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Our Free Press

Covers the Media in the United States as protected by the First Amendment, whether broadcast, cable, Internet or in Print.
See Also:
Politics in the United States
Democracy in the USA

First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
YouTube Video: President Trump's "fake news" claims create real danger by Anderson Cooper, CNN
​Pictured: Top: Tweet from Donald Trump attacking the Free Press; Bottom: Five benefits of the First Amendment including (L-R) Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Assembly and Free to Petition

​The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents Congress from making any law respecting an establishment of religion, prohibiting the free exercise of religion, or abridging the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or to petition for a governmental redress of grievances.

The first amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights was originally proposed to assuage Anti-Federalist opposition to Constitutional ratification. Initially, the First Amendment applied only to laws enacted by the Congress, and many of its provisions were interpreted more narrowly than they are today.

Beginning with Gitlow v. New York (1925), the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to states—a process known as incorporation—through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

In Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Court drew on Thomas Jefferson's correspondence to call for "a wall of separation between church and State", though the precise boundary of this separation remains in dispute. Speech rights were expanded significantly in a series of 20th and 21st-century court decisions which protected various forms of political speech, anonymous speech, campaign financing, pornography, and school speech; these rulings also defined a series of exceptions to First Amendment protections.

The Supreme Court overturned English common law precedent to increase the burden of proof for defamation and libel suits, most notably in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (1964). Commercial speech, however, is less protected by the First Amendment than political speech, and is therefore subject to greater regulation.

The Free Press Clause protects publication of information and opinions, and applies to a wide variety of media. In Near v. Minnesota (1931) and New York Times v. United States (1971), the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected against prior restraint—pre-publication censorship—in almost all cases. The Petition Clause protects the right to petition all branches and agencies of government for action. In addition to the right of assembly guaranteed by this clause, the Court has also ruled that the amendment implicitly protects freedom of association.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the First Amendment to the United States Constitution:

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Freedom of the Press in the United States
YouTube Video of the Movie Trailer "The Post" (2018)
Pictured: a Modern Newspaper Printing Press

Freedom of the press in the United States is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment is generally understood to prevent the government from interfering with the distribution of information and opinions.

Nevertheless, freedom of the press is subject to certain restrictions, such as defamation law.

Ranking of the Freedom of the United States compared to other nations:

Freedom House, an independent watchdog organization, ranked the United States 30th out of 197 countries in press freedom in 2014. Its report praised the constitutional protections given American journalists and criticized authorities for placing undue limits on investigative reporting in the name of national security.

Freedom House gives countries a score out of 100, with 0 the most free and 100 the least free. The score is broken down into three separately-weighted categories: legal (out of 30), political (out of 40) and economic (out of 30). The United States scored 6, 10, and 5, respectively, that year for a cumulative score of 21.

In 2014, the U.S. ranked 46th in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. This is a measure of freedom available to the press, which encompasses areas such as government censorship and is not indicative of journalistic quality. Its ranking fell from 20th in 2010 to 42nd in 2012, which was attributed to arrests of journalists covering the Occupy movement. 

The U.S. ranked 49th in 2015 and 41st in 2016. 

In 2012, Finland and Norway tied for first place worldwide. Canada ranked 10th, Germany tied with Jamaica for 17th and Japan tied with Suriname for 22nd. The UK ranked 28th, Australia 30th and France 38th. Extraterritorial regions of the U.S. ranked 57th.

Notable Exceptions:

​In 1798, shortly after the adoption of the Constitution, the governing Federalist Party attempted to stifle criticism with the Alien and Sedition Acts. According to the Sedition Act, criticism of Congress or the President (but not the Vice-President) was a crime; Thomas Jefferson—a non-Federalist—was Vice-President when the act was passed. These restrictions on the press were very unpopular, leading to the party's eventual demise.

Jefferson, who vehemently opposed the acts, was elected president in 1800 and pardoned most of those convicted under them. In his March 4, 1801 inaugural address, he reiterated his longstanding commitment to freedom of speech and of the press: "If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."

