Journalism

Tronc, the publisher of The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune, announced Sept 5 that it had acquired The Daily News, the nearly 100-year-old tabloid that for decades set the city’s agenda with its gossip, sports and city coverage. The deal represents the end of an era for The News, which was long a voice for New York’s working class. It may also signal the end of the political influence of its owner, the real estate magnate Mortimer B. Zuckerman, who often used the paper’s bold, front-page headline — known as “the wood” — for commentary about candidates and politicians, locally and nationally.

The paper’s circulation, which exceeded two million a day in the 1940s, is now in the low hundred thousands. And The Chicago Tribune reported that Tronc purchased The News for just $1, plus the assumption of liabilities. But while The News wields less influence than it once did, it still has the power to resonate in the city and beyond. In 2017, the paper and ProPublica shared the Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series on the New York Police Department’s widespread abuse of eviction rules.

After an extensive review, the Nation has issued an editor’s note concerning an Aug 9 article that raised questions regarding a consensus finding of the U.S. intelligence community that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked by Russian actors seeking to tilt the playing field in the 2016 presidential election.

“Former NSA experts say it wasn’t a hack at all, but a leak—an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system,” reads the subhead on the story, which was written by Patrick Lawrence, a contributing writer for the magazine. In her note to readers, which now sits atop the Lawrence piece, Nation Editor and Publisher Katrina vanden Heuvel writes, “We believe it is important to challenge questionable conventional wisdom and to foster debate—not police it. Focusing on unreported or inadequately reported issues of major importance and raising questions that are not being asked have always been a central part of our work.”

[Commentary] Six years ago, I was pressured to unpublish a critical piece about Google’s monopolistic practices after the company got upset about it. In my case, the post stayed unpublished. I was working for Forbes at the time, and was new to my job. In addition to writing and reporting, I helped run social media there, so I got pulled into a meeting with Google salespeople about Google’s then-new social network, Plus. The Google salespeople were encouraging Forbes to add Plus’s “+1" social buttons to articles on the site, alongside the Facebook Like button and the Reddit share button. They said it was important to do because the Plus recommendations would be a factor in search results—a crucial source of traffic to publishers.

The online tumult of the 2016 election fed into a growing suspicion of Silicon Valley’s dominance over the public sphere. Across the political spectrum, people have become less trusting of the Big Tech companies that govern most online political expression. Calls for civic responsibility on the part of Silicon Valley companies have replaced the hope that technological innovation alone might bring about a democratic revolution. Despite the focus on algorithms, A.I., filter bubbles, and Big Data, these questions are political as much as technical.

Regulation has become an increasingly popular notion; the Sen Cory Booker (D-NJ) has called for greater antitrust scrutiny of Google and Facebook, while Stephen Bannon reportedly wants to regulate Google and Facebook like public utilities. In the nineteen-thirties, such threats encouraged commercial broadcasters to adopt the civic paradigm. In that prewar era, advocates of democratic radio were united by a progressive vision of pluralism and rationality; today, the question of how to fashion a democratic social media is one more front in our highly divisive culture wars.

[Commentary] In Houston, local journalists were leading the effort to inform people on the ground, explaining how to get rescued, where to go and what to do. What if they hadn’t been there? Melanie Sills, a former editor at the Raleigh News & Observer, argues that extra effort will have to be made to shore up local reporting in the months to come, from national-local partnerships, public-service journalism and elsewhere, and she’s right. For those who want to find charities to support in the days to come, here’s an idea: Alongside shelters and immediate rescue operations, think about finding a way to support local journalism. You never know when you might need it yourself.

[Applebaum writes a biweekly foreign affairs column for The Washington Post]

The United Nations human rights chief said Aug 30 that President Donald Trump’s repeated denunciations of some media outlets as “fake news” could amount to incitement to violence and had potentially dangerous consequences outside the United States.

