Variety

President Donald Trump sent out a couple of tweets Oct 29 pushing back on the idea that he’s called the media the “enemy of the people.” It’s the “fake news” media, he specified. “A very big difference.” The first time that President Trump used the phrase, “enemy of the American people,” he identified the New York Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, and CNN. He’s also called the Washington Post “fake news” several times. In a Sept 16 tweet, he characterized all of mainstream media as “fake news.” 

Rebuilding Facebook’s content enforcement mechanisms to weed out harmful content could take 3 years or longer, said the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The good news is we started this in 2017, so even though this work will extend through 2019, I do expect us to end this year on a significantly better trajectory than when we entered it,” he added. Zuckerberg said that he would reveal more about the company’s plans to fight abuse in the near future in a series of posts.

The Trump era has now seen two major media mergers halted or almost stopped — Sinclair Broadcast Group’s combination with Tribune Media, and AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner. Both transactions met with turbulence from the feds, but that does not signal that media consolidation will be slowed in the coming years — far from it. In fact, getting far less attention are moves that likely will encourage more media mergers and acquisitions down the road. Here are a few examples: