Government & Communications

President Donald Trump bashed the American press corps on July 6, singling out CNN and others as "fake news." That wasn't new, of course. What was different was where it occurred. This latest example of Trump's anti-media rhetoric -- perhaps the defining element of his presidency thus far -- came during a visit to Warsaw, Poland, his second overseas trip since taking office. In the past, presidents have often used foreign visits to preach the value of a free press. President Trump went a different way.

A federal judge in California has decided to allow Twitter’s lawsuit against the attorney general’s office to go forward. She rejected arguments that the social media giant should not be allowed to be precise in its transparency reports when describing how it responds to the government’s requests for user data.

Twitter has argued that, just as it has been precise in other areas of its transparency report, so too should it be allowed to say precisely how many national security orders it has received from American authorities. For now, under federal law, it is only allowed to describe those numbers in vague ranges, such as “0 to 499,” and “500 to 999,” and so forth. Lawyers for Twitter say that this law constitutes a violation of the company’s First Amendment rights and is “prior restraint,” a concept of blocking legitimate speech before it is uttered. Attorneys from the Department of Justice claimed in a hearing in federal court in Oakland, California, earlier this year that if Twitter is allowed to specifically say how many national security orders it has received, potential adversaries could somehow use that number to inflict harm. But the judge didn’t buy it.

The US State Department wants to team up with other government agencies and Hollywood in a bid to create a "fake Twitter feud" about the importance of intellectual property rights. As part of this charade, the State Department's Bureau of Economic Affairs says it has been seeking the participation of the US Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and "others."

To make the propaganda plot seem more legitimate, the State Department is trying to enlist Stanford Law School and "similar academic institutions" to play along on the @StateDept feed on Twitter. "We're not going to participate," said Mark Lemley, the director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology at Stanford Law School. He recently received an e-mail and a telephone call from the State Department seeking his assistance. "Apparently there is not enough fake news for the US government," Lemley told his Facebook followers. On the Facebook post, he redacted the name of the official who sent him the letter out of privacy interests. The RIAA declined comment, as did the trademark office. The MPAA said it is not participating.

The Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund initiatives are important, complex programs that are as necessary as they are challenging to manage. The Government Accountability Office Lifeline report provides additional evidence that flaws in these programs can be used by unscrupulous actors seeking to line their own pockets at the expense of taxpayers and populations truly in need; and that while the FCC’s Lifeline program is essential to those that need it, there is significant room for both improved efficiency and performance.

CNN and its president, Jeff Zucker, are in the middle of their most intense bout yet: an unlikely public fight with the leader of the free world. It is rare that a single news organization attracts the level of ire mustered by President Donald Trump, who over the weekend posted on Twitter a video that portrayed him wrestling a figure with the logo of CNN for a head. But the president’s denunciations — in stinging tweets and slashing speeches, in phrases like “fraud news” and “garbage journalism” — have far outstripped his criticisms of other prominent news outlets, like The New York Times or The Washington Post. And his attacks have spawned a cottage industry of Trump supporters who have declared a digital war of sorts against CNN, including gotcha videos of network employees and threatening messages sent to anchors’ cellphones.

White House advisers have discussed a potential point of leverage over their adversary, a senior administration official said: a pending merger between CNN’s parent company, Time Warner, and AT&T. President Trump’s Justice Department will decide whether to approve the merger, and while analysts say there is little to stop the deal from moving forward, the president’s animus toward CNN remains a wild card.

President Donald Trump took his fight with the news media to the world stage on July 6, hammering CNN and his political enemies in the press as “fake news” at a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda in Warsaw. President Trump gave the first question of the press conference to Daily Mail editor David Martosko, a Trump ally who has been considered for various administration posts. That led CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta to allege a set-up. Martosko asked President Trump about the controversy that exploded around CNN July 5, when the network published a story claiming to know the identity of the man who created a video the President tweeted, which showed him tackling a wrestler with the CNN logo emblazoned over his face. President Trump didn’t miss a beat, saying that the network “has some pretty serious problems.” “They have been fake news for a long time,” President Trump said. “They’ve been covering me in a very dishonest way.”

