Jim Rutenberg

Social Media Pollution, a Huge Problem in the Last Election, Could Be Worse in 2020

Thanks to savvy lobbying by tech companies, online election campaign speech remains almost entirely unregulated. The platforms won exemptions from many campaign finance provisions by arguing that the rules would stifle their growth. They don’t have the legal requirements for ad disclaimers and disclosures — like keeping public logs of political sponsors — that television does. That’s how the Internet Research Agency, a home for troll accounts in St. Petersburg, Russia, could spend money on Facebook pages that worked for Hillary Clinton’s defeat without having to reveal its identity.

Trump’s Attacks on the News Media Are Working

“Funny how lowly rated CNN, and others, can criticize me at will, even blaming me for the current spate of Bombs and ridiculously comparing this to September 11th and the Oklahoma City bombing, yet when I criticize them they go wild and scream, ‘it’s just not Presidential!’” So began Day 645 of a presidency that has made denigrating the news media one of its identifying features. After mocking and insulting penned-in reporters on the campaign trail, President Doanld Trump continued going after journalists the day after he was sworn in, over the size of his Inauguration Day crowd.

National Enquirer Had Decades of Trump Dirt. He Wanted to Buy It All.

Federal investigators have provided ample evidence that President Donald Trump was involved in deals to pay two women to keep them from speaking publicly before the 2016 election about affairs that they said they had with him. But it turns out that Trump wanted to go even further. He and his lawyer at the time, Michael D. Cohen, devised a plan to buy up all the dirt on President Trump that the National Enquirer and its parent company had collected on him, dating back to the 1980s, according to several of Trump’s associates.

David Pecker, American Media Chief, Is Said to Have Immunity in Trump Inquiry

Apparently, the tabloid executive David J. Pecker has been granted immunity by federal prosecutors investigating payments during the 2016 campaign to two women who said they had affairs with Donald J. Trump. Pecker is chief executive and chairman of American Media Inc., the nation’s biggest tabloid news publisher, best known for its flagship, The National Enquirer. He is close to President Trump and the president’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael D.

Investigators Focus on Another Trump Ally: The National Enquirer

President Trump has long had ties to the nation’s major media players. But his connections with the country’s largest tabloid publisher, American Media Inc., run deeper than most. A former top executive of Trump’s casino business sits on AMI’s four-member board of directors, and an adviser joined the media company after the election. The company’s chairman, David J. Pecker, is a close friend of the president’s.

A Failure of the Network News Star System

The arrival of hard consequences for these men may have come too late in the news industry, but media organizations are unquestionably leading the national reckoning now underway. For the news business, this is the way it has to be: Its main product, after all, is integrity, which, in the case of the networks, is personified by those who sit behind the desk. Once the audience’s trust is lost, the entire enterprise falls apart.

Russia Inquiry Fails to Unite a Nation

[Commentary] As the country grapples with a  serious affront to American democracy, the agreement on the basic facts in the mainstream news media does not extend to Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and other important parts of the conservative media. This is the case even as the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III bears down in his investigation of the alleged Russian efforts to sway the 2016 presidential election.

Roger Ailes: The Man Who Mined a Divided America

Before Donald Trump rode the anger of forgotten (white) America to an “America First” presidency, before Breitbart News became a “platform for the alt-right” and before there were “alternative facts” and dueling versions of reality, Roger Ailes saw a divided country but an undivided news media. And he set out to change it.

Politics, It Seems, Has Jolted Even the Idiot Box Awake

As the big broadcast networks and ad buyers descend on Manhattan this week for the start of the annual advertising sales season known as upfronts, the Colbert-Fallon role reversal says everything you need to know about the political charge that’s shaking up the television world. The thinking the Spring 2016 was that people wanted a party-like-it’s-1999 late night experience, which Jimmy Fallon and James Corden offered and Stephen Colbert, then struggling in the ratings, presumably did not. Now, as Alexander Nazaryan wrote in the Newsweek piece on Fallon’s new standing, “Americans want rage.” Actually, it seems, a good subset of them want “woke.”

