Media Bits and Bytes – End of Obama Era Fire Sale Edition

Don’t be rude; Get out; NBC (normalizing buttkissing corporatists); Media’s big problems; Media’s big score; Resources for resisters; The Russian hot potato

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Trump Berated a CNN Reporter, and Fellow Journalists Missed an Opportunity

By Pete Vernon
January 11, 2017
Columbia Journalism Review

CNN Senior White House Correspondent Jim Acosta stood pleading with Trump to acknowledge his question, referencing earlier attacks made by Trump and his press secretary about the accuracy of a CNN report detailing Trump’s ties to Russia. “Mr. President-elect, since you have been attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance?” Acosta yelled above the scrum of reporters.
“No! Not you. No! Your organization is terrible,” the President-elect shot back. When Acosta persisted in shouting for recognition, Trump pointed a finger at him and said, “Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question.”

Exclusive: The Trump Administration May Evict the Press from the White House

By Peter J. Boyer
January 14, 2017
Esquire

According to three senior officials on the transition team, a plan to evict the press corps from the White House is under serious consideration by the incoming Trump Administration. If the plan goes through, one of the officials said, the media will be removed from the cozy confines of the White House press room, where it has worked for several decades. Members of the press will be relocated to the White House Conference Center—near Lafayette Square—or to a space in the Old Executive Office Building, next door to the White House.
For the media, the White House press room—situated on the first floor, in the space between the presidential residence and the West Wing—is not only a convenience, with prime sources just steps away. It is also a symbol of the press' cherished role as representatives of the American people. In the midst of the George W. Bush presidency, when relations between reporters and the Administration were growing testy, the White House press corps was removed from the press room for nearly a year, while the facility was remodeled. The move prompted such concern that the president himself had to offer his assurance that it was only temporary.

NBC Is Building a Trump Normalization Machine

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By John Whitehouse
January 4, 2017
Media Matters for America

After running a proto-fascist campaign, President-elect Donald Trump will bring his hate, misogyny, and bigotry to the White House at the end of the month. And when he does, NBC will have a machine ready to normalize him. Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is cozying up to Trump, the network is literally paying Trump through Celebrity Apprentice, and MSNBC is reportedly in talks to hire Greta Van Susteren, a longtime Fox News host with a history of treating Trump with kid gloves. And now Megyn Kelly, who famously buried the hatchet with Trump by lobbing him a softball interview and then withheld information about him until after the election, is also going to work for NBC.
By any measure, the Trump normalization effort at NBC begins at the top, with the network actually paying money to Trump as a result of his Celebrity Apprentice executive producer credit. The problem here is simple: NBC will have a fiduciary relationship with the president of the United States. The network now has an incentive to weigh aggressive reporting about the president-elect against what it might lose in revenue if Trump’s reputation is damaged.

The U.S. Media’s Problems Are Much Bigger than Fake News and Filter Bubbles   

By Bharat N. Anand
January 5, 2017
Harvard Business Review

The U.S. media has come under intense scrutiny, with analysts, politicians, and even journalists themselves accusing it of bias and sensationalism — of having failed us — in its coverage of the presidential election. Critics across the political spectrum have said that fake news and cyberattacks played a big role in determining the course of events. The prevailing logic has an “if only” tenor: If only the media had been less swayed by shocking stories, if only bias in the media had been purged, and if only fake news had been eliminated and cyberattacks curtailed, the outcome would have been different. The presidential transition has been marked by the same attitude: if only the media were less distractible and headlines more accurate.
Thinking that way is tempting, but it misses the mark. The media did exactly what it was designed to do, given the incentives that govern it. It’s not that the media sets out to be sensationalist; its business model leads it in that direction. Charges of bias don’t make the bias real; it often lies in the eye of the beholder. Fake news and cyberattacks are triggers, not causes. The issues that confront us are structural.

2016: A Bad Year for Democracy, but "Best Ever" for Big Media

By Michael Corcoran
January 11, 2017
Truthout
 
The 2016 election, thanks to $2.4 billion in political ad spending and record ratings, was great for Big Media's bottom line. "This is the best year in the history of cable news," said CNN President Jeff Tucker in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
This jubilation is rooted in the two biggest threats to any semblance of democracy, both rarely examined by the media: (1) the pervasive role of corporate money in our elections, and (2) the fact that the media outlets that should be vigorously investigating this trend are owned by the same corporate interests that profit so much from it. This scenario is not merely a conflict of interest but a crisis of democracy.

Trump Resistance Reference Guide

By Enoch Lambert
January 6, 2017
Olio

Here are some of the best web resources I've found for aiding the resistance.
It is my conviction that citizens of both the US and the world can and ought to cooperate to resist Trump (and the rise of nativistic populism) despite otherwise wildly diverging ideological backgrounds. With that in mind, I recommend writers and media outlets from across the political spectrum.

Dossier’s Russia Charges Should Be Treated Skeptically–but Taken Seriously

By Jim Naureckas
January 13, 2017
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Some in media are treating the report on Donald Trump’s ties to Russia published by BuzzFeed (1/10/17) as though it were an intelligence report—as in the Washington Post‘s headline, “Trump Says ‘Sick People’ Invented Russia Intelligence Report” (1/11/17).
It’s not an intelligence report, or a government report of any kind. No official agency had a hand in creating it; indications are it was leaked to media by the same private group that commissioned it. Putting it in the “intelligence” category makes it harder to think about how media outlets should deal with it, bringing in questions of journalism’s relationship to the state. Really, despite its anonymous author reportedly having a background in British intelligence, it’s closer to being itself a strange sort of journalism: It’s an investigator’s account of what information they say they learned by talking to people—not unlike a news article.