Columbia Journalism Review

Media outrage over press pool access plays right into Trump’s hands

[Commentary] We, as journalists, had better take extra care these days to strike the right balance between reacting and overreacting if we don’t want to be used as pawns in someone else’s strategy. Sometimes it seems that all the press wants is for President-elect Donald Trump to agree not to set up concentration camps—even as he confers with Republican leaders on how to completely dismantle what’s left of America’s public spaces, public institutions, and protections for the poor and the vulnerable. We will have our civil liberties, but nothing else.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.]

The symbiotic relationship between WikiLeaks and the press

WikiLeaks used to be the press’s only source for anonymously submitted online document dumps. Since then, the press has developed its own digital capabilities and a comfort with leaked material—and WikiLeaks has strayed from editorial curation and toward publishing unedited archives.

Before the election, the conversation around Wikileaks focused on the question of whether or not the press should report on the Podesta e-mails, since they are so targeted, uncurated, and not even clearly newsworthy. The verdict, rightly, was that the press should report on the leaks: Glenn Greenwald argues in The Intercept, and Trevor Timm in The Guardian, that it is the journalist’s job to take what was leaked, decide what is newsworthy, and report on it. The role of the press is not only to report the leaks, but to interrogate the information and assess its newsworthiness. But now, after the election, there is another layer of transparency that is the press’s job to add: transparency on WikiLeaks itself.

How tech and media can fight fake news

[Commentary] How can media companies do professional journalism that reaches audiences on the major platforms? And how can the giant platforms make that professional journalism worth their while?

I’m glad that the 2016 election has prompted people to buy new subscriptions to paywalled legacy publications. But that, by definition, is a way to stay out of the trenches, to keep clean hands in the new media wars. Instead, legacy outlets and new ones alike could let important coverage that is native to this new space out from behind paywalls. Editors could treat the information ecosystem as a frontline beat. And the platforms need to find a way to support the native journalism that is the only antidote to the poison in their veins.

[Ben Smith is the Editor in Chief of BuzzFeed.]

A protest vote against blaming the media for Trump

To say the media missed some seismic shift in American political culture goes too far. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote; President Barack Obama’s approval rating is sky high; and the winning GOP candidate this cycle received fewer votes than his losing predecessor in 2012. National journalists filed so many dispatches from Trump country that the genre coalesced into a recurring joke on Twitter. That reporting came in addition to strong and copious accountability work that exposed Trump as a grifter who jokes about sexual assault and Clinton as a uninspiring politician surrounded by a shady personal network.

This is a column about reviewing campaign journalism, however, so here goes: The performance of “the media” in 2016 was…mixed.

Journalists can regain public’s trust by reaffirming basic values

[Commentary] Wide swaths of the country, both geographically and demographically, don’t believe us. They see us as tools of some amorphous establishment, and have turned for their news of the world to alternate channels, to put it politely. To them, “corporate media” is of a piece with government insiders and self-dealers who, to paraphrase the tagline of one of this year’s attack ads, make government work…for them. Journalism is only one part of the problem. But it can and in my view should be part of the solution.

We can help provide the country with a common basis of facts and a common vocabulary to discuss our challenges. We have the power to actually introduce Americans from different backgrounds and points of view to each other. We can, in the popular phrase, be a convener of important conversations. 2016’s presidential campaign has provided a great opportunity to show how important we can be. Independent, fair-minded journalism is desperately needed. We need to find out how to rebuild it everywhere. That’s something we can ask the public to believe in. We did not have that conversation during the election. We need to have it now.

[Michael Oreskes is head of NPR News. He was national political correspondent and Washington bureau chief of The New York Times.]

300 newsrooms sign on to monitor voting problems

On Election Nights past, ProPublica staffers were more likely to be found at home watching the results roll in on TV or online than in the newsroom. The nonprofit, public-interest journalism outfit isn’t in the business of tracking the vote. But in 2016, it’s trying something new.