At the press conference, President Trump also slammed NBC, noting that he once pulled big ratings for the network, which aired his program “The Apprentice." Then-NBC president Jeff Zucker now heads CNN. “NBC is equally as bad, despite the fact that I made them a fortune, they forgot about that,” President Trump said. “But I will say that CNN has really taken it too seriously and I think has hurt themselves very badly. Very, very badly. What we want to see in the United States is honest, beautiful, free, but honest press. We want fair press. We don’t want fake news, and by the way, not everybody is fake news. Bad thing. Very bad for our country.”

The Reddit user said he never intended his anti-CNN meme — you know, the one tweeted by President Donald Trump in which the now-president beats up CNN in a wrestling match — to become a call for violence against journalists. #CNNBlackmail was the top trending Twitter topic July 5, thanks to the efforts of a furious Trump Internet, who had concluded that the user’s apology was forced by a “threat” from CNN. Their evidence? A story CNN itself published, detailing its attempts to contact and identify the anonymous Reddit user ahead of their apology, whose offensive posting history suddenly became part of a national news story.

The part of the article that infuriated the Trump Internet — and people on both sides of the political spectrum, who questioned the ethical standards of the network’s decision — had to do with how CNN described its reasoning for not identifying the Redditor by name. Reporter Andrew Kaczynski wrote that CNN had spoken with the person behind the account, and would not identify the user because “he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology,” who had promised not to continue flooding the Internet with offensive memes. But, he wrote, “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.”

[Commentary] Is the President an enemy of free speech or merely exercising it in a way that liberals dislike? Personal experience has taught me that the line between these two things is vanishingly thin. Horrible things have been said about President Trump, true. He could argue that he's simply fighting back, yes. But fighting fire with fire inevitably leads to more fire, and while I'm sympathetic towards some of Trump's agenda, I look upon the state of politics in this era with despair. It is not unreasonable for journalists to say "enough is enough."

[Timothy Stanley is a historian and columnist for Britain's Daily Telegraph.]

[Commentary] Remember when we used to obsess about every presidential tweet? When every story was about us? When Donald Trump’s war with the media was, really, the only thing that mattered? We need to stop. Stop reporting on every tweet with the volume of a declaration of war; stop letting the president and his staff frame every misstep and scandal as a media story; stop treating Trump’s war with the press as if it’s the most important thing happening in this country. It’s not. Our response to each of Trump’s media-bashing episodes comes off as if we’re hearing them for the first time. Can you believe he said that? Could this be the thing that finally does him in? Does he have no respect for the First Amendment? The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.

The media’s impulse, which is understandable, is to keep the focus on his threats to the press, and not to let them become normalized. But we have reached the point at which the media response has become counterproductive and even beneficial to the president and his lackeys in the White House, who have turned the West Wing into a megaphone for Trump’s faux media war and reporters in the White House briefing room into photo-op foils. It’s amazing, and absurd, that we turn over live television to the press secretary to air the administration’s latest broadside against the press, and let senior administration officials go off the record to attack our own outlets. Every time President Trump fires a shot in his war against the media, there’s an opportunity for a more serious, nuanced argument about why everyone benefits from a free and vigorous press: Airing a president and his policies to open discussion and scrutiny results in better government.

[Commentary] On Election Night 2016, a few hours before the results were fully in, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I’m staying at 18F”. I felt it was important, to me, to make a decision based on principle before I knew the outcome. Earlier in July, I decided to leave government service.

They may seem completely unrelated to most, but I’ll try to explain why to me they were evidence of the same dangerous “denormalization” of our government. The first thing that happened was the release of the written testimony of the former FBI Director, James Comey. For anyone in public service to ask for the personal loyalty of anyone else in government is an affront to our core values. For the President to ask it of the FBI Director is beyond “not normal." The second thing that occurred that very same day is that the technology and design organization I have worked for since before its public launch, 18F (and the larger service we created for it and its sibling organizations, the Technology Transformation Service), is being reorganized via administrative order into the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Federal Acquisition Service.