In mid-August 1861, four New York City newspapers (the New York Daily News, The Journal of Commerce, the Day Book and the New York Freeman’s Journal) were given a presentment by a U.S. Circuit Court grand jury for "frequently encouraging the rebels by expressions of sympathy and agreement".

This began a series of federal prosecutions during the Civil War of northern U.S. newspapers which expressed sympathy for Southern causes or criticized the Lincoln administration. Lists of "peace newspapers", published in protest by the New York Daily News, were used to plan retributions. The Bangor Democrat in Maine, was one of these newspapers; assailants believed part of a covert Federal raid destroyed the press and set the building ablaze.

These actions followed executive orders issued by President Abraham Lincoln; his August 7, 1861 order made it illegal (punishable by death) to conduct "correspondence with" or give "intelligence to the enemy, either directly or indirectly".

The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which amended it, imposed restrictions on the press during wartime. The acts imposed a fine of $10,000 and up to 20 years' imprisonment for those publishing "... disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag ..."

In Schenck v. United States (1919) the Supreme Court upheld the laws, setting the "clear and present danger" standard. Congress repealed both laws in 1921, and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) revised the clear-and-present-danger test to the significantly less-restrictive "imminent lawless action" test.

In Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988), the Supreme Court upheld the right of a school principal to review (and suppress) controversial articles in a school newspaper funded by the school and published in its name.

In United States v. Manning (2013), Chelsea Manning was found guilty of six counts of espionage for furnishing classified information to Wikileaks.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Freedom of the Press:







Media Bias in the United States
YouTube Video: The "this is fine" bias in cable news by Vox Media
Pictured: Two sources of highly reputable political coverage are (L-R) FactCheck.org and Project VoteSmart.org

Media bias in the United States occurs when the media in the United States systematically emphasizes one particular point of view in a way that contravenes the standards of professional journalism.

Claims of media bias in the United States include claims of liberal bias, conservative bias, mainstream bias, and corporate bias. To combat this, a variety of watchdog groups attempt to find the facts behind both biased reporting and unfounded claims of bias. Research about media bias is now a subject of systematic scholarship in a variety of disciplines.

Demographic polling:
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A 1956 American National Election Study found that 66% of Americans thought newspapers were fair, including 78% of Republicans and 64% of Democrats.

A 1964 poll by the Roper Organization asked a similar question about network news, and 71% thought network news was fair.

A 1972 poll found that 72% of Americans trusted CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite.

According to Jonathan M. Ladd's Why Americans Hate the Media and How it Matters, "Once, institutional journalists were powerful guardians of the republic, maintaining high standards of political discourse."

That has changed. Gallup Polls since 1997 have shown that most Americans do not have confidence in the mass media "to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly". According to Gallup, the American public's trust in the media has generally declined in the first decade and a half of the 21st century.

Again according to Ladd, "In the 2008, the portion of Americans expressing 'hardly any' confidence in the press had risen to 45%. A 2004 Chronicle of Higher Education poll found that only 10% of Americans had 'a great deal' of confidence in the 'national news media,'"

In 2011, only 44% of those surveyed had "a great deal" or "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in the mass media. In 2013, a 59% majority reported a perception of media bias, with 46% saying mass media was too liberal and 13% saying it was too conservative.

The perception of bias was highest among conservatives. According to the poll, 78% of conservatives think the mass media is biased, as compared with 44% of liberals and 50% of moderates. Only about 36% view mass media reporting as "just about right".

News Values:
Main article: News values

According to Jonathan M. Ladd, Why Americans Hate the Media and How It Matters, "The existence of an independent, powerful, widely respected news media establishment is an historical anomaly. Prior to the twentieth century, such an institution had never existed in American history." However, he looks back to the period between 1950 and 1979 as a period where "institutional journalists were powerful guardians of the republic, maintaining high standards of political discourse."

A number of writers have tried to explain the decline in journalistic standards. One explanation is the 24-hour news cycle, which faces the necessity of generating news even when no news-worthy events occur. Another is the simple fact that bad news sells more newspapers than good news. A third possible factor is the market for "news" that reinforces the prejudices of a target audience.