Murdochs’ TV Deal in Britain Hinges on 3 Words: ‘Fit and Proper’

“Fit and proper” is that so-perfectly British standard by which regulators decide whether a company should be allowed to gain and retain broadcast licenses. It’s based on the premise that those who control news, information and entertainment options on television and radio should be held to high ethical standards, and that doing so determines “the kind of country we are,” as Jane Bonham-Carter, a member of Parliament, recently put it. Understanding just how important the Sky deal (complete ownership of the popular and highly profitable Sky satellite and cable network) would be for the Murdochs’ personal and global ambitions, and the complications that “fit and proper” could present to them, is vital to understanding the head-spinning developments at Fox News these past few months.

Floyd Abrams Sees Trump’s Anti-Media Tweets as Double-Edged Swords

Trump’s anti-media Twitter posts still serve as reminders of his campaign vows to “open” libel laws, his veiled threats to punish corporate owners of news organizations whose coverage he does not like and his occasional calls for leak investigations. They took on a more ominous tone as the Justice Department began considering whether to bring a case against WikiLeaks that the Obama administration decided against pursuing, fearing it would start a trend of prosecuting news organizations and criminalizing journalism.

If the Trump administration decides it has no such qualms, then the president’s tweets just might wind up being journalism’s great insurance policy. His Twitter trail could be a gift to lawyers for the news industry during leak investigations into articles that made the president mad enough to pick up his Android and tap, Tap, TAP! It could provide great grist for legal arguments that the investigations are less about prosecuting damaging leaks than they are about punishing journalists. That, at least, is the view of Floyd Abrams, the titan of free speech jurisprudence. Abrams is seeking to re-educate the public about the thing that stands between it and, say, becoming Russia: the First Amendment.

A Lesson in Moscow About Trump-Style ‘Alternative Truth’

I wanted to better understand President Trump’s America, a place where truth is being ripped from its moorings as he brands those tasked with lashing it back into place — journalists — as dishonest enemies of the people. So I went to Russia.

[In one instance, w]hen Trump administration officials tried to counter Russia’s “false narratives” by releasing to reporters a declassified report detailing Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles — and suggesting to The Associated Press without proof that Russia knew of President Bashar al-Assad’s plans to use chemical weapons in advance — the Russians had a ready answer borrowed from Trump himself. As the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia put it, “Apparently it was for good reason Donald Trump called unverified information in the mass media one of the main problems in the US.” It was the best evidence I’ve seen of the folly of President Trump’s anti-press approach. You can’t spend more than a year attacking the credibility of the “dishonest media” and then expect to use its journalism as support for your position during an international crisis — at least not with any success. While President Trump and his supporters may think that undermining the news media serves their larger interests, in this great information war it serves Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests more. It means playing on his turf, where he excels. Integral to President Putin’s governing style has been a pliant press that makes his government the main arbiter of truth.

Opposition and a Shave: Former Obama Aides Counter President Trump

[Commentary] The cultural-political revolution of the Nixon era was neither televised nor sponsored. If you listen to the coolest protest anthem ever, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott-Heron, you’ll hear that it was not “brought to you by Xerox,” did not “go better with Coke,” did not have stars like Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen or the entertainment value of “Green Acres.”

The Trump era’s #Resistance is flipping all of that on its head. It’s being televised, podcasted, hashtagged, Snapped, Facebooked, Twittered and Periscoped. It doesn’t yet go better with Coke. But it does go better with a good night’s sleep in Parachute sheets, a slick new web page designed with Squarespace and an affordable shave with Harry’s razors — bearded Bernie bros notwithstanding. Just go check out an episode of “Pod Save America,” one of the big breakout hits of the nascent resistance movement. Running twice weekly, it has all of the above-named brands and sponsors, stars several members of former President Barack Obama’s inner circle and seeks to entertain as much as it tries to inspire anti-Trump action.

