Journalism

Don’t believe your eyes and ears. Believe only me. That has been President Trump’s message to the public for the past two years, pounded in without a break: The press is the enemy. The news is fake. President Donald Trump has done his best to prepare the ground for a moment like Aug 21. In a divided, disbelieving nation, will this really turn out to be the epic moment it looks like? Or will Trump’s intense, years-long campaign to undermine the media — and truth itself — pay off now, in the clutch? 

The first denial that Donald Trump knew about hush-money payments to silence women came four days before he was elected president, when his spokeswoman Hope Hicks said, without hedging, “We have no knowledge of any of this.” The second came in January of 2018, when his attorney Michael Cohen said the allegations were “outlandish.” By March, two of the president’s spokesmen — Raj Shah and Sarah Huckabee Sanders — said publicly that President Trump denied all the allegations and any payments.

The Broadcasting Board of Governors has updated its brand. The board, which oversees government-backed international programming services including the Voice of America, is now the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM). The reboot is meant to convey that the digital age agency now extends far beyond TV and radio to include digital and mobile platforms.  The agency is headed by John Lansing as CEO.  "The term 'broadcasting' does not accurately describe what we do," said Lansing.

As national media organizations contemplate how to mitigate their trust deficit with the American people, a solution emerges from the 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey: Bag the coverage of President Donald Trump and Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency, and go wall-to-wall on zoning hearings, bus-route changes, liquor-license revocations and softball games. Local news, that is. The survey, after all, shows that people trust sources of local reporting far more than national outlets.

President Donald Trump sought to clarify how much of the press he sees as “the enemy of the people.” He put it at about 80 percent. During an interview at the White House with Fox News, he was asked: “Is the press the enemy of the people?” “No, not at all. But the fake news is,” President Trump told Ainsley Earhardt of “Fox & Friends.” “And the fake news is comprised of — it’s a lot. It’s a big chunk, okay? Somebody said, ‘What’s the chunk?’ I said, ‘80 percent.’ It’s a lot. It’s a lot. If I do something well, it’s not reported.

The News Media Alliance has told the Federal Trade Commission that it needs to take action to "rein in tech giants' anticompetitive conduct." That came in comments to the agency in advance of a planned series of public hearings over the next six months or so on competition and consumer protection policy in the digital age. It told the FTC that the Googles and Facebooks of the world did not get to be dominant in distribution and monetization on their merits alone.

Every year since 2004, Pew Research Center has issued an annual assessment of the state of the news media that tracks key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors within the US news media industry. Here are the key findings for 2017:

The News Media Alliance, which represents the newspaper industry, laid out a potential antitrust case against its foes, Google and Facebook, in comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission. The organization outlined legal considerations — including non-price harm to consumers, such as the newspaper industry’s ability to sustain journalism — and explained “how they connect to a potential antitrust case against one or more platforms.” 

[Commentary] Nothing immediately changed as a result of the decision by hundreds of newspapers across the country to run simultaneous, but independent, editorials defending freedom of the press and deploring President Donald Trump’s identification of the media as an enemy of the American people. Still, the newspapers’ action is a significant event. Depending on what happens in the next few years, it might even prove historic—for two reasons. First, the action is collective; second, it is institutional.

You can boil Facebook’s election plan down into three main challenges: