Government & Communications

People with disabilities affecting mobility, vision, hearing, and cognitive function often move to cities to take advantage of their comprehensive transit systems and social services. But US law doesn’t specify how municipalities should design and implement digital services for disabled people. As a result, cities sometimes adopt new technologies that can end up causing, rather than resolving, problems of accessibility.

The decisions by networks to go all-in on Donald Trump in 2016 may sound a distant echo today. But it’s one that is still being heard and felt in the wake of the networks’ decision to air President Donald Trump’s Jan 8 speech about a border crisis that doesn’t exist and a wall that the vast majority of US taxpayers don’t want to pay for. News outlets need to have a deeper reckoning about their role in enabling President Donald Trump’s lies and spreading his racist propaganda.

The airing of President Trump's address on border security has sparked a debate amongst journalists about whether networks should carry Trump's remarks live, if the president has a tendency to twist facts and lie in these types of situations. Some operatives have suggested that networks ask for a copy of the speech ahead of time, so that they can prepare to fact-check the president's comments in real-time or decide to pull the address from the air altogether. The Washington Post's Karen Tumulty said, "Journalists are going to fact-check every word of Trump's nationally televised speech.

An elected official in Virginia violated the First Amendment when she temporarily blocked a constituent on Facebook, a federal appeals court ruled Jan 7, in a novel case with implications for how government officials nationwide interact with constituents on social media. The unanimous ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit is the first from an appeals court to answer the question of whether free speech protections prevent public officials from barring critics from their social media feeds. The 42-page opinion addresses the Facebook page of Phyllis J.

President Donald Trump is ramping up his efforts to make a public case for his border wall as the partial government shutdown is now in its third week, planning a prime-time address Jan 8 and a visit to the border Jan 10. Some Democrats responded to the news of Trump’s address with concern that he would mislead the American people about the situation at the border.

President Donald Trump launched a fresh attack on the news media, writing in tweets that it consists of many “crazed lunatics,” and he again invoked the derogatory term “enemy of the people.” “With all of the success that our Country is having, including the just released jobs numbers which are off the charts, the Fake News & totally dishonest Media concerning me and my presidency has never been worse,” President Trump said in the first of the tweets.

Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents. Concerns have intensified as Kansas City prepares to expand its technology experiment from downtown to poor neighborhoods on the city’s East Side.

Television viewers on New Year’s Eve tune in for performances by the latest hitmakers and nostalgia acts. This time around, 11 journalists — ranging from familiar faces like Martha Raddatz of ABC to behind-the-scenes editors like Karen Toulon of Bloomberg News — shared the Times Square limelight, part of an effort by the Committee to Protect Journalists and organizers to recognize the erosion of press freedoms at home and abroad.

When 2018 began, the President Donald Trump had made 1,989 false and misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database, which tracks every suspect statement uttered by the President. By the end of the year, President Trump had accumulated more than 7,600 untruths during his presidency — averaging more than 15 erroneous claims a day during 2018, almost triple the rate from the year before. President Trump began 2018 on a similar pace as last year. Through May, he generally averaged about 200 to 250 false claims a month.

In a year-end report, the Committee to Protect Journalists counted 53 journalists killed between Jan 1 and Dec 14, including 34 targeted in reprisal for their work — nearly double the 18 such murders it recorded in 2017. The growing number of journalists jailed or attacked on that pretext [of dissemintating "false" or "fake" news] is one illustration of the deleterious influence that President Donald Trump has had on press freedom globally. His labeling of the US media as the “enemy of the people” and charges of “fake news” have been imitated by regimes around the world.