"In a 2010 paper, Mr. Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, a frequent collaborator and fellow professor at Chicago Booth, found that ideological slants in newspaper coverage typically resulted from what the audience wanted to read in the media they sought out, rather than from the newspaper owners' biases."

Framing:

An important aspect of media bias is framing. A frame is the arrangement of a news story, with the goal of influencing audience to favor one side or the other. The ways in which stories are framed can greatly undermine the standards of reporting such as fairness and balance. Many media outlets are known for their outright bias. Some outlets, such as MSNBC, are known for their liberal views, while others, such as Fox News Channel, are known for their conservative views. How biased media frame stories can change audience reactions.

Corporate bias and power bias:
See also: 
​Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media proposed a propaganda model to explain systematic biases of U.S. media as a consequence of the pressure to create a stable and profitable business. In this view, corporate interests create five filters that bias news in their favor.

Pro-power and pro-government bias:​

Part of the propaganda model is self-censorship through the corporate system (see corporate censorship); that reporters and especially editors share or acquire values that agree with corporate elites in order to further their careers. Those who do not are marginalized or fired.

Such examples have been dramatized in fact-based movie dramas such as Good Night, and Good Luck and The Insider and demonstrated in the documentary The Corporation. 

George Orwell originally wrote a preface for his 1945 novel Animal Farm, which focused on the British self-censorship of the time: "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. ... [Things are] kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that 'it wouldn't do' to mention that particular fact." The preface was not published with most copies of the book.

In the propaganda model, advertising revenue is essential for funding most media sources and thus linked with media coverage. For example, according to Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR.org), 'When Al Gore proposed launching a progressive TV network, a Fox News executive told Advertising Age (10/13/03): "The problem with being associated as liberal is that they wouldn't be going in a direction that advertisers are really interested in....

If you go out and say that you are a liberal network, you are cutting your potential audience, and certainly your potential advertising pool, right off the bat." An internal memo from ABC Radio affiliates in 2006 revealed that powerful sponsors had a "standing order that their commercials never be placed on syndicated Air America programming" that aired on ABC affiliates. 

The list totaled 90 advertisers and included major corporations such as Wal-Mart, GE, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, Bank of America, FedEx, Visa, Allstate, McDonald's, Sony and Johnson & Johnson, and government entities such as the U.S. Postal Service and the U.S. Navy.

According to Chomsky, U.S. commercial media encourage controversy only within a narrow range of opinion, in order to give the impression of open debate, and do not report on news that falls outside that range.

Herman and Chomsky argue that comparing the journalistic media product to the voting record of journalists is as flawed a logic as implying auto-factory workers design the cars they help produce. They concede that media owners and news makers have an agenda, but that this agenda is subordinated to corporate interests leaning to the right. 

It has been argued by some critics, including historian Howard Zinn and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges, that the corporate media routinely ignore the plight of the impoverished while painting a picture of a prosperous America.

In 2008 George W. Bush's press secretary Scott McClellan published a book in which he confessed to regularly and routinely, but unknowingly, passing on lies to the media, following the instructions of his superiors, lies that the media reported as facts. He characterized the press as, by and large, honest, and intent on telling the truth, but reported that "the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House", especially on the subject of the war in Iraq.

FAIR reported that between January and August 2014 no representatives for organized labor made an appearance on any of the high-profile Sunday morning talkshows (NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CBS's Face the Nation), including episodes that covered topics such as labor rights and jobs, while current or former corporate CEOs made 12 appearances over that same period.

Corporate Control:

Six following six corporate conglomerates own the majority of mass media outlets in the United States:
Such a uniformity of ownership means that stories which are critical of these corporations may often be underplayed in the media. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled this handful of corporations to expand their power, and according to Howard Zinn, such mergers "enabled tighter control of information."

Chris Hedges argues that corporate media control "of nearly everything we read, watch or hear" is an aspect of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls inverted totalitarianism.

In the United States most media are operated for profit, and are usually funded by advertising. Stories critical of advertisers or their interests may be underplayed, while stories favorable to advertisers may be given more coverage.

