Portside

• Soledad O'Brien: Donald Trump Coverage Has Normalized White Supremacy in America – German Lopez (Voz)
• How Community Media Can Fill Local News Gaps – Fiona Morgan (Free Press)
• New Docs Show How the NSA Used the Iraq War to Build its Surveillance Apparatus – Jason Koebler (Motherboard)
• Europe's Net Neutrality Guidelines Seen as a Victory for the Open Web – Amar Toor (The Verge)
• The Revenge of Roger’s Angels – Gabriel Sherman (New York)

Soledad O'Brien: Donald Trump Coverage Has Normalized White Supremacy in America

By German Lopez
September 7, 2016
Voz

Appearing on CNN, former anchor Soledad O’Brien appeared to criticize the network and other news outlets for normalizing white supremacy through their coverage of Donald Trump.
“Listen, I’ve seen on air white supremacists being interviewed because they are Trump delegates,” O’Brien said. “And they do a five-minute segment — the first minute or so talking about what they believe as white supremacists. So you have normalized that.”

How Community Media Can Fill Local News Gaps

By Fiona Morgan
September 6, 2016
Free Press

Community media can and must help fill the gaps in local news coverage that are growing across the country thanks to rampant consolidation and newsroom cutbacks.
Community media is an umbrella term that refers to noncommercial media that isn’t part of NPR or PBS. ACM is an organization composed primarily of public access, education and government (PEG) TV channels available on cable television, along with the digital media centers and training programs such stations offer. There are more than 3,000 community media outlets in the U.S., and they’re diverse in terms of the resources they have, the programming they produce, the way they’re organized, and the scale at which they operate.
What they have in common is that we need them more than ever.

New Docs Show How the NSA Used the Iraq War to Build its Surveillance Apparatus

By Jason Koebler
September 6, 2016
Motherboard

Newly released internal NSA missives from the early days of the Iraq war show how quickly the agency’s priorities shifted from providing wartime intelligence to coalition troops to being a “pervasive” part of the “intelligence-driven” global war on terror.
The documents, which have surfaced for the first time, outline how the NSA asked its employees for “unprecedented degrees of cooperation” to set up the global surveillance infrastructure revealed by Edward Snowden with the stated aim of combating terrorism worldwide.
 

Europe's Net Neutrality Guidelines Seen as a Victory for the Open Web

By Amar Toor
August 30, 2016
The Verge

Europe's telecommunications regulator, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), has published final guidelines on how the EU will implement net neutrality rules that were adopted last year, in what digital rights groups are hailing as a victory for the free and open internet. The guidelines clarify vaguely worded provisions that experts say could have been exploited by telecoms to favor certain internet services over others.
Net neutrality advocates welcomed BEREC's guidelines as a milestone for the open internet in Europe. "Europe is now a global standard-setter in the defense of the open, competitive and neutral internet," Joe McNamee, executive director of the Brussels-based organization European Digital Rights (EDRi), said in a statement. Net neutrality activist Thomas Lohninger, of SaveTheInternet.eu, described the tougher guidelines as "a triumph for the European digital rights movement."
 

The Revenge of Roger’s Angels

By Gabriel Sherman
September 2, 2016
New York

It took 15 days to end the mighty 20-year reign of Roger Ailes at Fox News, one of the most storied runs in media and political history. Ailes built not just a conservative cable news channel but something like a fourth branch of government; a propaganda arm for the GOP; an organization that determined Republican presidential candidates, sold wars, and decided the issues of the day for 2 million viewers. That the place turned out to be rife with grotesque abuses of power has left even its liberal critics stunned. More than two dozen women have come forward to accuse Ailes of sexual harassment, and what they have exposed is both a culture of misogyny and one of corruption and surveillance, smear campaigns and hush money, with implications reaching far wider than one disturbed man at the top.