Journalism

The Trump administration, the Federal Communications Commission, Congress and greedy companies are attacking people’s rights to connect and communicate so relentlessly that staying on top of everything that’s happening can feel like an impossible task. That’s why we’ve put together this handy list of five of the biggest threats people are facing:

1) The FCC’s scheme to kill Net Neutrality
2) Anti-Net Neutrality legislation
3) Mega media mergers
4) Local news crisis
5) Lies, lies and more lies: The proliferation of fake news — which Trump embraces — is making it hard to get the truth out about these attacks on our rights to connect and communicate, what’s at stake and what we can do about it.

[Commentary] During her news briefings the week of Sept 11, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has repeatedly suggested that former FBI director James B. Comey may have broken the law and should be investigated. To be clear, this “prosecution from the lectern” is not illegal. It’s probably a sign of the times that it doesn’t even seem particularly surprising. But it should be deeply disturbing.

The president, of course, is the head of the executive branch and the attorney general’s boss. But when it comes to criminal prosecution, there is a long-standing norm of Justice Department independence. Presidents typically don’t interfere with or comment on criminal investigations. This norm is central to our commitment to the rule of law. It reduces the danger that criminal prosecution may be used for political ends. Presidents typically avoid even the appearance of using the justice system to punish political foes or help political allies. That’s banana-republic stuff — it’s not supposed to happen here. Sanders’s accusations from the lectern are simply one symptom of a much larger problem. Anyone who cares about the integrity of the criminal justice system has reason to be concerned by the behavior of this administration.

[Randall D. Eliason teaches white-collar criminal law at George Washington University Law School.]

The White House on Sept 15 hammered ESPN, calling the network “hypocritical” for what it says is a double-standard in the way it treats conservative and liberal employees. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders noted the network suspended longtime anchor Linda Cohn, who said earlier this year in a radio interview that left-wing bias at the network had contributed to a loss of subscribers. The latest political controversy at ESPN involves Jemele Hill, who this week called President Trump a white supremacist. The network distanced itself from the anchor but did not fire or suspend her.

Hundreds of TV viewers are taking up President Trump's war with CNN by filing Federal Communications Commission complaints calling for the news network to be punished and taken off the tube, records show — even though the agency has zero authority over cable television.

Since late June, viewers have filed more than 1,100 FCC complaints about news coverage of President Donald Trump. No other topic has consumed them as overwhelmingly as CNN, the news channel President Trump has trashed more than any other. Out of the complaints, about 750 call for CNN to be taken off the air or lose its [non-existent] broadcasting license. Nearly a dozen accuse CNN of broadcasting "illegal" content and committing "treason" or "crimes against America." One says the channel should face a $100 million government fine. In hundreds of other complaints, viewers call the news channel "disgusting," "fake," "bogus," "fictitious," "communistic," and a "danger" to the President. Nearly all of these complaints are misplaced, because cable news is not regulated by any government agency and the FCC has no ability to police it. Several viewers even complained about The New York Times and Washington Post, two newspapers that are in no way regulated by the government.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding $3.3 million to five regional journalism collaborations to promote local news coverage and newsgathering efficiency. The grants will help a total of 23 public media stations coordinate news services as well as produce more community-based, multiplatform coverage of local and regional issues. The collaborations will increase local news coverage at a time when the full-time newspaper jobs that drive local reporting have dramatically declined, as documented by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics (OES). In addition to news from underreported rural areas, small towns and urban centers, public media stations play a vital role serving as the backbone of the Emergency Alert System.