The rebuke by Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the high commissioner for human rights, at a news conference in Geneva was an unusually forceful criticism of a head of state by a United Nations official. al-Hussein was reacting to President Trump’s recent comments at a rally in Phoenix (AZ) during which he spoke of “crooked media deceptions” in reports of the violent clashes at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville (VA) that resulted in the death of a counterprotester. In Phoenix, the president’s words also appeared to whip up audience hostility toward journalists. “It’s really quite amazing when you think that freedom of the press, not only a cornerstone of the Constitution but very much something the United States defended over the years, is now itself under attack from the president himself,” al-Hussein said. “It’s a stunning turnaround.”

On Aug 25, a judge in south Florida dismissed a lawsuit against the Democratic National Committee, brought by people who accused it of committing fraud during the 2016 primary to the detriment of Sen Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Neither the DNC nor ousted chair Rep Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) responded to the dismissal when asked to comment. Within hours, the attorneys who bought the suit, Jared and Elizabeth Beck, were providing updates on the case to the blogger and fantasy author H.A. Goodman. Calling out the people and outlets who they believe had covered them unfairly, the Becks described a legal system so corrupt that there could be no fair accounting for what the DNC did. It would be up to alternative media to get the truth out.

YouTube, with its easy use, free storage, and possibility of global reach, has become an agora of 2016 primary bitter-enders. YouTube previously played the same role for far right; in reporter John Herrman’s read, it made mini-celebrities out of “monologuists, essayists, performers and vloggers who publish frequent dispatches from their living rooms, their studios or the field, inveighing vigorously against the political left and mocking the ‘mainstream media,’ against which they are defined and empowered.” Something similar, but smaller, has grown up around the people who want to prove that the 2016 primary was stolen from Sanders. Over the weekend, there was no TV coverage of the case; it was easy to spend hours, instead, absorbing punditry on YouTube. The case against the “mainstream media” was easy to make, anyway as the Becks’ lawsuit drew little national attention.

On July 6, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs issued a scathing report detailing what the Committee characterized as a seething epidemic of classified information making its way into the press. Titled, “State Secrets: How an Avalanche of Media Leaks Is Harming National Security,” the 23-page document cites “at least 125 stories” between Inauguration day and May 25 “with leaked information potentially damaging to national security.” That last part is debatable.

While the report does include a handful of truly astonishing disclosures—things like FISA warrants and transcripts of private phone calls with foreign leaders—most of the document essentially reads like a chronology of what the public has learned about the interlocking investigations into the Trump administration and its potential ties to Russia. The bylines of New York Times and Washington Post reporters are especially prolific. “Listing individual reporters who allegedly harmed national security is something that illiberal nations do,” the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote in response. Trump’s election was not a total sea change. Those who spoke with me agreed that the previous administration laid the groundwork for the current leak jihad. But his very public war on the press, along with his suspicion of his own intelligence agencies, has significantly raised the temperature.

A federal judge on Aug 29 dismissed a defamation lawsuit filed by the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin against The New York Times, saying Palin’s complaint failed to show that a mistake in an editorial was made maliciously. “What we have here is an editorial, written and rewritten rapidly in order to voice an opinion on an immediate event of importance, in which are included a few factual inaccuracies somewhat pertaining to Palin that are very rapidly corrected,” Judge Jed S. Rakoff of Federal District Court in Manhattan said in his ruling. “Negligence this may be; but defamation of a public figure it plainly is not.”

[Commentary] Three days before Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, President Trump told Americans that most journalists are “bad people” who “don't like our country.” As the media covers the devastation in Houston and the surrounding area, however, even Breitbart News has begrudgingly acknowledged that the president's characterization might not be entirely fair, reporting that “journalists are helping to direct emergency crews to save stranded drivers rather than encouraging enraged mobs to riot against the police.”

In all seriousness, the response to the storm has showcased the best of elected officials, first responders, next-door neighbors and, yes, even reporters. The media's reputation is hardly the most important thing at stake in the midst of a natural disaster. But my job is to write about the press, and it is impossible not to view the work of reporters on the ground — disseminating vital information and relaying the stories of victims and heroes — against the backdrop of Trump's ceaseless campaign to undermine the media's credibility.