"InfoTainment":
Main article: Infotainment

Academics such as McKay, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, and Hudson (see below) have described private U.S. media outlets as profit-driven. For the private media, profits are dependent on viewing figures, regardless of whether the viewers found the programs adequate or outstanding. The strong profit-making incentive of the American media leads them to seek a simplified format and uncontroversial position which will be adequate for the largest possible audience.

The market mechanism only rewards media outlets based on the number of viewers who watch those outlets, not by how informed the viewers are, how good the analysis is, or how impressed the viewers are by that analysis.

According to some, the profit-driven quest for high numbers of viewers, rather than high quality for viewers, has resulted in a slide from serious news and analysis to entertainment, sometimes called infotainment:

"Imitating the rhythm of sports reports, exciting live coverage of major political crises and foreign wars was now available for viewers in the safety of their own homes. By the late-1980s, this combination of information and entertainment in news programmes was known as infotainment." [Barbrook, Media Freedom, (London, Pluto Press, 1995) part 14]

Oversimplification:

Kathleen Hall Jamieson claimed in her book The Interplay of Influence: News, Advertising, Politics, and the Internet that most television news stories are made to fit into one of five categories:
  • Appearance versus reality
  • Little guys versus big guys
  • Good versus evil
  • Efficiency versus inefficiency
  • Unique and bizarre events versus ordinary events.

​Reducing news to these five categories, and tending towards an unrealistic black/white mentality, simplifies the world into easily understood opposites. According to Jamieson, the media provides an oversimplified skeleton of information that is more easily commercialized.

Media Imperialism:

Media Imperialism is a critical theory regarding the perceived effects of globalization on the world's media which is often seen as dominated by American media and culture. It is closely tied to the similar theory of cultural imperialism.

"As multinational media conglomerates grow larger and more powerful many believe that it will become increasingly difficult for small, local media outlets to survive. A new type of imperialism will thus occur, making many nations subsidiary to the media products of some of the most powerful countries or companies." Significant writers and thinkers in this area include Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman and Robert McChesney.

Conservative vs. Liberal Bias:
​
Conservative Bias:

​Certain media outlets such as NewsMax, WorldNetDaily, and Fox News are said by critics to promote a conservative or right-wing agenda.

Rupert Murdoch, the owner and executive co-chairman of 21st Century Fox (the parent of Fox News), self-identifies as a "libertarian". Roy Greenslade of The Guardian, and others, claim that Murdoch has exerted a strong influence over the media he owns, including Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and The Sun.

According to former Fox News producer Charlie Reina, unlike the AP, CBS, or ABC, Fox News's editorial policy is set from the top down in the form of a daily memo: "[F]requently, Reina says, it also contains hints, suggestions and directives on how to slant the day's news—invariably, he said in 2003, in a way that was consistent with the politics and desires of the Bush administration." Fox News responded by denouncing Reina as a "disgruntled employee" with "an ax to grind."

According to Andrew Sullivan, "One alleged news network fed its audience a diet of lies, while contributing financially to the party that benefited from those lies."

Progressive media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has argued that accusations of liberal media bias are part of a conservative strategy, noting an article in the August 20, 1992 Washington Post, in which Republican party chair Rich Bond compared journalists to referees in a sporting match. "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.' Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time." 

A 1998 study from FAIR found that journalists are "mostly centrist in their political orientation"; 30% considered themselves to the left on social issues compared with 9% on the right, while 11% considered themselves to the left on economic issues compared with 19% on the right. The report argued that since journalists considered themselves to be centrists, "perhaps this is why an earlier survey found that they tended to vote for Bill Clinton in large numbers." FAIR uses this study to support the claim that media bias is propagated down from the management, and that individual journalists are relatively neutral in their work.

A report "Examining the 'Liberal Media' Claim: Journalists Views on Politics, Economic Policy and Media Coverage" by FAIR's David Croteau, from 1998, calls into question the assumption that journalists' views are to the left of center in America. The findings were that journalists were "mostly centrist in their political orientation" and more conservative than the general public on economic issues (with a minority being more progressive than the general public on social issues).

Kenneth Tomlinson, while chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, commissioned a $10,000 government study into Bill Moyers' PBS program, NOW. 

