New York Times

Can Libel Laws Be Changed Under Trump?

When Donald Trump said in February that he would “open up our libel laws” if he became president to make it easier to sue news organizations for unfavorable coverage, the declaration sent shock waves through the media world. But could he actually do it? The simple answer is yes, but it would be complicated. And assuming the established procedures to change laws hold, it would also be extremely difficult. Libel is a matter of state law limited by the principles of the First Amendment. Presidents cannot directly change state laws, so President-elect Trump would effectively have to seek to change the First Amendment principles that constrain the country’s libel laws. There are two potential ways he could do this, according to legal experts. One route is through the Supreme Court. The other is through the Constitution itself.

Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence

On Election Night 2016, a private chat sprang up on Facebook among several vice presidents and executives of the social network. What role, they asked each other, had their company played in the election’s outcome?

Facebook’s top executives concluded that they should address the issue and assuage staff concerns at a quarterly all-hands meeting. They also called a smaller meeting with the company’s policy team, according to three people who saw the private chat and are familiar with the decisions; they requested anonymity because the discussion was confidential. Facebook has been in the eye of a postelection storm for the last few days, embroiled in accusations that it helped spread misinformation and fake news stories that influenced how the American electorate voted. The online conversation among Facebook’s executives, which was one of several private message threads that began among the company’s top ranks, showed that the social network was internally questioning what its responsibilities might be.

Even as Facebook has outwardly defended itself as a nonpartisan information source — Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook affecting the election was “a pretty crazy idea” — many company executives and employees have been asking one another if, or how, they shaped the minds, opinions and votes of Americans.

Future of Big Mergers Under Trump? Like Much Else, It’s Unclear

Deal makers took notice in Oct when Donald Trump declared that he would seek to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner on the grounds that it would radically concentrate power in too few companies. But after an initial period of turmoil, deal advisers say that it is unclear whether a Trump administration — led by an avowedly pro-business real estate mogul — would really make life difficult for mega-mergers.

At the moment, AT&T’s planned takeover of Time Warner, the biggest merger of the year and one that is poised to reshape the world of media and telecommunications, appears to be the most likely candidate for hazing. The president-elect was among the first politicians to criticize the deal, vowing to block it if he became president. President-elect Trump said it was “an example of the power structure I’m fighting.” He also opposed a similar union between Comcast and NBCUniversal in 2013, which he called “poison.” But antitrust specialists and Republican strategists say a Trump administration may not fulfill his campaign promises.

What Trump, Clinton and Voters Agreed On: Better Infrastructure

At the end of a stunning and divisive election that left many Americans feeling further apart than ever, there was perhaps one area of common ground: infrastructure.

In a triumphant victory speech, President-elect Donald J. Trump cited the issue as a top priority for his administration. “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,” President-elect Trump said. “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none.” The sentiment was echoed across the country on Election Day as voters supported dozens of local ballot measures intended to improve public transportation. In Los Angeles, Seattle and Atlanta, voters were poised to approve spending billions of dollars on buses, rail lines and other projects.

Trump Expected to Seek Deep Cuts in Business Regulations

Hours after Donald J. Trump won the race for the White House, scores of regulations that have reshaped corporate America in the last eight years suddenly seemed vulnerable. While many questions remain about how President-elect Trump will govern, a consensus emerged in many circles in Washington and on Wall Street about at least one aspect of his impending presidency: President-elect Trump is likely to seek vast cuts in regulations across the banking, health care and energy industries.

The idea of a Trump presidency triggered a sense of dread among many people in the liberal-leaning technology business. Trump is seen as less favorably disposed toward the concentration of power among the handful of large companies that dominate the internet, including Facebook, Google and Amazon, said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, an online real estate firm. Trump has called for the rejection of AT&T’s bid for Time Warner. Still, analysts expect that he will appoint antitrust regulators at the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department who will largely follow traditional Republican approaches to the free market. Trump will be under pressure by major telecom and cable firms to roll back aspects of net neutrality. The rule inhibits how broadband providers manage traffic on their networks to ensure any website is equally accessible to consumers. Telecom and cable firms continue to challenge the rules in court and Mr. Trump, with the encouragement of Republicans in Congress, may seek to abandon the regulation.

What We’ve Learned About the Media Industry During This Election

In media business terms, it is now clear, the 2016 election could not have arrived at a more precarious moment, as industries defined by their futures struggled to handle what was happening in the present. A new business model had not replaced an old one — not yet. There was, for the duration of the campaign, effectively no model at all.