Working out of a temporary newsroom setup at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, it will be the hub of a country-wide network of journalists, journalism students, and concerned citizens tracking and reporting on problems that prevent people from voting. Amid Donald Trump’s cries of a “rigged” election and a “crooked” news media, more than 300 newsrooms—at least one in every state—have signed on to participate in the Electionland project to ensure voter problems are surfaced, reported, and rectified by the time the polls close on Election Day, when it counts.

Changing the media’s notions of failure and success

[Commentary] Donald Trump is a moral, intellectual and spiritual failure. Trump’s followers forgive his abusiveness, callousness and mendacity because it embodies, to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous phrase, “the crooked timber of humanity.” His failures of character allow them to forgive him his wealth and power. What his followers cannot forgive is the liberal media’s smug enforcement of the straight and narrow path to happiness and success, a smugness and prescriptiveness often born in conditions of prosperity and privilege that are far removed from the way the majority of Americans exist.

Most American define success in terms of their families, their work—if they’re lucky enough to be working, and at a job with dignity—and their attachment to their communities. For most of the media, success is the right school, the right style of parenting, the right cultural products, the right job, the right etiquette in every social situation, the right social attitudes, and the right workout. That difference between how the media defines success and failure and how much of the rest of the country does, is one of the great causes of the divide between the press and the tens of millions of Americans who have rallied behind the exceptionally flawed Republican standard-bearer. It is a reason most of the media never grasped the rise of Trump’s base of support. Unless it’s addressed, one of the legacies of the 2016 election will be a permanent, and deepening, mistrust of and alienation from the mainstream press.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism.]

What Trump could (and couldn’t) do to restrict press freedom if elected

First, could President Trump “open up our libel laws”? No. States create nearly all libel laws, and they’re subject to First Amendment limits. Trump couldn’t require states to change their laws, any more than he could require the Supreme Court to change its First Amendment jurisprudence, or require Congress to rewrite the First Amendment. This is a matter of eighth-grade civics.

Second, could President Trump change the Freedom of Information Act? Kind of. He alone couldn’t amend the law, but he could affect its implementation. For example, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama signed one executive order and two presidential memoranda heralding a “new era of openness” that would, among other things, re-establish a presumption of disclosure for records requested under the FOIA—and reverse President George W. Bush’s changes to the Presidential Records Act, to hold his own records “to a new standard of openness.”

Third, could President Trump crack down on public affairs reporting? Yes, most likely in the area of national security—if his Department of Justice prosecuted journalists under, say, the Espionage Act, something that has occurred once before, or if his DOJ tried to obtain an injunction against publication, or prosecuted leakers and subpoenaed journalists to supply information. Another route would be to issue an executive order modifying how classified information must be handled, or allowing information to be classified for longer periods.

Fourth, what if President Trump simply didn’t like the press, as he’s been saying on the campaign trail? What impact could that have? It could mean Trump would be less accessible to journalists or wouldn’t invite them to certain functions or press conferences.

Donald Trump threatens press freedom worldwide

[Commentary] For the first time in history, the Iranian state broadcaster livestreamed the entire 90-minute US presidential debate. This was not meant to be a civics lesson. Rather, it was an effort to highlight the dysfunctionality of the American political system to the Iranian public. That decision shows the ways in which—win or lose—the Trump campaign has eroded US standing around the world, particularly when it comes to such issues as human rights and press freedom. This may seem incidental compared with the enormous threat a Trump presidency poses to US institutions from the political parties, to the Justice Department, and the media itself. But for vulnerable journalists around the world, it’s a game changer.

When it comes to press freedom and the rights of journalists around the world, the US exercises its influence in two ways. The first is by example. But Trump has consistently trampled on America’s First Amendment tradition. The second way in which the US exercises influence is by speaking out when the rights of journalists are violated around the world. Trump has indicated he has no inclination to do so. If Trump were to be elected president, he would likely become America’s first democratator. Though he now appears likely to lose, the Trump campaign has already had a negative influence—as anyone who watched debate night from Tehran already knows.

[Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.]

