Our weekly roundup of news found at the intersection of media, politics, policy and technology, from the Shorenstein Center and from around the web. Sign up to receive Media and Politics Must Reads in your inbox each week. Also connect with us on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.
News from Faculty and Fellows
Tom Wheeler slams Ajit Pai’s plan to kill net neutrality rules. Tom Wheeler, Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow, said that Pai’s plan is “a classic example of regulatory capture, where the regulatory agency bends to the wishes of those they are supposed to oversee.”
Not easily persuasive: E.J. Dionne works hard to write it like he sees it. E.J. Dionne, Jr., William H. Bloomberg Visiting Professor, discusses his writing process with the Harvard Gazette.
Newsrooms Need to Purge Secrets in Order to Heal. Farai Chideya, spring 2016 fellow, discusses WNYC’s unwillingness to address the bullying behavior of its former Takeaway host, John Hockenberry.
Not my Alabama. Ted Gup, fall 2003 fellow, writes that “the Alabama my family knew and knows is only partially reflected in the headlines. It is not the caricature of the ignorant Southerner, not the Bible-thumping congregation that prefers a potential child molester to missing out on a tax cut.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders And The Modern White House Press Secretary. Martha Joynt Kumar, fall 1998 fellow, discusses the White House briefing room on On Point.
Teaching Trump. Khalil G. Muhammad, Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy and Shorenstein Center faculty affiliate, discusses how Trump’s election and presidency has offered additional opportunities to tie historical issues to contemporary ones.
Selling local news, with the help of The Boss and ‘Hamilton’. David Beard, Research Fellow, writes about a publisher who thinks creatively about sustaining her nonprofit newsroom.
News Media Performance
- Trump’s mind-numbing media manipulation machine, from Axios.
- When A Robbery Is Described As A ‘Win’: How The Media Failed Us In Covering The Tax Bill, from WBUR.
- Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media, from Columbia Journalism Review.
Trump and the Media
- Trump’s attacks on ‘fake news’ are increasingly global, from USA Today.
- On the Night News Desk When Trump’s Tweeting Starts, from The New York Times.
Partisanship
- Trump is causing Democrats to trust media more, while Republicans are endorsing more extreme views, says a new study, from Poynter.
- More than half of partisans see the other party’s policies as a threat to the country, from The Washington Post.
- Is Media Driving Americans Apart? From The New York Times.
Tech and Democracy
- Facebook Allowed Political Ads That Were Actually Scams and Malware, from ProPublica.
- Democracy’s immune system is in trouble. Here’s what we can do, from CNN.
- How white engineers built racist code – and why it’s dangerous for black people, from The Guardian.
Harassment
- What we found when we asked newsrooms about sexual harassment, from Columbia Journalism Review.
- A survey of tech-y journalists tiptoes into the sexual-harassment-in-newsrooms problem (but tons of questions remain), from Nieman Lab.
- Let’s Talk: Personal Boundaries, Safety & Women in Journalism, from the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
- Facebook Is Banning Women for Calling Men ‘Scum,’ from the Daily Beast.
Media Business
- The FCC is swiftly changing national media policy. What does that mean on the local level? From Nieman Lab.
- The 3 types of news subscribers: Why they pay and how to convert them, from American Press Institute.
Resources
- Digging deep: Strategies for investigations, from Journalist’s Resource.
- 10 Things You Can Do Now to Up Your Social Media Game in 2018, from MediaShift.
- Is your newsroom talking about bias? Eight questions to ask your colleagues, from Jennifer Dargan.
- Who’s that interrogating you? These tools can help you avoid a sting, from Poynter.