The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure

A fascinating story emerged about Netflix recently. It was reported that the streaming television service was developing new interactive technology allowing viewers to direct the plots of certain television shows, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style. The company later told me that the experiment was focused on children’s programming, more as a developmental learning tool than as some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.

No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week. So why not extend the idea to the plots of your favorite shows?

Assailing the White House From Hollywood’s Glass House

Given the cultural and political rifts that have followed President Trump’s election, and the aggressive way in which President Trump has pursued his agenda, it was natural that some would want to use their international Oscar platforms to make big statements about free speech, diversity and cherished American values. But they were treading on tricky terrain.

First, there was the question of whom they were actually winning over with political oratory delivered amid a bacchanalia of self-celebration and haute couture, some of it costing as much as the average American’s home down payment. And for all the talk of inclusion in the political speechifying leading up to, and during, the Oscars, how inclusive is Hollywood itself? The answer is that despite the big honors that black actors and black-themed films took home, the industry still has a long way to go to improve diversity throughout its ranks. Hollywood’s judgment would go a lot further if it directed some of that political energy back at itself.

Today's Quote 02.27.2017

If there were ever a moment for government leaders who believe that true information unearthed by independent news sources is vital to our nation to stand up and say so, this would be it.

-- Jim Rutenberg, New York Times

Will the Real Democracy Lovers Please Stand Up?

[Commentary] The Administration doubled down on its antipress aggression, this time declaring it was “going to get worse every day” for these “globalist” and “corporatist” journalists (and other such gobbledygook from the former Goldman Sachs executive Stephen Bannon). And all the while, so many of the most important and credible leaders in the President’s own party more or less kept their traps shut or looked the other way. If there were ever a moment for government leaders who believe that true information unearthed by independent news sources is vital to our nation to stand up and say so, this would be it.

In Trump Era, Censorship May Start in the Newsroom

This is how the muzzling starts: not with a boot on your neck, but with the fear of one that runs so deep that you muzzle yourself. Maybe it’s the story you decide against doing because it’s liable to provoke a press-bullying president to put the power of his office behind his attempt to destroy your reputation by falsely calling your journalism “fake.” Maybe it’s the line you hold back from your script or your article because it could trigger a federal leak investigation into you and your sources (so, yeah, jail).

Or, maybe it’s the commentary you spike because you’re a publicly supported news channel and you worry it will cost your station its federal financing. In that last case, your fear would be existential — a matter of your very survival — and your motivation to self-censor could prove overwhelming. We no longer have to imagine it. We got a real-life example recently in San Antonio (TX), where a PBS station sat atop the slippery slope toward censorship and then promptly started down it.

When a Pillar of the Fourth Estate Rests on a Trump-Murdoch Axis

[Commentary] The ties that bind the most powerful media mogul in the world to the leader of the free world just keep getting stronger. Or, more precisely, we keep learning just how strong they are. The question is where that leaves the rest of the world when they’re done divvying it up.

The whole Murdoch’s highly influential news organizations were covering Trump’s campaign and transition, their executive chairman was entangled in a financial arrangement of the most personal sort — tied to his children’s financial (very) well being — along with the president’s daughter. Referring to her only as the president’s “daughter” fails to capture her true role. She is Trump’s most trusted confidante. And she is married to a key presidential adviser, Jared Kushner, who, as it happens, is so close with Murdoch that he even helped Murdoch set up his bachelor pad after his last divorce, The relationship between the president and Murdoch has implications well beyond The Wall Street Journal, given the global breadth of Murdoch’s media holdings, his history of putting them to use for political leaders who then help him with his own business needs, and Trump’s own reactivity to the news media.

How it all affects the rest of us depends on how powerfully Murdoch’s news media properties swing behind the new presidential agenda and how much criticism of President Trump they’ll abide from their journalists and commentators. And all of that could depend on what Murdoch wants from the administration, and how badly he wants it.