The media’s Weimar moment

[Commentary] In June 1954 on national television, Joe Welch, the US Army’s chief counsel, exposed Senator Joseph McCarthy’s dubious morality with those two legendary questions: “Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Such was the novelty of television back then that having given Sen McCarthy an authoritative forum for his views, TV could now serve as the instrument of his destruction. We all know what followed. The media attained the highest point of its legitimacy and authority during the Vietnam War with the publication of the Pentagon Papers and then the unfolding of the Watergate scandal. That ascendancy ran parallel to the rapid discrediting of politics as a vocation. Journalists were heroes. Politicians were scoundrels.

Thirty years later, with the revelations of the media’s blindness to and sometimes complicity with the lies that led America into the Iraq War, journalists joined politicians in the space of detention into which public opinion puts those figures who betray the people’s trust. From that point on, America, once dubbed the oldest young country in the world by Gertrude Stein, began to experience the historical version of a senior moment. It began to undergo a Weimar moment.

[Lee Siegel is the author of five books and the recipient of a National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. His forthcoming book, The Draw: A Memoir, will be published in April.]

Trump’s many, many threats to sue the press since launching his campaign

[Commentary] Donald Trump's Outright Contempt for journalists and press freedom is well known—but in the past month he has outdone himself. In the span of a long weekend in mid-September, Trump threatened to sue The New York Times, his staff had a Vice reporter arrested outside a campaign event, and he blamed the New York terrorist bombings on “freedom of the press.” The weekend of Sept 30, Trump struck again. After the Times’ huge scoop detailing how he took an almost billion-dollar loss on his 1995 taxes, Trump’s lawyer threatened “prompt initiation of appropriate legal action” against the Times once more. By my count, it is at least the 11th time Trump has threatened to sue a news organization or journalist during his campaign for president.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.]

Five takeaways from the Online News Association 2016 conference

While the war between the presidential candidates and the press rages on, more than 1,000 journalists gathered recently at the 2016 Online News Association conference in Denver (CO) for a conversation on the future of journalism. Here are five takeaways from the conference:

  1. Facebook was dominant.
  2. Publishers are desperate to connect.
  3. Tech companies are lining up to help journalists find that audience.
  4. The buzzword is monetization.
  5. Trump is still the 10,000-pound gorilla in the room.

United Nations must take action to ensure free speech for all

[Commentary] The United Nations General Assembly gets underway this week in New York, and beginning Sept 20, 195 leaders from around the world will parade before the UN’s green marble rostrum and deliver speeches. While the General Assembly may not be the world’s most productive meeting, it cannot be denied that everyone gets to have their say. Indeed the entire UN system places an extraordinary value on speech as a tool for resolving differences and managing international conflict. But on the world stage, it is often only government officials who have the chance to speak freely. Around the world, freedom of expression is under siege, and journalists are being jailed in record numbers. The UN must take action.

Leaders from around the world will enjoy free expression when they come to speak at the UN this week, but journalists who cover their speeches back home may not. If the UN—and the international community it represents—truly believes in the power of speech to solve global problems, it must do all within its power to close that gap.

[Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.]

Donald Trump’s wish for hacking powers sets up disaster scenario Snowden feared

[Commentary] Donald Trump shocked a lot of people when he suggested (maybe sarcastically, maybe not?) that he hopes Russia is hacking the e-mails of Hillary Clinton so they can find the ones she deleted from her private server. There was another phrase, however, he used later in the day that didn’t get the same attention yet was perhaps more disturbing. While claiming he didn’t have anything to do with the hacking of his political enemies at the Democratic National Committee, he said: “I wish I had that power, man, that would be power.”

This really gets at the crux of why civil libertarians have been arguing for years that the National Security Agency has to be significantly curtailed. Even if you believe that the Obama Administration is 100 percent trustworthy and no one at the NSA under his watch has abused the agency’s vast spying powers (which, by the way, evidence refutes), the real danger is the infrastructure in place that would allow some future leader to wreak havoc. A future leader just like Donald Trump. In fact, this was the exact scenario that Edward Snowden warned about when he first went public in 2013.

[Trevor Timm is the executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation.]