Through this lens, some of the defining narratives about the media and the election start to make a little more sense. Major news organizations, household names trusted for decades, lost a great deal of ownership over audiences. The organizations exist among many contributors in infinite feeds. Their news stories could be more easily brushed aside and ignored as a product of bias or motivated reporting. Once privileged with the leverage to shape narratives, or declare stories important, they now found themselves competing with rivals shaped by new incentives. It seemed that readers and viewers had been prompted, all at once, to ask news outlets: Who are you to assume we trust you?

Can the Media Recover From This Election?

This has not been your typical presidential election — not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.

Poniewozik: The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next president of the United States. The press covered Donald Trump like a future trivia question (and a ratings cash cow). From the get-go, too much coverage of the race has been informed by a belief, overt or unconscious, that Trump couldn’t win. Last fall, the political press, like their sources, dismissed the polls and stuck to the belief that people would never actually pull the lever for that man. The mind-set stuck well into the primaries — even data-minded Nate Silver succumbed to the siren call of punditry.
Rutenberg: Yes, If you think about it, she received coverage befitting a traditional politician running for president; he received coverage of a billionaire reality-television star who turned politics into performance art and sparked a powerful movement in the process.

TV Networks Face a Skeptical Public on Election Night

As television news gears up for 2016’s big finale, an intense public distrust in the media is threatening the networks’ traditional role as election night scorekeeper. There is a divided electorate, big segments of which are poised to question the veracity of Nov 8’s results. Donald J. Trump has refused to say if he will concede in the event of a projected defeat. And new digital competitors plan to break the usual election-night rules and issue real-time predictions long before polls close.

The era of Tim Russert’s famed whiteboard — when network anchors could serve as the ultimate authority on election results — has faded. And scrutiny on big media organizations on Tuesday, when 70 million people might tune in, is likely to be harsher than ever. In interviews, network executives said that credibility was their first concern, and that they hoped to tune out competing chatter and focus on what they can control: getting it right.

Why Facebook Showed You That Ad for the Candidate You Hate

You may be a reliable Democratic voter in a solid-blue city. Maybe you have a graduate degree; maybe you’re a member of an ethnic or religious minority; maybe you are a woman. Any of these would make you a likely Hillary Clinton supporter. So why did you just see an ad for Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign on Facebook?

The New York Times has collected an extensive database of political Facebook ads, and data about how they are targeted, from our readers as part of our Political Ad Tracker project. Microtargeted online advertisements can be a powerful tool for political campaigns to tailor a message to specific people they are trying to reach. But the reason you saw a particular campaign ad on Facebook may have nothing to do with your political views, or even your demographic profile. It could depend on whether you live in a swing state and on your internet activity — or be practically random. You can find the reasons you were shown a particular ad, political or otherwise, on Facebook with just a few steps.

Emails Warrant No New Action Against Hillary Clinton, FBI Director Says

FBI Director James Comey told Congress that he had seen no evidence in a recently discovered trove of emails to change his conclusion that Hillary Clinton should face no charges over her handling of classified information.

Comey’s announcement, just two days before the election, was an effort to clear the cloud of suspicion he had publicly placed over her presidential campaign in late October when he alerted Congress that the FBI would examine the emails. “Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” Director Comey wrote in a letter to the leaders of several congressional committees. He said agents had reviewed all communications to and from Clinton in the new trove from when she was secretary of state.

Can a Media Merger Bring Success? Comcast and NBCUniversal Say Yes

Comcast is the country’s largest cable company, selling television, broadband and phone service to 28.3 million customers. AT&T is the country’s largest television distributor after its acquisition last year of DirecTV, and counts more than 100 million subscribers across its wireless, broadband and TV offerings. Consumer groups denounced both deals with similar complaints: that they stifle competition, create unfair pricing and spur even more consolidation in an industry already controlled by relatively few companies. And some Washington experts have pointed to the conditions placed on Comcast’s deal for NBCUniversal as being too difficult to enforce — a harbinger, they say, of similar problems with an AT&T-Time Warner merger. Comcast says there has been just one violation of the conditions attached to its deal, but critics point to several disputes. They also point out that the conditions expire in 2018.

