBI — to investigate Hillary Clinton, ticking through a slew of issues involving the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee and her party, and urging law enforcement to “do what is right and proper.” President Trump's advocacy for criminal probe of his political opponent marked a significant breach of the traditional boundaries within the executive branch designed to prevent investigations from being politicized. In a series of Friday morning tweets, President Trump claimed there was mounting public pre

[Commentary] I was struck this week by two inside-baseball journalism stories following Oct 30’s Mueller investigation bombshells that spoke, tangentially but notably, to what I have often said about a main obstacle in our industry’s ability to regain the trust of the public: The conflation in many information consumers’ minds between responsible journalism and the opinion media. I invoke the spirit of Walter Cronkite to make some points that I believe are critical in our current time.

[Commentary] We should ask ourselves if we can find a way to re-introduce serious competition in social networking. Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik of the University of Chicago have proposed an intriguing idea. They build on the concept of “number portability”, the principle that you own your own phone number, and you can take your number with you to a different phone provider. The idea has promise in retail banking. Zingales and Rolnik suggest an analogy: social graph portability. The idea is that I could take my Facebook contacts with me to another service — call it “ZingBook”.