Government & Communications

President Donald Trump’s angry condemnation of the news media during a campaign-style rally heightened the fear among journalists that verbal attacks on the profession could lead to physical attacks. While criticizing media coverage has long been a surefire tactic to rile up crowds, the depth of the president’s most recent jabs took even seasoned journalists by surprise. He called journalists “sick people,” accused the news media of “trying to take away our history and our heritage” and questioned their patriotism.

“I really think they don’t like our country,” he said. “To see this sort of attack coming yet again from the president is deeply disturbing,” said Courtney C. Radsch, the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. “It creates an environment in which attacks on the press, both verbal and potentially physical, could become common.”

The Radio-Television Digital News Association is warning broadcasters to be careful out there following arguably President Donald Trump’s most extended attack on the news media to date.

“Throughout his campaign, and throughout his first seven months in office, the president has consistently tried to make responsible journalists the villains in his effort to fire up his political base. We know that this kind of rhetoric has emboldened some people who don’t like, or don’t understand, the news media to act out against reporters and photojournalists at the national and local levels,” said Dan Shelley, RTDNA incoming executive director. “As long as the person with the most powerful bully pulpit in the world continues to attack verbally the news media, journalists are at risk. We urge reporters and photojournalists to be vigilant, and to take whatever steps they feel necessary to protect their personal safety while fulfilling their Constitutionally-guaranteed duty to seek and report the truth.”

[Commentary] As with so much about President Donald Trump, his Phoenix rally was two contradictory things: both shocking and completely predictable. Shocking because it was the most sustained attack any president has made on the news media. (“It’s time to expose the crooked-media deceptions and challenge the media for their role in fomenting divisions,” Trump ranted, as he charged that reporters invent sources and make up stories. “They are trying to take away our history and our heritage.”) And predictable because this is exactly what Trump does when he’s in trouble. He finds an enemy and punches as hard as he can.

The Secret Service has agreed to stop erasing White House visitor log data while a lawsuit demanding public access to some of the information goes forward. Justice Department lawyers said in a court filing Aug 22 that, pending resolution of the case, the Secret Service will suspend its practice of disposing of the information after it is transferred to a White House records repository. “Although not necessary to preserve the requested records, the Secret Service has stated that it will retain copies of all [appointment and visitor entry] data during the pendency of this litigation, and Secret Service has suspended auto-delete functions,” Justice Department lawyer Julie Straus Harris wrote in response to a lawsuit brought by the Public Citizen watchdog group. Who holds the information can have a pivotal impact on the public’s ability to access the data in a timely way.

Former undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson is looking to raise enough money to buy Twitter so President Donald Trump can't use it. Wilson launched the crowdfunding campaign last week, tweeting: “If @Twitter executives won't shut down Trump's violence and hate, then it's up to us. #BuyTwitter #BanTrump.” The GoFundMe page says Trump's tweets “damage the country and put people in harm's way.” As of Aug 23, she had raised about $9,000 of the $1-billion goal. In an e-mailed statement, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the low total shows that the American people like Trump's use of Twitter.

President Donald Trump, stung by days of criticism that he sowed racial division in the United States after deadly clashes in Charlottesville (VA), accused the news media on Aug 22 of misrepresenting what he insisted was his prompt, unequivocal condemnation of bigotry and hatred. Removing his earlier statements about the Charlottesville violence from his jacket pocket, President Trump glibly ticked off a list of racist groups that he had been urged to explicitly denounce, and ultimately did two days after the clashes. But he said the news media quoted him selectively, accused him of responding too late and ignored his message of unity. “I hit ’em with neo-Nazi. I hit them with everything. I got the white supremacists, the neo-Nazi. I got them all in there. Let’s see. KKK, we have KKK,” President Trump said sardonically of his rebuke to Charlottesville racists, after being faulted for failing to condemn those groups in his initial response on the day of the clashes.

In an angry, unbridled and unscripted performance that rivaled the most sulfurous rallies of his presidential campaign, President Trump sought to deflect the anger toward him against the news media, suggesting that they, not he, were responsible for deepening divisions in the country. “It’s time to expose the crooked media deceptions,” President Trump said. He added, “They’re very dishonest people.” “The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself and the fake news,” he said. President Trump also derided the media for focusing on his tweets, which are his preferred form of communication. Pointing repeatedly to the cameras in the middle of a cavernous convention center, President Trump whipped the crowd into fevered chants of “CNN Sucks.” Members of the audience shouted epithets at reporters, some demanding that the news media stop tormenting the president with questions about his ties to Russia.

President Donald Trump stepped on stage in Phoenix (AZ) on Aug 22 with something clearly eating at him. Minutes into his style rally, we learned what: It wasn't the white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis who threw the nation into chaos and allegedly killed a woman in Virginia. Or the intractable 16-year war in Afghanistan that he just announced he's revving up. It's the media.

President Trump spent nearly a third — if not more— of his 90-minute rally rehashing his public remarks in the wake of Charlottesville and complaining that he was widely criticized for them. In fact, about the only time he mentioned the racial tensions and violence stirred up last week was in the context of defending himself. The president was so frustrated with media coverage of him that he printed out copies of some of the remarks he gave in the wake of the violence. He read them aloud to the crowd, pausing to express total disbelief that the tone of the coverage wasn't more positive.

Several research groups in the United States and Europe now see the white supremacist and jihadi threats as two faces of the same coin. They’re working on methods to fight both, together — and slowly, they have come up with ideas for limiting how these groups recruit new members to their cause. Their ideas are grounded in a few truths about how extremist groups operate online, and how potential recruits respond. After speaking to many researchers, I compiled this rough guide for combating online radicalization.
1) Recognize the internet as an extremist breeding ground.
2) Engage directly with potential recruits.

The Office of Science and Technology employs just 40 people, down from roughly 130 under President Barack Obama. The president has yet to nominate a head for the office, or a chief technology officer. At 18F, a tech-consulting group for government agencies inside the General Services Administration, two to three staffers per month have departed since the election. Before the election, the department was adding roughly two employees a month, peaking at a little more than 200 employees overall.

“The swing there is about five employees per month, which after a few months you notice real quickly,” one former 18F engineer says. The Obama administration won rare bipartisan praise for bringing more technologists into government. It created the US Digital Service to improve delivery of government services; the agency helped save the troubled healthcare.gov website and digitized services such as veterans’ health records and the immigration review process. Now some fear such gains will be erased.

After controversy over a broad search warrant that could have identified visitors to an anti-Trump website, the Justice Department says it’s scaling back a demand for information from hosting service DreamHost. Recently, DreamHost disclosed that it was involved in a legal dispute with the department over access to records on the website “disruptj20.org,” which organized protests tied to Donald Trump’s inauguration.

In a legal filing Aug 22, the Justice Department argues that the warrant was proper, but also says DreamHost has since brought up information that was previously “unknown.” In light of that, it has offered to carve out information demanded in the warrant, specifically pledging to not request information like HTTP logs tied to IP addresses. The DOJ says it is only looking for information related to criminal activity on the site, and says that “the government is focused on the use of the Website to organize, to plan, and to effect a criminal act — that is, a riot.” Peaceful protestors, the government argues, are not the targets of the warrant.