Jim Rutenberg

The decision by ABC News to hire George Stephanopoulos in 1996 tripped alarms throughout American journalism. “Government-to-press switcheroos do not bode well for news objectivity,” The Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg wrote at the time. In The New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel called Stephanopoulos’s move another step in “the progressive collapse of the walls that traditionally separated news from propaganda,” which had been erected “to guard against all kinds of partisan contamination.” Network news executives brushed it off as sanctimony from graybeards who didn’t get it. Their hiring of political operatives — who were becoming telegenic stars in their own right — continued apace. It took 20 years, but the warnings have come true — the contamination has spread and the patient is looking sickly. But the moment will be wasted if it does not prompt the networks to reset the boundaries between their newsrooms and their paid political operatives, if not end these arrangements altogether.

[Commentary] On the face of it, there is something Strangelovian about the proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner.

A company that controls the signal to the wireless devices of more than 130 million people, and to televisions in some 25 million households, buys a major movie studio and one of the biggest collections of cable channels in the country — potentially attaining a dominant position from which to control the information flow to a large percentage of Americans. A cultural-political Doomsday Machine is born. Mass media hegemony, or some such, follows. Or does it? Like a lot of news consumers, I’ve been struggling to get my head around this deal, which would give AT&T control of the Warner Bros. movie studio and cable networks including CNN, HBO and TBS. It would be gargantuan, carrying an $85 billion price tag. And it would further concentrate media ownership into a few powerful hands, playing to fears of a big corporate media takeover of the wild and woolly web, which has been so central to this year’s great political upheaval. But it’s all very fuzzy.

What is it about this proposed merger that has both the left and the right, on the presidential trail and on Capitol Hill, so suspicious of it, if not downright opposed? Are the stakes really so high and the potential damage so great?

“When the company that controls the pipes, so to speak, owns this very, very large content provider, it can cause a whole bunch of different horribles for consumers,” said Sen Al Franken (D-MN).

You sure have to hand it to the Russians. They understand the power of free-flowing information, how it can upend government and politics. It’s why they don’t let information flow too freely in their own country. And it’s why, if United States intelligence assessments are correct, they have worked so hard to send it roaring through ours. There is a certain kind of brilliance to the way the Russians are said to have hacked the email accounts of senior Democratic officials and gifted the contents to their BFFs at WikiLeaks. The Russians seem to be using the United States’ free press — a great symbol of our democracy — against it while setting up an impossible choice for American newsrooms: Run with the stolen and in many cases unverified correspondence and potentially assist an audacious Russian attempt to disrupt a presidential election, or decline to print it and betray their mission to combat the great political fog machine.

[Commentary] If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him? Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career.

If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?

Roger Ailes’s tenure as the head of Fox News appears to be over. Ailes and 21st Century Fox, Fox News’s parent company, are in the advanced stages of discussions that would lead to his departure as chairman, said Susan Estrich, one of Ailes’s lawyers. The development follows a sexual harassment suit filed on July 6 against Ailes by a former anchor, Gretchen Carlson. The suit prompted 21st Century Fox to conduct an internal review and it set off an intense round of speculation in the news media and the television industry about Ailes’s future at Fox News.

On July 19, the sides were negotiating terms that could include Ailes’s staying on in a consulting role for Fox News. Estrich said nothing had been finalized about what sort of continuing role he could have at the network. “Roger is at work,” 21st Century Fox said. “The review is ongoing. And the only agreement that is in place is his existing employment agreement.” Ailes’s exit would be a humbling and startlingly sudden fall from power for a man who started Fox News from scratch 20 years ago and built it into a top-rated cable news network and a critical profit center for 21st Century Fox. Along the way, Ailes, a former Republican operative, established Fox News as the leading media platform for conservative politics. He also minted prime-time stars like Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren.