Journalism

The decisions by networks to go all-in on Donald Trump in 2016 may sound a distant echo today. But it’s one that is still being heard and felt in the wake of the networks’ decision to air President Donald Trump’s Jan 8 speech about a border crisis that doesn’t exist and a wall that the vast majority of US taxpayers don’t want to pay for. News outlets need to have a deeper reckoning about their role in enabling President Donald Trump’s lies and spreading his racist propaganda.

President Donald Trump is ramping up his efforts to make a public case for his border wall as the partial government shutdown is now in its third week, planning a prime-time address Jan 8 and a visit to the border Jan 10. Some Democrats responded to the news of Trump’s address with concern that he would mislead the American people about the situation at the border.

President Donald Trump launched a fresh attack on the news media, writing in tweets that it consists of many “crazed lunatics,” and he again invoked the derogatory term “enemy of the people.” “With all of the success that our Country is having, including the just released jobs numbers which are off the charts, the Fake News & totally dishonest Media concerning me and my presidency has never been worse,” President Trump said in the first of the tweets.

Tech giants are facing a barrage of tough, negative coverage, with some of the same dynamics that drive saturation coverage of President Donald Trump. Many major news organizations — including The Washington Post, The Atlantic and CNN — are staffing up for greatly expanded tech coverage because: 1) Tech is the new politics. 2) This is partly in reaction to the techlash and partly in preparation for a post-Trump world, when websites can't count on politics to drive massive year-round traffic.

The Los Angeles Times says an unusual cyberattack that disrupted its printing operations and those at newspapers in San Diego and Florida the weekend of Dec 28 came from outside the United States, but it stopped short of accusing a specific foreign government. Computer malware attacks on infrastructure, while relatively rare, are hardly new: Russia has been credibly accused of shutting down power grids in Ukraine and a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia, Iran crippled a casino in Las Vegas, and the United States and Israel attacked a nuclear enrichment plant in Iran.

Television viewers on New Year’s Eve tune in for performances by the latest hitmakers and nostalgia acts. This time around, 11 journalists — ranging from familiar faces like Martha Raddatz of ABC to behind-the-scenes editors like Karen Toulon of Bloomberg News — shared the Times Square limelight, part of an effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists and organizers to recognize the erosion of press freedoms at home and abroad.

In a year-end report, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted 53 journalists killed between Jan 1 and Dec 14, including 34 targeted in reprisal for their work — nearly double the 18 such murders it recorded in 2017. The growing number of journalists jailed or attacked on that pretext [of dissemintating "false" or "fake" news] is one illustration of the deleterious influence that President Donald Trump has had on press freedom globally. His labeling of the US media as the “enemy of the people” and charges of “fake news” have been imitated by regimes around the world.

New studies suggest that efforts to bring transparency to media — including attempts by journalists to publicly defend their work, media literacy campaigns, more transparent funding and improved fact-checking partnerships — have helped the media recover a bit of trust with the public after hitting an all-time low in 2016. While trust in the news media has recovered slightly since 2016, it still remains low compared to decades of prior research conducted by Gallup.

Four different Time covers feature journalists from around the world. Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi embassy in Turkey earlier in 2018, appears alone in one, while staff from the Capital Gazette, the US newspaper where five people were killed this year, feature in another. Pictures of Maria Ressa, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo appear on the final two. Ressa is the editor of Rappler, a Philippine news website critical of the country's leadership, while Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo were imprisoned in Myanmar for investigating the massacre of Rohingya Muslims.

Social media sites have surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans: One-in-five US adults say they often get news via social media, slightly higher than the share who often do so from print newspapers (16%) for the first time since Pew Research Center began asking these questions. In 2017, the portion who got news via social media was about equal to the portion who got news from print newspapers.