Washington Post

Wilbur L. Ross, Jr., a former banker and investor who earned billions during decades of buying and selling industries and who President Trump has touted to lead his trade negotiations, was confirmed as secretary of commerce by the Senate in a 72-to-27 vote.

Dubbed the “king of bankruptcy” for his leveraged buyouts of battered companies in the steel, coal, textile and banking industries, Ross has generated a fortune of $2.5 billion, ranking him among the wealthiest 250 people in America. Ross worked for decades at the New York investment bank of Rothschild, during which time he represented Trump's failing Taj Mahal casino and helped forge a deal that allowed President Trump to retain ownership. In the early 2000s, Ross purchased some of America’s largest steel mills, including Pennsylvania’s Bethlehem Steel and Cleveland’s LTV Corp. He later sold his steel conglomerate to India’s Mittal Steel, helping to form what is now the world’s largest steel company.

[Commentary] The early television news reviews of the Trump presidency are in and they are not good — not even on Fox News.

Only 3 percent of the reports about Trump that aired on NBC and CBS were positive, while 43 percent were negative and 44 percent were neutral. On “Special Report,” the Fox News program that most closely resembles the evening network news, 25 percent of the reports about President Trump were negative, compared with 12 percent positive and the remainder neutral. In other words, even the conservative-leaning Fox News featured twice as much bad press as good press.

The networks differed in their emphases. Fox News focused on personnel decisions in the new White House, and coverage of that issue area was more positive than negative by a ratio of 2 to 1. Another bright spot for President Trump was Fox’s coverage of economic news: There was mostly positive coverage of the new president’s initiatives that are intended to strengthen the international competitiveness of U.S. business. CBS and NBC focused more on Trump’s immigration policy and whether he was respecting U.S. constitutional norms such as separation of powers. Most of these news reports were far more negative than positive. But CBS and NBC coverage of Trump’s international diplomacy was more positive than negative, but there were fewer stories on that topic than on others. Of course, the news media’s role as a monitor of government usually leads to at least some negative news. But the negative coverage of President Trump seems unusual.

[Stephen J. Farnsworth is a professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Mary Washington, S. Robert Lichter is a professor of communication at George Mason University, and Roland Schatz is president of Media Tenor Ltd.]

Attacks on the press by President Trump and his aides are so frequent that they blur together. But not all attacks are the same. Some, such as the “opposition party” label applied by White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, are aimed at the entire mainstream media. Others target certain news outlets, such as the “failing” New York Times and “fake news” CNN. Still others zero in on individual journalists. What almost all of them have in common is a lack of specifics.

So, it was notable that when the Trump White House went after Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt on Feb 26, it took the unusual step of leveling a precise charge: Isenstadt, according to “one informed official” quoted by the Washington Examiner, laughed about the death of a Navy SEAL during a conversation with White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Politico fired back at what it called a “patently false characterization of the conversation.” Isenstadt declined to discuss the episode further, and the Examiner reporter who agreed to publish the claim, Paul Bedard, turned down an interview request

Former President George W. Bush rarely weighs in on current political events, but on Feb 27 he offered some of his most pointed critiques of President Donald Trump's statements and policies. “I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy,” Bush said. “We need an independent media to hold people like me to account." "Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive and it's important for the media to call to account people who abuse power, whether it be here or elsewhere,” he added. Bush noted that during his presidency, he sought to persuade people like Russian President Vladimir Putin to respect a free press. “It's kind of hard to tell others to have an independent free press when we're not willing to have one ourselves,” Bush said.

President Donald Trump just can't get his story straight.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference, he accused the news media of widespread fabrication, claiming without evidence that “they have no sources; they just make 'em up when there are none.” The charge is wholly incompatible with his assertions, at other times (or on the same day), that U.S. intelligence officials are leaking classified information to reporters — and must be ferreted out. Which is it? Are the unidentified intelligence sources cited in reports by The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and others invented by “dishonest” journalists? Or are they real people, providing real information, who need to be stopped? Both of the president's claims cannot be true.

