Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On Monday, some of the biggest names in TV news trooped into Trump Tower for an off-the-record meeting with the president-elect. It was an all-star cast. Not just on-air stars like Lester Holt, Wolf Blitzer and George Stephanopoulos, but their bosses were also summoned before the Potentate of Fifth Avenue. The meeting was a huge…
storytext President-elect Donald Trump backed out of a meeting he had called with The New York Times on Tuesday. Trump had asked for the meeting with Times executives, and also agreed to meet on the record with reporters and columnists. He said on Twitter that the “terms and conditions” were changed at the last minute…
.entry-header About the nicest thing you can say about President Trump’s incoming administration is that it is without precedent. But there is another way of looking at it: it is not normal. Normal, you might argue, is a bad thing when people are hurting. In fact, there is enough polling about why people voted for…
Trump’s masterful manipulation. CREDIT: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster One of the guiding principles for the media in covering the President of the United States is that the things the president says and does are, by definition, newsworthy. This is why there is a White House press corps and a “protective pool” that follows the president around…
Like many populist leaders, Donald Trump skillfully exploited the media obsession for immediacy and page views. In French journalism, especially in radio and TV, we have an expression that says it all: “He (or she) is a bon client”. Literally, a good customer, an endless provider of soundbites and juicy quotes that will jump to the top…
The press must defend all norms, not just those that pertain to themselves. On Tuesday night, Donald Trump committed a huge no-no. This was nothing trivial like empowering white hate groups or waging public and legal vendettas against his enemies—he’s been doing those things all along. For the first time since winning the presidency last…
It would be relatively simple to produce a web-based feed, outside of Twitter or Facebook, that includes only stories from vetted news orgs. That doesn’t mean that their stories are true, just that they are making their best efforts to produce real news. There’s no time to get into a deep philosophical discussion about this….
There’s been much ado in media circles this past week about the prevalence of “fake” news on social networks and what, if any, effect that had on the outcome of the U.S. election. Stories from big players like InfoWars and The Blaze as well as cookie-cutter outlets like Occupy Democrats, WorldNetDaily, The Other 98% and…
Editor’s note: Our sister publication Nieman Reports is out with their new issue — go check it out. I write a column for the print edition of the magazine; here’s my latest. A few years back, around the time of the financial crisis, I remember hearing about a guy with a startup idea for a…
Should paywalls come down for election coverage? By Melody Kramer • August 2, 2016 Last updated by Benjamin Mullin August 2, 2016 a id=”dcl_comment_link” class=”comment_count” href=”#disqus_thread”> Comments a class=”comment_count” href=”#disqus_thread”> Comments As Election Day nears, news organizations that keep their journalism behind a paywall will likely give some of it away for free. When The…