Journalism

A new study of millennial public radio listeners suggests that stations should focus on delivering more local and on-demand content to bolster their appeal to the country’s largest generation.

The Millennial Research Project, commissioned by the Public Radio Program Directors Association, found that millennials don’t fit commonly cited stereotypes of being lazy and addicted to technology. It also suggests that their habits are changing how media content is consumed. A common theme from the interviews was that respondents “hold public radio in the highest regard and commonly compare it favorably with the most credible news outlets,” according to an executive summary. But some interviewees also voiced frustrations. Paul Jacobs, VP and GM of Jacobs Media, said that he noticed a shift in perception after the election. Some respondents said they’re “agitated that journalists on public radio are not going far enough, they’re not questioning hard enough, they’re letting people get away with saying things that might not be true,” Jacobs said. “These are perceptions, but they were deeply embedded.” Those respondents “still value public radio,” he said. But “they’re getting a little irritated” and ”they feel there are times when public radio is falling short,” he added.

[Commentary] “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem,” Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said in a talk at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York. He believes that journalists must state their biases up front and not pretend to be magically free of the beliefs or assumptions that everyone has. If objectivity is a “view from nowhere,” it may be out of date. What’s never out of date, though, is clear truth-telling. Journalists should indeed stand for some things. They should stand for factual reality. For insistence on what actually happened, not revisionism. For getting answers to questions that politicians don’t want to answer. Can journalism be both impartial and forceful? That’s not only a possibility but, more than ever, a necessity. In dealing with the false-equivalency president they helped to get elected, the news media may have learned something. The best way to be fair is not to be falsely evenhanded, giving equal weight to unequal sides. It’s to push for the truth, and tell it both accurately and powerfully.

President Donald Trump complained that the "fake news" media took his remarks about the violence in Charlottesville out of context, after saying "both" white supremacist groups and counterprotesters were to blame for the violence. "The public is learning (even more so) how dishonest the Fake News is. They totally misrepresent what I say about hate, bigotry etc. Shame!" President Trump tweeted.

President Donald Trump parroted multiple right-wing media talking points during a press conference as he responded to questions about deadly white supremacist violence in Charlottesville (VA). President Trump, following in the footsteps of right-wing media personalities, mostly from Fox News, called counter-protesters the “alt-left,” suggested that calls to take down Confederate statues is a slippery slope that could lead to demands to take down statues of other historical figures, and defended his failure to condemn white supremacists in his initial response to the violence.

The question of how to cover the alt-right and its leaders has long been a complicated one. It's grown even more so given that President Donald Trump appointed leaders of that movement—including White House adviser Steve Bannon, who previously ran the alt-right media company Breitbart—to his staff. At its core, the mainstream press is grappling with this conundrum: Ignore these groups and risk allowing a potential public threat to go unreported; shine too bright a light on them, and risk amplifying their message—or worse, attracting new acolytes to the cause.

There’s no right approach to covering this growing movement, but one thing is certain: The press has erred on the side of overexposure. It’s positioned the alt-right in the center of President Trump's story, in part because of the shock value of the movement’s actions. This fringe group has taken the country’s implicit history of racism and made it explicit, which is certainly newsworthy. But that's brought unpleasant side effects, namely, giving the leaders of these hate groups coverage disproportionate to their influence. After all, it took a whole lot of mainstream Republicans to help usher President Trump into office. He received the greatest number of primary votes in the history of the Republican party. He also won the general election with 88 percent of Republican party votes, according to exit polls. The right got President Trump elected; the alt-right was merely a subset. But as Trump's comments indicate, he clearly believes it is a crucial subset.

What would possess the president of the United States, after he finally called out white supremacists, to return a day later to the flimsy position that attracted so much criticism in the first place? Part of the answer is that he hates the media and just can't stand to give reporters what they want — or admit that he was wrong.

Take it from someone who knows President Trump pretty well. “I think there's — it's almost like a counterintuitive thing with him, as it relates to the media,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told Stephen Colbert on “Late Show.” “The media's expecting him to do something; he sometimes does the exact opposite.” Scaramucci shared his insight before President Trump doubled down on remarks he delivered over the weekend, when white supremacists protesting the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville clashed with counterprotesters. Though it was a Nazi sympathizer who drove a car into a crowd, killing one and injuring 19 others, the president reiterated his position that “both sides” were to blame for the violence while speaking at an impromptu news conference at Trump Tower in New York. This was President Trump, furious at the media, freelancing in self-destructive fashion.

President Donald Trump fashions himself as a CEO president. But he's feuding with one of America's most famous, most respected and wealthiest business leaders -- Amazon's Jeff Bezos -- mainly because the company is so successful. In his latest attack on Amazon, President Trump said on Twitter that Amazon "is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt - many jobs being lost." It is true that Amazon has wreaked havoc on the traditional retail industry.

The present work proposes the use of social media as a tool for better understanding the relationship between a journalists’ social network and the content they produce. Specifically, we ask: what is the relationship between the ideological leaning of a journalist’s social network on Twitter and the news content he or she produces? Using a novel dataset linking over 500,000 news articles produced by 1,000 journalists at 25 different news outlets, we show a modest correlation between the ideologies of who a journalist follows on Twitter and the content he or she produces. This research can provide the basis for greater self-reflection among media members about how they source their stories and how their own practice may be colored by their online networks. For researchers, the findings furnish a novel and important step in better understanding the construction of media stories and the mechanics of how ideology can play a role in shaping public information.

President Donald Trump angrily defended himself on Aug 15 against criticism that he did not specifically condemn Nazi and white supremacist groups following the weekend’s deadly racial unrest in Virginia, and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down statues of Confederate leaders would escalate to the desecration of George Washington.

In a long, combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan, the president repeatedly rejected a torrent of bipartisan criticism for waiting two days before naming the right-wing groups and placing blame on “many sides” for the violence on Aug 12 that ended with the death of a young woman after a car crashed into a crowd. He said that “before I make a statement, I like to know the facts.” And he criticized “alt-left” groups that he claimed were “very, very violent” when they sought to confront the white nationalist and Nazi groups that had gathered in Charlottesville (VA) to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a park. He said there is “blame on both sides.” President Trump unleashed a torrent of frustration at the news media, saying they were being “fake” because they did not acknowledge that his initial statement about the Charlottesville protest was “very nice.” Again and again, President Trump said that the portrayal of nationalist protesters in the city were not all Nazis or white supremacists, and he said it was unfair to suggest that they were.

Theories abound about why President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted that “many sides” are to blame for the white supremacist-fueled violence in Virginia over the weekend. Some suggested the president does not want to alienate whites who voted for him out of a sense of racial grievance. Others said he was offering his white nationalist supporters a wink and a nod. Yet another concluded advisers like Stephen K. Bannon must be influencing President Trump.

But there is an alternate explanation, one that is espoused by many on the right and repeated on an almost daily basis in the conservative news media that consumes so much of the president’s attention and energy. In this version of events, a violent and dangerous left fringe is ignored by news media that would rather elevate far-right extremism as the nation’s more urgent threat. This view of the left as unhinged and anarchistic has become popular with some Republicans who insist that Democrats still refuse to accept Mr. Trump. And it stokes the powerful emotions behind perceptions of excessive political correctness and media bias.