It seems clear which one President Trump actually believes: He speaks and tweets so frequently about plugging leaks that his consternation appears genuine.

[Commentary] The message — if you are really bad at reading the signs — is that President Donald Trump and the people who support him believe they are at war with the media, plain and simple.

It's beyond an adversarial relationship. It's a desire on their part to extinguish what they believe to be the corporate-controlled, liberal media once and for all. From a political perspective, it makes sense for Trump to villainize the press, since the media is a stand-in for virtually everything that Trump supporters dislike about Washington specifically and “elites” more generally. But from a healthy democracy perspective, the attempts to change the rules — or turn the daily interactions between the president and the media into a game of favorites — is a very dangerous thing.

Since the election of President Trump, Republican lawmakers in at least 18 states have introduced or voted on legislation to curb mass protests in what civil liberties experts are calling “an attack on protest rights throughout the states.” From Virginia to Washington state, legislators have introduced bills that would increase punishments for blocking highways, ban the use of masks during protests, indemnify drivers who strike protesters with their cars and, in at least once case, seize the assets of people involved in protests that later turn violent.

The proposals come after a string of mass protest movements in the past few years, covering everything from police shootings of unarmed black men to the Dakota Access Pipeline to the inauguration of Trump. Some are introducing bills because they say they're necessary to counter the actions of “paid” or “professional” protesters who set out to intimidate or disrupt, a common accusation that experts agree is largely overstated.

[Commentary] Even as fanatic customers can be counted on to line up outside the Apple store for the latest iPhone, there are still millions of Americans who don’t use a smartphone at all. For that matter, there are still plenty of happy owners of tube televisions, rotary dial telephones, film cameras, fax machines, typewriters and cassette tape players. You might think the holdouts just can’t afford it, which certainly remains an important factor despite programs that subsidize both wired and wireless broadband. But the real holdup is that non-adopters — mostly older, rural and less-educated — just aren’t interested in Internet access, at any price.

As other factors such as price and usability fall, a perceived lack of relevance now dominates. To overcome the inertia of legacy customers, it may be appropriate for governments to step in. The United States has long had programs aimed at making broadband more affordable for lower-income Americans and more accessible for those living in sparsely populated areas.

[Larry Downes is a project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.]

It's no secret that Stephen K. Bannon, the past chairman of Breitbart News and now a senior strategist to the president, is behind much of Trump's anti-media rhetoric. The idea of the media as the “opposition party” or the “enemy" — two phrases Trump has used of late to describe those who cover him — is pure Bannon. So, there was no reason to think that Bannon was going to be anything but confrontational with the media during a joint appearance with Trump White House chief of staff Reince Priebus at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. But, even by Bannon's standards, he seemed to ramp up his attacks on the media and offer a very clear message to political journalists: You think this is bad? Just wait.

“It's going to get worse every day for the media,” Bannon said, insisting that the “corporatist” media would continue to see Trump pursue exactly the sort of economic nationalism that journalism allegedly despises. Then he added this call to arms: “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”

When CNN's Dylan Byers reported that counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway had been pulled off the air by the White House, his story included a familiar line: “Conway did not respond to a request for comment.” Within minutes of the report's publication, however, Conway was talking — to rival network MSNBC, claiming Byers and CNN had it wrong. Half an hour later, Conway's “might be doing TV later tonight” became is doing TV later tonight.

To review: Conway chose not to comment before CNN published its report, but in the 55 minutes afterward, she pushed back in an off-camera interview with MSNBC and announced an appearance on Fox News to further counter the idea that she had been sidelined. Byers viewed the sequence as a series of calculated maneuvers. When a journalist asks for comment on what seems sure to be an unfavorable story, do not provide one. Wait for the report to be published, then attack it as unfair or inaccurate. Maybe even act as if you didn't have a chance to tell your side of the story.