Journalism

The closeness of the 2016 Presidential election — 78,000 votes in three states gave Donald Trump the victory — means that small things could have swung the result. So, too, could big things, like former FBI Director James Comey’s late-campaign revelation that the bureau had found new emails that might be relevant to the server investigation. They weren’t, but the announcement resuscitated the subject right as voters were about to head to the polls. However, the inspector general’s report reinforces an unimportant point about this response to the 2016 election.

The relationship between technology platforms and news publishers has endured a fraught 18 months. Even so, the external forces of civic and regulatory pressure are hastening a convergence between the two at an accelerated rate beyond what we saw when we published our first report from this study in March 2017. Journalism has played a critical part in pushing for accountability into the practices of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, yet newsrooms are increasingly oriented toward understanding and leveraging platforms as part of finding a sustainable future.

Since 2004, Pew Research Center has issued an annual report on key audience and economic indicators for a variety of sectors within the US news media industry. On June 13, 2018, Pew released the Newspapers Fact Sheet. 

The White House restricted journalists’ access to parts of President Donald Trump’s summit with Kim Jong Un despite long-standing arrangements intended to ensure the public is kept fully abreast of key presidential moments. Under standard rules agreed to by the White House and the press corps, a full pool of reporters travels with the president at all times and is allowed at any meetings where press access in granted, even if space is limited.

President Donald Trump declared that the nation's "biggest enemy is the Fake News," particularly NBC and CNN for their coverage of the North Korea summit. "So funny to watch the Fake News, especially NBC and CNN," President Trump tweeted. "They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea. 500 days ago they would have 'begged' for this deal-looked like war would break out. Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!"

[Commentary] Although every legitimate news organization made efforts, some better than others, to bring context and even a measure of skepticism into their mix of stories [on the Singapore summit], the event overall was a triumph of Trumpian stagecraft. And the media played its accustomed role.  Because of wall-to-wall media coverage, carefully choreographed visuals and the usual Trumpian bluster, the Singapore summit largely came across as a triumph of personal diplomacy by the president.

The revelation that the Justice Department had seized years of phone and email records from Ali Watkins, a New York Times journalist, raised concerns that the Trump administration was adopting a highly aggressive approach, continuing a crackdown that ramped up in the Obama years. Under Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., the Justice Department obtained private records from reporters at Fox News and The Associated Press. Eventually, facing criticism from the news media, AG Holder strengthened rules meant to minimize the seizure of journalists’ data.

On both sides of the Atlantic, interest in news is high. The daily dramas of the Trump administration and the rollercoaster of the Brexit negotiations have fuelled sales of online subscriptions to US and UK newspapers grappling with the transition from print to a predominantly digital business model. The picture is bleaker for local newspapers. In the US there has been a hollowing out of a once-mighty sector.

On June 5, President Donald Trump tweeted an unfounded conspiracy theory that originated in some of the internet’s worst “fake news” corners. “Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015,” the president wrote. “SPYGATE is in full force!” The supposed source for this claim is text messages between two FBI employees, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were having an affair during the 2016 campaign.

Edward Snowden has no regrets five years on from leaking the biggest cache of top-secret documents in history. He is wanted by the US. He is in exile in Russia. But he is satisfied with the way his revelations of mass surveillance have rocked governments, intelligence agencies and major internet companies.