Media’s Next Challenge: Overcoming the Threat of Fake News

[Commentary] With Donald Trump providing must-see TV theatrics, cable news has drawn record audiences. Newspapers have reached online readership highs that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. On Nov 9 comes the reckoning. The election news bubble that’s about to pop has blocked from plain view the expanding financial sinkhole at the center of the paper-and-ink branch of the news industry, which has recently seen a print advertising plunge that was “much more precipitous, to be honest with you, than anybody expected a year or so ago,” said The Wall Street Journal editor in chief Gerard Baker.

Papers including The Journal, The New York Times, The Guardian, the Gannett publications and others have responded with plans to reorganize, shed staff, kill off whole sections, or all of the above. Taken together, it means another rapid depletion in the nation’s ranks of traditionally trained journalists whose main mission is to root out corruption, hold the powerful accountable and sort fact from fiction for voters. It couldn’t be happening at a worse moment in American public life. The internet-borne forces that are eating away at print advertising are enabling a host of faux-journalistic players to pollute the democracy with dangerously fake news items.

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth

Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election? Much of that remains unclear, because the Internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information.

For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case. If you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth.

Gawker and Hulk Hogan Reach $31 Million Settlement

Gawker Media, which filed for bankruptcy after losing a lawsuit brought by the former professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, has settled the case, bringing to a close a multiyear saga that led to the demise of the company as an independent news organization. The settlement, which court documents indicate is for $31 million, comes less than eight months after a jury awarded Hogan, whose real name is Terry G. Bollea, $140 million in damages in an invasion of privacy case lawsuit over Gawker.com’s publication of a video that showed Bollea having sex with a friend’s wife. Gawker will forgo its appeal of that judgment.

The significant financial pressure from the judgment — and the revelation that Peter Thiel, the billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur, was financing the lawsuit and others against the company — forced Gawker to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and sell itself through an auction, which Univision won in August with a bid of $135 million.

A Union of Politics and News Ends With Both Contaminated

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.

The PG-13 Reporters Covering an R-Rated Election

Scholastic has been providing child-friendly election coverage to teachers and classrooms for nearly a century, starting with the 1924 race between Calvin Coolidge and John W. Davis. It introduced its children’s press corps program in 2000, and for the last five presidential elections, Scholastic has sent precocious young political reporters to cover rallies, debates and stump speeches around the country. 2016's press corps includes children in 22 states and the District of Columbia. The children cover their local areas, and their reports appear on the Scholastic News website and occasionally in its classroom magazines, which reach about 25 million students. Many of the young reporters say it is exhilarating to witness history unfolding before their eyes. But this election has presented challenges, as the race has devolved into one of the most vicious contests in the nation’s history. Even the most grizzled, jaded campaign veterans have been shocked by the barrage of insults and controversies that have defined this year’s race. Kaitlin Clark, 12, of New Hampshire, said that when she was in a news media pen at a rally for Donald Trump. “You could feel that the crowd didn’t really want us there,” she said.

Gannett Abandons Effort to Buy Newspaper Publisher Tronc

After six months of pursuit, the Gannett Company said that it was withdrawing its offer to acquire the owner of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, a deal that would have extended Gannett’s national footprint and furthered consolidation in the newspaper industry.

Gannett, the publisher of USA Today, had made several efforts to acquire the former Tribune Publishing Company, now known as Tronc. The first two were rejected during the spring. Gannett said that the acquisition was an attractive opportunity but “in the end the terms were not acceptable.” Tronc shares plunged nearly 20 percent on the morning of Nov 1 on the news. Gannett shares were up 1.3 percent in early morning trading.

Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia

For much of the summer, the FBI pursued a widening investigation into a Russian role in the American presidential campaign. Agents scrutinized advisers close to Donald Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, searched for those involved in hacking the computers of Democrats, and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank. Law enforcement officials say that none of the investigations so far have found any conclusive or direct link between Trump and the Russian government.

And even the hacking into Democratic emails, F.B.I. and intelligence officials now believe, was aimed at disrupting the presidential election rather than electing Trump. The FBI’s inquiries into Russia’s possible role continue. Intelligence officials have said in interviews over the last six weeks that apparent connections between some of Trump’s aides and Moscow originally compelled them to open a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Republican presidential candidate. Still, they have said that Trump himself has not become a target. And no evidence has emerged that would link him or anyone else in his business or political circle directly to Russia’s election operations.

Today's Quote 10.31.2016

“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.”
-- Sen Al Franken (D-MN)

Seeking Ownership of Both the Information and the Superhighway

[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).