The results of the study indicated that there was no particular bias on PBS. Tomlinson chose to reject the results of the study, subsequently reducing time and funding for NOW with Bill Moyers, which many including Tomlinson regarded as a "left-wing" program, and then expanded a show hosted by Fox News correspondent Tucker Carlson.

Some board members stated that his actions were politically motivated. Himself a frequent target of claims of bias (in this case, conservative bias), Tomlinson resigned from the CPB board on November 4, 2005.

Regarding the claims of a left-wing bias, Moyers asserted in a Broadcasting & Cable interview that "If reporting on what's happening to ordinary people thrown overboard by circumstances beyond their control and betrayed by Washington officials is liberalism, I stand convicted."

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns broadcast stations affiliated with the major television networks, has been known for requiring its stations to run reports and editorials that promote conservative viewpoints. Its rapid growth through station group acquisitions—especially during the lead-up to the 2016 presidential elections—had provided an increasingly large platform for its views.

Several authors have written books on conservative bias in the media, including:
Reviewer John Moe sums up Alterman's views: "The conservatives in the newspapers, television, talk radio, and the Republican party are lying about liberal bias and repeating the same lies long enough that they've taken on a patina of truth. Further, the perception of such a bias has cowed many media outlets into presenting more conservative opinions to counterbalance a bias, which does not, in fact, exist."

Liberal Bias:
See also: Liberal bias in academia

Some critics of the media say liberal (or left wing) bias exists within a wide variety of media channels, especially within the mainstream media, including network news shows of CBS, ABC, and NBC, cable channels CNN, MSNBC and the former Current TV, as well as major newspapers, news-wires, and radio outlets, especially CBS News, Newsweek, and The New York Times. 

These arguments intensified when it was revealed that the Democratic Party received a total donation of $1,020,816, given by 1,160 employees of the three major broadcast television networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), while the Republican Party received only $142,863 via 193 donations from employees of these same organizations. Both of these figures represent donations made in 2008.

A study cited frequently by those who make claims of liberal media bias in American journalism is The Media Elite, a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter. They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the broadcast networks.

The survey found that the large majority of journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics, including issues such as abortion, affirmative action, social services, and gay rights.

The authors compared journalists' attitudes to their coverage of issues such as the safety of nuclear power, school busing to promote racial integration, and the energy crisis of the 1970s and concluded firstly that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes and education, and secondly that the predominance of political liberals in newsrooms pushed news coverage in a liberal direction.

The authors suggested this tilt as a mostly unconscious process of like-minded individuals projecting their shared assumptions onto their interpretations of reality, a variation of confirmation bias.

Jim A. Kuypers of Dartmouth College investigated the issue of media bias in the 2002 book Press Bias and Politics. In this study of 116 mainstream U.S. papers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, Kuypers stated that the mainstream press in America tends to favor liberal viewpoints.

They argued that reporters who they thought were expressing moderate or conservative points of view were often labeled as holding a minority point of view. Kuypers said he found liberal bias in the reporting of a variety of issues including race, welfare reform, environmental protection, and gun control. 

According to the Media Research Center, and David Brady of the Hoover Institute, conservative individuals and groups are more often labeled as such, than liberal individuals and groups.

A 2005 study by political scientists Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia attempted to quantify bias among news outlets using statistical models, and found a liberal bias. The authors wrote that "all of the news outlets we examine[d], except Fox News's Special Report and the Washington Times, received scores to the left of the average member of Congress." The study concluded that news pages of The Wall Street Journal were more liberal than The New York Times, and the news reporting of PBS was to the right of most mainstream media.

The report also stated that the news media showed a fair degree of centrism, since all but one of the outlets studied were, from an ideological point of view, between the average Democrat and average Republican in Congress. In a blog post, Mark Liberman, professor of computer science and the director of Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania, critiqued the statistical model used in this study.

The model used by Groseclose and Milyo assumed that conservative politicians do not care about the ideological position of think tanks they cite, while liberal politicians do. Liberman characterized the unsupported assumption as preposterous and argued that it led to implausible conclusions.

