Journalism

Cable news outlets are pulling huge ratings and reporters are becoming overnight celebrities as the attacks between President Donald Trump and the media enter strange new territory. The White House has agitated for the fight, believing that every day it spends feuding with the media exposes further press bias and energizes the conservative base. But Trump’s claim that MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski was “bleeding badly from a face-lift" unified the media, with anchors from Fox News to CNN expressing outrage at the president’s tweets and pointing to them as evidence that the press should not treat Trump like a normal president.

It seems clear, at this point, that the White House would prefer not to hold regular press briefings. But President Trump and his aides do not want to be the ones to pull the plug. They want journalists to do it. , making the briefing situation so untenable that reporters might bail first. If successful, Team Trump will achieve its desired outcome while avoiding the blame. The apparent strategy has three prongs: Turn off the cameras; Stop answering questions; Show the media at its worst.

[Commentary] In hindsight, it’s easy to say CNN shouldn’t have gone with such a flimsy, improperly vetted story. Unfortunately, journalism isn’t a hindsight business. Journalism happens in real time, against a deadline clock, and in a competitive atmosphere. Only ombudsmen, press critics and libel attorneys get to second-guess what they do. As the Supreme Court noted in the landmark libel case Times v. Sullivan, the First Amendment is of little use unless we provide “breathing space” for controversial reports that end up containing unintentional mistakes—like the CNN story—as long as they’re made without malice.

The hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” made the startling allegation that senior White House officials threatened them with a negative story in the National Enquirer unless they called President Trump and apologized. Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, who are engaged to be married, revealed the alleged threat in an op-ed in The Washington Post that was published the morning after President Trump attacked Brzezinski in two widely condemned tweets.

"This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas," they wrote. Brzezinski and Scarborough detailed the alleged blackmail attempt during June 30's episode of "Morning Joe." “We got a call that, hey, the National Enquirer is going to run a negative story against you guys, and it was, Donald is friends with — the president is friends with — the guy that runs the National Enquirer,” Scarborough said.

President Donald Trump told supporters he wanted to sue CNN at a private fundraiser. “Boy, did CNN get killed over the last few days,” the president said, referring to a retracted story that linked Trump ally Anthony Scaramucci to a Russian investment fund, triggering resignations at the outlet. “It’s a shame what they’ve done to the name CNN, that I can tell you,” continued Trump, who frequently refers to the network as "fake news." “But as far as I’m concerned, I love it. If anybody’s a lawyer in the house and thinks I have a good lawsuit — I feel like we do. Wouldn’t that be fun?” he said. The president’s comments come as tensions have flared between the administration and the media.

[Commentary] We don’t yet know to what extent Donald Trump will succeed in remaking the United States, but his candidacy and presidency are already remaking American journalism. It is not just that the ranting and raving on talk radio, on cable news, on websites, on Twitter have grown, if anything, louder. What’s more significant is how the political world’s encounter with President Trump is changing our most respected journalism organizations—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the network evening newscasts and CNN.

The big news in American journalism today has been that reporters, editors and producers at legacy journalism organizations have become so eager to dispute the more questionable pronouncements and proposals of the Trump administration. Increasingly, they are prepared to label the president’s wilder statements and tweets “falsehoods” or even “lies.” The big news is that many of our best journalists seem, in news coverage, not just opinion pieces, to be moving away from balance and nonpartisanship.

[Mitchell Stephens is a professor of journalism at New York University]

Suffolk University released detailed numbers from a poll it conducted with USA Today, exploring, among other things, how views of political issues overlap with public confidence in various media outlets. In this poll, 60 percent of Republicans identified Fox News as the outlet in which they had the most confidence. Every other network combined for 23 percent. By contrast, only 4 percent of Democrats cited Fox as their most trusted. (Most trusted among Democrats was CNN, at 20 percent.) On issue after issue, those who most trusted Fox News held positions that were much more favorable to the president and his party than survey respondents overall. For example, consider President Trump’s job approval. More than half of the population overall disapproves of Trump’s performance. Among those who trust Fox , 9 in 10 approved. Nearly three-quarters of that group think America is headed in the right direction; overall, half think we’re on the wrong track.

More than half of Americans think the US media reports news with a bias. The good news? The press gets a better grade today than in recent years, according to a new survey.

The 20th annual State of the First Amendment survey, out from The First Amendment Center at the Newseum Institute in Washington (DC), found 57% of Americans who participated in the survey said that the news media reports with bias. Even at a time when the Trump Administration is clashing with the mainstream media, this response is better than in 2016 when 77% of Americans said the media was biased. A similar response was found in 2015, when 76% answered that way. Respondents thought more favorably of the press in 2013 and 2014, when 54% and 59% said they thought the media was biased Perhaps fueling the lack of trust in the media is the vacuum in which many people get their news. More than half (53%) of the 1,009 adults, surveyed in May 2017, said they preferred to get news from outlets aligned with their political views. The center's executive director Lata Nott called that finding "both obvious and disheartening" and "one of the factors that keeps us so divided," in an essay accompanying the report.

A version of the the New York Times’s Trump bump has materialized across the media landscape, as readers have been galvanized by a man who may well be the most polarizing president in American history. But the boon carries significant risks, especially for the Times. And it highlights some business-model vulnerabilities for a newspaper that is struggling mightily to wade through a brutal media climate: Not only is the company becoming increasingly dependent on Trump for its core subscription revenue, but its print readers are subsidizing the rest of the operation through repeated, and often opaque, price increases—a practice that at some point will have to ease.

Editorial staffers at The New York Times will stage a walk-out from the newsroom on June 29 to protest potential layoffs and staff reductions, according to an announcement from their union. "New York Times editors, reporters and staff will come together to leave the newsroom and their offices in protest of management’s elimination of copy editors," reads the NewsGuild of New York announcement. "After a year and a half of uncertainty about their futures, New York Times editors and staff have expressed feelings of betrayal by management. The staff has been offered buyouts and if a certain number of buyouts is not reached, layoffs will ensue for the editorial staff and potentially reporters as well." Recently, NewsGuild President Grant Glickson penned an open letter to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet to share how the union feels about the layoffs, calling it a "humiliating process" and noting that the number of editors being let go "dumbfoundingly unrealistic."