The collaboration grants include:

1. Kansas Regional Journalism Collaboration, $502,327. Lead station KCUR (Kansas City) will collaborate with KMUW (Wichita), Kansas Public Radio (Lawrence) and High Plains Public Radio (Garden City) on a statewide news service focusing on statehouse politics, health, education, natural resources, rural life, and agriculture.
2. Collaboration in the Mountain West, $475,000. Lead station Boise State Public Radio (Boise, Idaho) will collaborate with KUNC (Greeley, Colo.), Yellowstone Public Radio (Billings, Mont.), Wyoming Public Media (Laramie), KRCC (Colorado Springs) and KUER (Salt Lake City) on a news service focusing on land and water resource management, regional growth, issues in the rural West, and Western culture.
3. StateImpact Pennsylvania, $652,902. Lead station WITF (Harrisburg) will work with WHYY (Philadelphia), WESA (Pittsburgh) and the public radio program Allegheny Front on a statewide news service focusing on the energy industry, the economic and environmental impact of energy choices, and how energy production affects the health of citizens and communities.
4. California Counts, $994,909. Lead station Southern California Public Radio (KPCC) will work with KQED (San Francisco), KPBS (San Diego), Capital Public Radio (Sacramento) and the non-profit Sacramento-based newsroom CALmatters.org on a statewide, multi-platform news service focusing on statehouse issues, economic opportunity, safety and quality of life, and the next California Dream.
5. Sustainability Regional Journalism Collaboration, $699,847. Lead station Arizona PBS, at the Arizona State Cronkite School of Journalism, will collaborate with KJZZ (Phoenix), Rocky Mountain PBS, KPCC (Los Angeles) and PBS SoCal on a news service focusing on emerging solutions to water resources, renewable energy, climate change and urbanization.

An official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has instructed employees not to speak directly with members of the press. Several health journalists quickly condemned the CDC move, calling it “really disturbing” and a “gag order." A late August e-mail by a CDC public affairs officer directs staff to route any correspondence with journalists—“everything from formal interview requests to the most basic of data requests”—through the communication office at its Atlanta headquarters.

Facebook touts its partnership with outside fact-checkers as a key prong in its fight against fake news, but a major new Yale University study finds that fact-checking and then tagging inaccurate news stories on social media doesn’t work. The study found that tagging false news stories as “disputed by third party fact-checkers” has only a small impact on whether readers perceive their headlines as true.

Overall, the existence of “disputed” tags made participants just 3.7 percentage points more likely to correctly judge headlines as false, the study said. The researchers also found that, for some groups—particularly, Trump supporters and adults under 26—flagging bogus stories could actually end up increasing the likelihood that users will believe fake news.

Journalists at Gizmodo Media Group haven’t shied away from hard-hitting reporting since Hulk Hogan’s privacy lawsuit bankrupted its parent company, Gawker, in 2016. That’s according to Gizmodo general counsel Lynn Oberlander, who says “the reason they hired me is because I’m a journalist’s lawyer, and they want to be in a position to do aggressive journalism.” “Our president has contributed to the atmosphere with which people think they can bring crazy claims against the media and maybe win,” Oberlander said. Oberlander said libel, in particular, “is back.” Recent big-money settlements have had a chilling effect on sections of the press.

Google is planning to end its “first click free” policy that enables users of its search engine to bypass paywalls on news websites, a move that could help publishers boost subscriptions, News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson said.

Google for years has encouraged publishers to be part of the program, which allows search users to access a limited amount of content on subscription-based news sites free of charge. Some publishers say the policy has hurt subscription growth and say their sites are penalized in Google’s search rankings if they don’t participate in the program. The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by News Corp, opted out of the program in 2017 and saw its traffic from Google search fall 38% and from Google News fall 89% compared with a year earlier because its stories were demoted in search results, a spokesman said. Now, Google is ready to end the first-click-free program and allow publishers to choose how users access their sites from its search results. People familiar with the situation said Google will still enable subscription-oriented publishers to give search users a free sample of their stories if they choose to, but they won’t be penalized if they don’t.

The mainstream-media critics over at the Media Research Center have been evaluating “evaluative” statements about President Donald Trump on the three main nightly newscasts — ABC’s “World News Tonight,” “CBS Evening News” and “NBC Nightly News.” Over the summer — June, July and August — 91 percent of such statements have been negative, as opposed to 9 percent positive, the organization has determined. “Analyzing the networks’ spin makes it clear that the goal of all of this heavy coverage is not to promote the President, but to punish him,” write Rich Noyes and Mike Ciandella in a posting on NewsBusters, the very prolific blog of the MRC.

For the sake of comparison, Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center earlier this year found that negative Trump coverage swamped positive Trump coverage over his first 100 days in office.