The AT&T-Time Warner Merger: A Match Built on Hope

Is AT&T’s $85 billion bid for Time Warner the triumph of hope over experience? It is certainly true that the last two mega-mergers involving Time Warner fell far short of their promise. After the 1989 marriage of Time Inc. and Warner Communications, for instance, it took seven years for investors to see any real gains in the combined companies’ stock. But even that painful deal paled in comparison to the 2001 merger of AOL and Time Warner. That was the worst combination in corporate history, at least until 2008, when Bank of America bought Countrywide Financial, the toxic mortgage lender.

This time it’s different, contends Randall L. Stephenson, AT&T’s chairman and chief executive. He called the merger “a perfect match of two companies with complementary strengths who can bring a fresh approach to how the media and communications industry works for customers, content creators, distributors and advertisers.” There’s something for all investors in this corporate marriage, AT&T says: Those seeking earnings growth will benefit as well as investors on the hunt for income. For one thing, the company expects the combination to begin adding to earnings the year after it closes — a quick turnaround by traditional standards. And it also says the takeover will improve its so-called dividend coverage. That’s the measure of how much excess cash AT&T has to cover its 5.3 percent dividend. Company executives always make promises when they announce big deals. But talk is cheap, delivery costly.

President Obama Brought Silicon Valley to Washington

In many ways, President Barack Obama is America’s first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity. Those efforts were in part led by a founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who believed in the Illinois senator’s campaign so much that he left the start-up to join Obama’s strategy team. After he was elected, he created a trifecta of executive positions in his administration modeled on corporate best practices: chief technology officer, chief data scientist, chief performance officer. He sat for question-and-answer sessions on Reddit, released playlists of his favorite songs on Spotify and used Twitter frequently, even once making dad jokes with Bill Clinton. He stoked deep and meaningful connections with scores of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg.

President Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals. Even his tech-specific fumbles seem unlikely to mar his permanent record: The rocky debut of HealthCare.gov, the online insurance marketplace that cost more than $600 million to build and crashed almost immediately after it went live, was later brushed off as a technical difficulty. And his administration’s pressure on Silicon Valley companies to aid its cybersecurity efforts hasn’t seemed to dampen their enthusiasm for him. Obama used his ties to the tech sector to foster diplomacy: Last year, he took Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, with him to Cuba as an economic endorsement of the revolutionary powers of start-ups to change the world.

AT&T’s Vision of Ultrafast Wireless Technology May Be a Mirage

Randall Stephenson, AT&T’s chief executive, has a vision for the future if regulators approve his company’s blockbuster bid for Time Warner. It goes like this: In a few years, your cellphone’s data connection will be so fast that you can download a television show in the blink of an eye and a movie in less than five seconds. (That compares with up to eight minutes now for a movie.) When that happens, Stephenson has suggested, you may as well just watch TV with your cellular connection and cancel your cable subscription.

Yet the vision may be a mirage. That is because 5G is unlikely to be deployed in any meaningful capacity in the next decade. The technology, which is supposed to offer connectivity at least 100 times faster than what is now available, is at the center of a bitter fight between carriers and telecom equipment makers about how it should work. No resolution is expected until at least 2020, said Bengt Nordstrom, co-founder of Northstream, a telecommunications consulting firm. “Anything before that will just be window dressing,” he said. Even after companies and telecommunications groups define 5G and how it should operate, they face the high cost of installing a wireless network capable of handling the fast wireless speeds. “They take a tremendous amount of money to build,” Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst, said of 5G networks. “The obvious question for AT&T is, where is the money going to come from to build out 5G networks on a large scale?”

How Donald Trump Used Hollywood to Create ‘Donald Trump’

Most politicians have a public record of speeches and votes on issues of the day, but Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has left a different type of record: a near-constant presence in TV shows, movies, documentaries, pageants and even professional wrestling events over 30 years. His first television appearance seems to have been an uncredited 1981 cameo on the sitcom “The Jeffersons.”

Since then, Trump has seized on opportunities to create a recurring character over three decades: a larger-than-life New York billionaire named Donald Trump. His cameos have included numerous TV shows (“The Nanny,” “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” “Sex and the City”) and movies (“Home Alone 2,” “Zoolander” and Woody Allen’s “Celebrity.”). Including his many interviews on late-night talk shows, appearances on beauty pageant and professional wrestling shows, and a recurring role on his reality program “The Apprentice,” his credits have numbered in the hundreds, according to the Internet Movie Database. His memorable cameos have been collected in at least one YouTube supercut.