The Massacre That Wasn’t, and a Turning Point for ‘Fake News’

[Commentary] The “Bowling Green Massacre” may go down in the record of the Trump presidency as the first break in the “fake news” clouds that have cast such gloom over our fair and once (relatively) true republic.

The same internet that enabled false stories to run unchecked through news feeds during the election year dispatched new white blood cells that attacked Kellyanne Conway’s “alternate facts” with “true facts” (a redundant term that I guess we’re stuck with for now). Their most effective attack was traditional reporting, in many cases from news organizations that have doubled down on fact-checking, joined by newfangled memes that accentuate the truth. The Massacre That Wasn’t showed that while Facebook, Google and Twitter take steps to combat nefarious hoaxes, they are already playing host to an organic correction movement led by ordinary users who are crowdsourcing reality. It’s early. Vigilance, and continuing improvements throughout the news business, remain necessary. But the tale of the “massacre” could be the start of something new.

As Trump Berates News Media, a New Strategy Is Needed to Cover Him

There were two big lessons in the Jan 11 melee:
1. President-elect Donald Trump remains a master media manipulator who used his first news briefing since July to expertly delegitimize the news media and make it the story rather than the chaotic swirl of ethical questions that engulf his transition.
2. The news media remains an unwitting accomplice in its own diminishment as it fails to get a handle on how to cover this new and wholly unprecedented president.
It better figure it out, fast, because it has found itself at the edge of the cliff. And our still-functioning (fingers crossed) democracy needs it to stay on the right side of the drop.

Facebook Hires Former TV Journalist Campbell Brown to Lead News Partnerships Team

Facebook is turning to a former television news journalist to help smooth over its strained ties to the news media, which views it as both a vital partner and a potentially devastating opponent. It has hired Campbell Brown, a former NBC News correspondent and CNN prime-time host, to lead its news partnerships team, starting immediately.

The position is a new one for Facebook. In the role, Brown will “help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook,” she wrote. The addition of Brown comes as Facebook is struggling with its position as a content provider that does not produce its own content — that is, as a platform, not a media company.

Megyn Kelly Is Leaving Fox News for NBC

Megyn Kelly, who arrived at Fox News 12 years ago as a television news neophyte but rose to become one of its two biggest stars, has decided to leave the network to take on a broad new role at NBC News for an undisclosed salary, NBC announced. The NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, wooed Kelly away from Fox News by offering her a triple role in which she will host her own daytime news and discussion program, anchor an in-depth Sunday night news show and take regular part in the network’s special political programming and other big-event coverage.

The move will herald a seismic shift in the cable news landscape, where Kelly had become the second-most watched host — after Bill O’Reilly of Fox News — and often helped define the national political debate, especially over the last year as Donald J. Trump regularly attacked her, at times in viciously personal terms. Kelly’s exit will upend Fox News’s vaunted prime-time lineup and inject a new dose of tumult just a few months after the departure of the network’s powerful founding chairman, Roger Ailes, who was ousted after several women made allegations that he sexually harassed them.

In Trump Era, Uncompromising TV News Should Be the Norm, Not the Exception

[Commentary] Television news is going to have to do its part should President-elect Donald Trump and his administration try to make policy based on false assertions, the same way he used them on the campaign trail. (And, yes, television will have to be just as vigilant should Mr. Trump’s opponents use falsehoods to fight him, too.) The same holds for all of the news media, of course. But live television can be a safe harbor for falsehood and deflection. It’s easy for me to criticize as a columnist who has time to analyze and fact-check before writing. On television, in real time, even the best-prepared interviewers may have neither the time nor the facts to catch a lie and call it out. Even when they do, their attempts to call foul can turn into stalemates if the interviewee insists on continuing to forward something that’s false or unsubstantiated, which seems to be the latest craze. CNN’s Jake Tapper said, in this “year in which basic facts and basic decency are at risk, persistence is important at the end of the day.”