Clik here to view.
What journalists say back when they are criticized for mishandling coverage...
I’ve been keeping track of these replies. This is what I have heard. First, let’s summarize the criticisms: These are the complaints journalists talk the most about. Not the only complaints that have...
View ArticleClik here to view.
PressThink’s new design and third space
This is the third version of my site. The designer is Andy Rossback, recently of the Marshall Project, now at the New York Times. The programmer is Garrett Gardner, webmaster at NYU Journalism. My...
View ArticleWhat the campaign press should not be neutral toward
I wrote a whole book called What Are Journalists For? So I don’t say this lightly: To me it is not proper — I don’t think it builds trust in a free press — for the people who produce news to be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Speaking truth to audience power
This week I published in The Guardian a column about a Florida newspaper that wrote an open letter to readers, apologizing to them for news coverage that was too critical of Trump. The editors were...
View ArticleA miss bigger than a missed story: my final reflections on Trump and the...
On the eve of an election filled with danger I take up my pen to describe one more time what I think political journalists missed about the candidacy of Donald Trump. We lack any common language for...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump
This started as a thread on Twitter about “things to look for” in the next six to eight months. Readers asked what could be done in response. I will try to meet that request in part two. (And here it...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Prospects for the American press under Trump, part two
In part one of this post, I described in 17 numbered paragraphs a bleak situation for the American press as a check on power, now that Donald Trump has been elected. My summary of it went like this:...
View ArticlePlagiarism charges against Monica Crowley put her publishing house on stage
Today Andrew Kaczynski of CNN published this article. It says that author and TV figure Monica Crowley, recently appointed to the Trump administration as a national security aide, plagiarized many...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Send the interns
#sendtheinterns is a hashtag that stands for some advice I have given the Washington press corps about its dealings with the Trump White House. After this weekend’s spectacular display by new Press...
View ArticleSteve Bannon’s styrofoam balls
I will be brief because — like the news itself — I’m moving quickly today. For a moment there I thought these guys were serious about treating the news media as “the opposition party” and trying to...
View ArticleA few notes on unbuilding a key part of the presidency
Watching President Trump’s February 16th press conference, I felt stunned into silence. I could not think of how to comment on that performance. These notes are my attempt to figure out why. They are a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This is what a news organization looks like when it is built on reader trust
On March 28 the news was announced: De Correspondent will expand to the U.S. I will be their first ambassador to the American market. The Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund and First Look Media will...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“The Trump White House has turned into a kind of playground for the press.”
On CNN’s Reliable Sources this week Trump’s “contentious relationship with the press” was said to be back in the spotlight because of the upcoming marker of the First Hundred Days on April 28. Host...
View ArticleGetting granular with the claim that Trump is some media wizard
I have written about this before, but it keeps coming up. So here I take a more detailed look at it. I show you ten versions of the same claim so you can gain a more rounded view of what I am talking...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Why the White House daily briefing is in such trouble.
First, read this update that CNN’s Brian Stelter included in his nightly newsletter this week: In the past 24 hours… — President Trump went after two of the nation’s biggest newspapers, The New York...
View ArticleClik here to view.
His campaign to discredit the press is a permanent feature of Trump’s...
Donald Trump’s so-called “war with the media” is a good example of what philosophers mean by an over-determined effect: multiple causes, any one of which would be enough to support it. Which is to say...
View ArticleNormalizing Trump: An incredibly brief explainer
Most every journalist who covers Trump knows of these things: 1. He isn’t good at anything a president has to do. From the simplest, like pretending to help out in flood relief, to the hardest: making...
View ArticlePricing access to the Trump White House: the strange case of the Times social...
Follow these events with me. Then I will share my view of what is going on here. On Sep. 17, Glenn Thrush, White House reporter for the New York Times, posted this on Twitter: Classy retweet by the...
View ArticleShow your work: The new terms for trust in journalism
It has been eight years since the internet philosopher David Weinberger wrote, “Transparency is the new objectivity.” It’s been 16 years since Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel said, in their great book...
View ArticleMembership as a force multiplier for beat reporting
The paper: Join the Beat, a force multiplier for beat reporting. It says we ought to push membership models in news down to the beat level, and describes some simple ways that could work. The paper is...
View Article