Journalism

Most reporters share a sense that covering President Donald Trump is a challenge like no other, at a time when political journalists and the First Amendment are under siege. With the easy accessibility of social media, some political reporters find themselves getting death threats. 

President Donald Trump is using his planned absence from the White House Correspondents Association dinner Saturday, April 28, to try and raise money for his next election. The President didn't show up for 2017's dinner, either, where the press and the President customarily get together to trade barbs and toasts, a temporary glove-dropping that had become a regular stop for President's of both parties before the current one.

[Commentary] On April 11, 11 Democratic senators and Independent Sen. Bernie Sanderssent a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai requesting that the proposed merger between Sinclair Broadcast Group and Tribune Media be denied. Their request didn’t stop there; the senators requested not only that Sinclair’s future acquisitions be denied but that its existing broadcast licenses be reviewed and a decision be made on whether they should be revoked. The senators wrote this letter seemingly without a sense of the tremendous ironies laced throughout.

A group of journalists have decided to do something about the diminution of newsrooms at the local level. They’re making reporting part of a national service program. Report for America, a nonprofit organization modeled after AmeriCorps, aims to install 1,000 journalists in understaffed newsrooms by 2022. Now in its pilot stage, the initiative has placed three reporters in Appalachia.

Michael Ferro, who resigned recently as chairman of Chicago-based newspaper chain Tronc, has struck a deal to sell his entire stake in the company, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ferro, who owned more than 25% of Tronc -- the parent of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and other newspapers -- agreed to sell his more than 9 million shares at $23 per share, or $208.6 million, to McCormick Media, pending approval by regulators.

Late in 2015, a former Trump Tower doorman named Dino Sajudin met with a reporter from American Media, Inc., the publisher of the National Enquirer, at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. A few weeks earlier, Sajudin had signed a contract with A.M.I., agreeing to become a source and to accept thirty thousand dollars for exclusive rights to information he had been told: that Donald Trump, who had launched his Presidential campaign five months earlier, may have fathered a child with a former employee in the late nineteen-eighties. Sajudin declined to comment for this story.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai immediately shot down a request to investigate Sinclair Broadcasting Group for distorting the news, and to pause the review of Sinclair's pending acquisition of Tribune Media. Chairman  Pai said the FCC doesn’t have the authority to revoke licenses based on the content of newscasts.

President Trump abruptly issued an executive order demanding an evaluation of the Postal Service’s finances, asserting the power of his office weeks after accusing Amazon, the online retail giant, of not paying its fair share in postage. In the executive order, issued just before 9 p.m., President Trump created a task force to examine the service’s “unsustainable financial path” and directed the new panel to “conduct a thorough evaluation of the operations and finances of the USPS” The president does not mention Amazon in the order, but it is clear that he intends for the panel to substanti

[Commentary] While online rights are coming into question, it’s worth considering how those will overlap with offline rights and civic engagement. We need a conversation about data protections, empowering users with their own information, and transparency — ultimately, data rights are now civic rights.While the US still lacks such data standards, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), scheduled to take effect in May, demonstrates a path toward reliable online privacy balanced with transparency. 

A dozen Democratic senators are asking the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Sinclair Broadcasting Group for distorting the news. 

The FCC should also pause its review of Sinclair's acquisition of Tribune Media — a merger that could expand the nation's largest broadcaster from 193 stations to 223 stations covering 72% of US homes  — the senators say, to determine whether the deal is in the public interest.