Michael Grynbaum

In 2011, Fox News announced that a new guest would appear weekly on “Fox & Friends,” its chummy morning show. “Bold, brash, and never bashful,” a network ad declared. “The Donald now makes his voice loud and clear, every Monday on Fox.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Seven years later, the symbiosis between President Donald Trump and his favorite cable network has only deepened. Fox News, whose commentators resolutely defend the president’s agenda, has seen ratings and revenues rise.

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.

President Donald Trump — buffeted by rumbling trade tensions with China, delicate negotiations with North Korea and fallout from the Russia investigation — took a few minutes this week to reach for the media equivalent of Linus’s blanket: New York City talk radio.

The television pundit Larry Kudlow, best known for his patter on CNBC, was named as President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser. Pete Hegseth, a co-host of “Fox & Friends Weekend,” is on the short list to become secretary of veterans affairs. John R.

Conservatives are zeroing in on a new enemy in the political culture wars: Big Tech. 

The Conservative Political Action Conference is usually a moment to hammer out what divides the fractious conservative movement.

Thanks to a relentless news cycle — and a dedicated fan in the Oval Office — Fox News has defied the downward trends in the television business, notching its highest-rated year in 2017 even as audiences dwindled for many networks. But the mass migration of viewers away from traditional cable and satellite packages is accelerating. And now Fox News is plotting a leap into the uncertain digital future that rivals like CNN have so far put off.

Since President Donald Trump took office a year ago, the political press has endured a sustained assault from a chief executive who has called journalists “the enemy of the American people.” Yet the news media has also driven decisions inside the West Wing to a degree perhaps unmatched since the scandal-ridden days of Richard Nixon. And White House aides and reporters alike say that political reality is being refracted by the media in an unprecedented way.

President  Donald Trump — who gleefully questioned President Barack Obama’s birthplace for years without evidence, long insisted on the guilt of the Central Park Five despite exonerating proof and claimed that millions of illegal ballots cost him the popular vote in 2016 — wanted to have a word with the American public about accuracy in reporting.

Peter Thiel, the technology billionaire, submitted a bid to purchase Gawker.com, the remaining unsold property from the Gawker Media gossip empire that was nearly destroyed in 2016 by a lawsuit largely bankrolled by Thiel. If approved, the acquisition could be the last step in a yearslong effort by Thiel to finish an independent journalism outfit that angered him in 2007 when it reported, without his permission, that he is gay, a fact widely known at the time in Silicon Valley.