Portside

King’s critique of power was never purely about race: The collapse of independent media is partly what got us here. It was the independent and radical left media that forced mainstream media to cover the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, poverty and the fight against it. Over the last 15 years, more than half the jobs in the news industry had disappeared, media consolidation will quicken this trend.

Your smartphone, your enemy; All in the family; Twitter has your number too; Cell-trackers; Scoops a la Trump; Fox News confidential

It takes more than one clown to make a circus.

Bill O'Reilly, Donald Trump and Roger Ailes have formed a mutual protection racket.

Journalists should not fear being on the wrong side of power. On the contrary, that is exactly where they belong.

Trump evokes America’s sins not to challenge them, but to apologize for those of the Russian president and, preemptively, his own. But to insist that the United States is, in fact, on a higher moral plane than Russia serves to legitimize our government’s crimes.

Time Magazine is clear on its sole criterion - 'the person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse, on the events of the year.' For clues as to how Time feels about that question - is it 'better or worse?' - we can look to the image chosen for the cover of the issue. Time's decisions regarding how to photograph Trump reveal a layered, nuanced field of references that place the image among the magazine's greatest covers.

Not long before Mussolini and Hitler came to power, much of the US press believed that power would "moderate" them, or considered them something of a joke. Are we seeing similar mistakes today?