Journalism

The Russian government declared the broadcasters Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty “foreign agents” on Dec 5, in retaliation for a similar action against Russian state-run news outlets in the United States. The Kremlin-financed television station RT America and its affiliated news agency, Sputnik, complied in Nov with an order from the Justice Department that they registered as foreign agents. This followed a report by American intelligence agencies in January that concluded that the Kremlin was using RT America as a tool “to undermine faith in the U.S.

In this first year in the Age Of Trump, favorable public opinion about the news media has gone up. According to a new report from Poynter, 49% of the public has at least a “fair amount” of trust and confidence in the U.S. media, which is an uptick from the year before.  Though this sounds good, when Poynter analyzed this data further, it showed some alarming trends. Specifically, this uptick in trust is very polarized, and represents a resurgence of media trust from people on the left, while those on the right continue to show little confidence in the press.

“One of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake,’ ” President Donald Trump said on Mike Huckabee’s talk show, in October. (In fact, the phrase “fake news” has been around for more than a century.) The President’s strategy has been successful, however, in at least one respect: he has appropriated a term that had often been used to describe the propaganda and the lies masquerading as news, emanating from Russia and elsewhere, which proliferated on Facebook, YouTube, and other social-media platforms during the 2016 election campaign.

Myanmar is the latest country to piggyback off of a dangerous rhetorical strategy made popular by President Trump. The New York Times reports that an official in Myanmar’s Rakhine state recently said: “there is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news.” Rohingya is the Muslim minority in Myanmar facing sweeping persecution from hardline Buddhists. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people have fled the country in the wake of what a top UN official called ethnic cleansing.

President Donald Trump in an early morning tweet accused The New York Times of lobbying for Democrats on tax reform, dubbing the newspaper a "pipe organ for the Democratic Party." "The Failing @nytimes, the pipe organ for the Democrat Party, has become a virtual lobbyist for them with regard to our massive Tax Cut Bill. They are wrong so often that now I know we have a winner!" the president said in a tweet.

The arrival of hard consequences for these men may have come too late in the news industry, but media organizations are unquestionably leading the national reckoning now underway. For the news business, this is the way it has to be: Its main product, after all, is integrity, which, in the case of the networks, is personified by those who sit behind the desk. Once the audience’s trust is lost, the entire enterprise falls apart.

What, if anything, is constraining the Trump Justice Department in its dangerous war on leakers, whistleblowers, and journalists? The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Freedom of the Press Foundation are teaming up to find out.

[Commentary] President Donald Trump is right. There is an epidemic of “fake news” in America. Only it’s being perpetuated not by his political opponents but by him and his supporters. Trump is quickly undoing America’s traditional role as a champion of free speech and free press in the world. He sounds very much like an authoritarian, even if he lacks the power of one, and actual authoritarians are cheered by his words.

The newest area of work in MacArthur's long-standing Journalism and Media Program is support for organizations that enable, encourage, and amplify civic media-making. We are supporting nonprofit organizations that train and amplify fresh voices, with a particular emphasis on empowering young people and historically marginalized communities to tell their own stories, shape the public narrative, and assert influence over the matters that concern them. We call this work "participatory civic media."

In the eight days after news broke that Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai wants to fully repeal network neutrality rules, cable and broadcast news networks -- aside from MSNBC -- have given the story very little coverage.