Committee to Protect Journalists
CPJ promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
CPJ promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
Not as much as journalism needs Facebook
Today, just 6 percent of people in the United States say they have a lot of confidence in media, according to a survey by the Media Insight Project, a significantly lower score than Congress’s 17 percent approval rating, according to Gallup.
The disillusion in media, it seems, is eroding people’s loyalty to individual news brands—or, at least, distrust and decreasing loyalty are happening simultaneously in an age when news consumers have more options than ever for finding news.
via @washingtonpost
1. Donald Trump is never wrong.
Donald Trump is infallible — like the pope but with more raw sexual charisma. If Donald Trump appears to be wrong in a story, either because of a statement or an action, or some combination of the two, it should be rewritten so that he is not wrong. A good baseline for what is fair and honest coverage is that fair and honest coverage depicts Donald Trump as the shining, golden god he is, envied of men and beloved of women. Unfair, dishonest coverage does not depict Donald Trump this way.
committeetoprotectjournalists:
Why Trump’s insults of journalists must be taken seriously
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has called the mainstream media “crooked” “unfair” “troublemakers” and The New York Times a failing, “SAD!” newspaper “full of boring lies.” Individual reporters are “liars” and “bimbos,” according to his tweets.
Recently, reporter Julia Ioffe found herself at odds with the Trump campaign after she wrote a profile of the candidate’s wife, Melania Trump. Within 24 hours, she picked up her phone to a recording of a Hitler speech, part of a wave of anti-Semitic messages targeted at the journalist, whose family fled to America to escape anti-Semitism in Russia 26 years ago. Other female journalists at odds with the campaign have found themselves in the crosshairs; Trump’s insults against Megyn Kelly and Michelle Fields galvanized online trolls to send thousands of hateful and misogynistic messages, according to reports and analysis by digital news outlet Vocativ.
Image: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to journalists in Nashville, Tennessee, in August 2015. (Reuters/Harrison McClary)
.@realDonaldTrump attacks the media
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice on March 29 ordered Ben Makuch to hand over his communications with Farah Shirdon, a Canadian citizen who allegedly traveled to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State group. Makuch wrote a series ofarticles for Vice between June and October 2014 about Shirdon, whom he identified by his nom de guerre, Abu Usamah. Canadian prosecutors in September 2015 charged Shirdon in absentia with participation in a terrorist group and in terrorist activity, according to news reports.
Barely one hour after a suicide blast ripped through an Istanbul square packed with tourists on Tuesday morning, the Turkish government imposed a media blackout.
Ten Germans died in the bombing in the historic neighborhood of Sultanahmet. Turkish officials said the suicide bomber was linked to the Islamic State militant group.
The prime minister’s office quickly rushed out a ban on media coverage of the blast, citing a 2011 Turkish law that allows the government to institute a temporary blackout to protect public order or national security. A few hours later, the ban was backed by a judicial order from an Istanbul court.
Tuesday’s media ban followed a pattern the government has established after recent attacks.
Ahmed Abu al-Hamza, “Software” as he was known by his friends, stood behind the camera on November 6 as a gunman explained how rebel forces took Tel Sukayk, a strategic hilltop north of Hama, from government forces. Suddenly the camera’s sound recorder picked up the faint thud of a mortar shell firing in the distance. A few seconds of confusion then turned to horror as the shell exploded right in front of the camera, killing Abu al-Hamza and the rebel fighter and injuring several others.
Abu al-Hamza’s friends shared the last moments captured on camera in a graphic YouTube video that garnered more than 1.7 million views. Copies of the video also spread quickly, some by accounts that confused the rebel fighter for Abu al-Hamza. Abu al-Hamza’s colleagues and news outlet told CPJ he had just joined the local pro-opposition SMART News Agency for a try-out period and he died filming for SMART. But it turns out the other accounts were not so wrong after all, as his colleagues also said Abu al-Hamza was a member of a media center of a local affiliate of Ahrar al-Sham, a powerful rebel group with ties to Al-Qaeda.
Abu al-Hamza was one of 90 cases researched by CPJ of journalists who reportedly died while covering the Syrian conflict this year
Image: ZAC BAILLIE / AFP
DONALD TRUMP WAS TELLING THE TRUTH. “It’s a simple formula in entertainment and television,” he explained before a crowd of thousands in Dallas last week. “If you get good ratings—and these aren’t good, these are monster—then you’re going to be on all the time, even if you have nothing to say.”
It was one of a handful of media critiques Trump spouted as he free-associated for more than an hour in front of rolling news cameras broadcasting live on cable and online. While the real estate tycoon has bragged repeatedly about his business savvy and personal fame en route to a lofty perch atop Republican primary polls, his real genius may lie in an understanding of the political media market unmatched by his competitors. For Trump, the press is not only the vessel to carry his self-centered message to millions, but also the foil in a readymade, “come-from-behind” storyline that few billionaires can rival.
“I haven’t heard the word ‘clown’ in a while—they don’t use that word anymore,” Trump told the crowd in Dallas. “They talk about us. They talk about me. And they said, Well … . But most of them are now saying,We think he’s going to win. Can you believe that?”
by Ravi Somiya at the NYtimes
Early last month, a lion known as Cecil was killed by a hunter near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.
The first international news articles on his death appeared in mid-July. By the end of the month, once it had emerged that the man who killed Cecil was an American dentist, the global news media had claimed its own trophy.
The phrase “Cecil the lion” now returns about 3.2 million Google News results. Among those are celebrity takes (“Jean-Claude Van Damme Responds to Cecil the Lion Outrage”), emotional takes (“Like All Lions, Cecil Had a Huge Capacity to Love”) and contrarian takes (“Eating Chicken Is Morally Worse Than Killing Cecil the Lion”). There were local takes, millennial takes, arguments that other global concerns were more pressing, roundups of previous stories and condemnations of the amount of coverage. (Not to mention articles like this one.)
More than 2,100 articles had been posted to Facebook by mid-August, according to data from the social media tracking firm CrowdTangle, where they were shared about 3.6 million times, and liked 1.3 million times. According to Twitter, mentions of Cecil peaked at nearly 900 tweets a minute, for a total of more than three million.