Watching the press at the DNC

Shifting from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland (OH) to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia (PA), the press working to cover the Democrats inside the convention hall have to battle for less space, bigger crowds, and a security perimeter so wide, it nearly extends to New Jersey. Absent are the well-marked delegate areas, the ability to move freely up and down the aisles, the sanctuary of relative calm in the upper tiers of Wells Fargo Center—the ingredients that made conditions at the RNC bearable. Instead, the DNC is a loud, sweaty mess. Television reporters and photojournalists, floor passes in hand, stand four to five hours a day crushed together for a glimpse at the speakers, continuously ushered along by security and told: “You can’t stand here.” On July 26, the fire marshals shut the convention floor.

The physical layout and security perimeters in the convention hall also make it far more difficult for solo journalists to cover events both inside and outside. Photographers and TV crews must enter security gates more than a mile away from public transportation stations and taxi drop-off points. Some photographers estimate that a typical work day is 14 hours, while walking the equivalent of eight miles, much of it outside in more than 90-degree heat. Yet, despite the conditions, the conventions offer the priceless opportunity to get up close and personal to senators, governors, and members of Congress, who are also packed into the hall like sardines, with nowhere to run.

Did Sanders have the right priorities on social media before Clinton clinched?

[Commentary] Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT) rode a wave of populist support that nearly upended former shoo-in Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president. Are there lessons to learn from his campaign’s social-media strategy that explain why the Bernie movement gained so much traction but ultimately came up short?

A review of hundreds of the candidates’ messages on Twitter and Facebook—using data* from Illuminating 2016, a project supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Syracuse University’s Center for Computational and Data Sciences—suggests the candidates took very different approaches to the digital medium in the month before Clinton clinched the nomination. Sen Sanders’s feed had fewer negative messages, relying more on calls to action than Clinton’s feed. And despite his success with small donations, Sen Sanders was more focused on getting out the vote than urging supporters to donate money on social media. Clinton’s strategic use of calls to action was focused on digital engagement—and attempts to create an open and collaborative campaign environment by inviting supporters to engage with policy discussions online.

[Patricia Rossini is a PhD Candidate in Communication Studies at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil), and a research assistant at the Center for Computational and Data Sciences at Syracuse University.]

Ailes’s Fox dominates conservative media. A Trump presidency could challenge that.

The combination of Ailes’s departure, a transforming conservative media, and a possible Donald Trump presidency doesn’t bode well for the status quo. If Fox’s own history is any indication, such political crossroads carry with them the potential for massive change within media markets.

Which individuals or outlets emerge in this new environment could play a leading role in redefining conservatism in the years after Trump un-defined it—for better or worse. In the meantime, with millions of TV viewers and 62 million monthly uniques on its website, Fox has an immense upper hand in driving discussion on the right side of the political spectrum. The question going forward is how long the network can maintain Ailes’s audience—his political coalition—in the more competitive market he helped create.

Black media has a plan to stay relevant as mainstream journalists encroach

Mainstream media—fueled by amateur videos showing tragic interactions between police and people of color, social-media activism, and wider awareness of racial discrimination—have flocked to cover black issues, with dedicated beat reporters, black-focused verticals, and graphic photos. Mainstream interest in the black story has put black media in a tricky position in the battle for audience attention, but they’re not giving up the mantle without a fight.

Black media outlets both digital and analog are responding by finding new story angles, choosing to focus not only on the events themselves but also on the larger context, with honest analysis of what politics and police brutality mean for the future of black Americans, and how they cope with daily life. These outlets are striving for a level of authenticity and trust that still eludes mainstream players—many of which employ few people of color. The ultimate value of all black media is that it gives a true and full picture of black life and culture.

The biggest tool at the conventions

[Commentary] Last time the Republican and Democratic National Conventions rolled around in 2012, live video coverage was almost exclusively the domain of news organizations. YouTube was the official digital live-streaming partner of the 2012 conventions, but neither Facebook nor Snapchat were doing video and Periscope didn’t even exist. The big innovation of the year was how digital and print outlets were using live streaming tools on their websites.

Four years later, the social media landscape has changed exponentially thanks to an explosion in social video on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat. Now social platforms have set their sights on live streaming, and the 2016 conventions are shaping up to become a frenzied microcosm of the next era of live event coverage.

Carson, Fiorina failed to leverage social media as their campaigns peaked

[Commentary] A project supported by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Syracuse University’s Center for Computational and Data Sciences tracks the Twitter and Facebook feeds of active presidential campaigns. The project, Illuminating 2016, looks at the number of messages each candidate sends, and also codes by message type. By doing so, this tool is able to provide details about candidate social-media usage that typically do not register on the mainstream media’s radar.

There are a few strong similarities between the trajectories of the Fiorina and Carson campaigns. Both proudly touted their status as outsiders to politics—Ben Carson as a well-known neurosurgeon and Carly Fiorina as first female CEO of a top-20 US corporation, Hewlett Packard. Both candidates, as shown by the Illuminating 2016 site, likely under-utilized social media when they probably should have used it most. There is no evidence that either candidate’s social media utilization patterns influenced his or her performance in the polls. Comparing their social media behaviors to their performance on the campaign trail, however, does reveal a disparity between social media strategies and what each candidate faced offline.

[Jerry Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University and a summer research assistant on the Illuminating 2016 project.]

For journalists covering Trump, a Murrow moment

[Commentary] As Edward R Murrow wrapped up his now-famous special report condemning Joseph McCarthy in 1954, he looked into the camera and said words that could apply today. “He didn’t create this situation of fear—he merely exploited it, and rather successfully,” Murrow said of McCarthy. Most of Murrow’s argument relied on McCarthy’s own words, but in the end Murrow shed his journalistic detachment to offer a prescription: “This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent—or for those who approve,” he said. “We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.” After months of holding back, modern-day journalists are acting a lot like Murrow, pushing explicitly against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. To be sure, these modern-day Murrow moments carry less impact: Long gone are the days in which a vast majority of eyeballs were tuned to the big-three television news programs. But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate’s comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.

[David Mindich is a professor of media studies, journalism, and digital arts at Saint Michael’s College in Vermont.]

In Ferguson, local news coverage shines

[Commentary] Much of the national coverage of Ferguson (MO) has been excellent. But local media, with its assets on the ground, its 24-7 focus on the story, and its prior understanding of the many players involved and long-standing issues in play, has offered the deepest dive into the complexities of the Ferguson story.

And more than a million viewers have turned to previously-unknown KARG Argus Radio, an upstart independent local station formed mainly to broadcast local music events, which has taken viewers into the heart of the action on Florissant with a continuous livestream.

Needless to say for those who have been following the story, all the journalists on the scene -- professional and unaccredited, local, national, and international -- have done their jobs at times under threat from those who would prefer they didn’t: both looters and the police.

Is communications security for reporters improving?

Working journalists and journalism students are more often being taught to use tools like the email-encrypting LEAP, browsing-anonymizer Tor, and the messaging service Jabber. But just as one source never has the whole story, one security measure never can guarantee safety.

The problem with tools that aren’t cheerily packaged as James Bond playthings is that they can be difficult enough to use that they interfere with the ease of communication journalists have come to depend on. Most reporters don’t do anything to protect themselves, their reporting, or their sources; the ones that do invest time and effort in privacy measures sometimes go overboard.

The great newspaper spinoff

[Commentary] It’s hard to recall a spate of media deconsolidation like the one in recent months, as companies shed their publishing divisions. Time Warner unloaded its magazine division, Time.

Tribune spun off its newspapers, as has News Corporation, with EW Scripps, Journal Communications, and now Gannett planning to follow suit soon. The Grahams sold the Washington Post and kept their education and TV businesses. The New York Times Company has done the reverse in recent years, selling About.com and its Red Sox stake to focus on its namesake paper.

There will be no cross-subsidization for these newspapers and magazines, much less synergy.

Investors tend to want growth or at least stable, predictable profits -- they’re not much interested in declining assets with uncertain futures. Even if papers figure out a digital revenue source that staunches revenue declines, it’s hard to imagine these ever being businesses with serious growth potential.

The monopolies are now in Silicon Valley, and journalism doesn’t scale like Facebook.