A 2014 Gallup poll found that a plurality of Americans believe the media is biased to favor liberal politics. According to the poll, 44% of Americans feel that news media are "too liberal" (70% of self-identified conservatives, 35% of self-identified moderates, and 15% of self-identified liberals), while 19% believe them to be "too conservative" (12% of self-identified conservatives, 18% of self-identified moderates, and 33% of self-identified liberals), and 34% "just about right" (49% of self-identified liberals, 44% of self-identified moderates, and 16% of self-identified conservatives).

A 2008 joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that viewers believe a liberal media bias can be found in television news on networks such as CNN.

These findings concerning a perception of liberal bias in television news—particularly at CNN—were also reported by other sources. The study was met with criticism from media outlets and academics, including the Wall Street Journal, and progressive media watchdog Media Matters. Criticism from Media Matters included:
  • Different mediums were studied for different lengths of time. For example, CBS News was studied for 12 years while the Wall Street Journal was studied for four months.
  • Lack of context in quoting sources (sources quoted were automatically assumed to be supporting the article).
  • Lack of balance in sources: liberal sources such as the NAACP did not have a conservative counterpart that could add balance.
  • Flawed assignment of political positions of sources: the RAND corporation was considered "liberal" while the American Civil Liberties Union was considered "conservative".

Authors:

Several authors have written books on liberal bias in the media, including
Racial Bias:
​See also: Representation of African Americans in media

Political activist and one-time presidential candidate Rev. Jesse Jackson said in 1985 that the news media portray black people as "less intelligent than we are." 

​The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy, a book published by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman, claimed to document bias in media coverage of scientific findings regarding race and intelligence. Snyderman and Rothman stated that media reports often either erroneously reported that most experts believe that the genetic contribution to IQ is absolute or that most experts believe that genetics plays no role at all.

According to Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow, in 1986, many stories of the crack crisis broke out in the media. In these stories, African Americans were featured as "crack whores." The deaths of NBA player Len Bias and NFL player Don Rogers due to cocaine overdose only added to the media frenzy. Alexander claims in her book: "Between October 1988 and October 1989, the Washington Post alone ran 1,565 stories about the 'drug scourge.'"

One example of this double standard is the comparison of the deaths of Michael Brown and Dillon Taylor. On August 9, 2014, news broke out that Brown, a young, unarmed African American man, was shot and killed by a white policeman. This story spread throughout news media, explaining that the incident had to do with race. Only two days later, Taylor, another young, unarmed man, was shot and killed by a policeman. This story, however, did not get as highly publicized as Brown's. However unlike Brown's case, Taylor was white and Hispanic, while the police officer is black.

Research has shown that African Americans are over-represented in news reports on crime and that within those stories they are more likely to be shown as the perpetrators of the crime than as the persons reacting to or suffering from it. This perception that African Americans are over-represented in crime reporting persists even though crime statistics indicate that the percentage of African Americans who are convicted of crimes, and the percentage of African Americans who are victims of crimes, are both larger than the percentages for other racial and ethnic groups.
​
One of the most striking examples of racial bias was the portrayal of African Americans in the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. The media presented the riots as being an African American problem, deeming African Americans solely responsible for the riots. However, according to reports, only 36% of those arrested during the riots were African American. Some 60% of the rioters and looters were Hispanics and whites, facts that were not reported by the media.

Conversely, multiple commentators and newspaper articles have cited examples of the national media under-reporting interracial hate crimes when they involve white victims as compared to when they involve African Americans victims. 

Jon Ham, a vice president of the conservative John Locke Foundation, wrote that "local officials and editors often claim that mentioning the black-on-white nature of the event might inflame passion, but they never have those same qualms when it's white-on-black."

​According to David Niven, of Ohio State University, research shows that American media show bias on only two issues: race and gender equality.

Coverage of Electoral Politics:
Main article: Political handicapping

In the 19th century, many American newspapers made no pretense to lack of bias, openly advocating one or another political party. Big cities would often have competing newspapers supporting various political parties. To some extent this was mitigated by a separation between news and editorial. News reporting was expected to be relatively neutral or at least factual, whereas editorial was openly the opinion of the publisher. Editorials might also be accompanied by an editorial cartoon, which would frequently lampoon the publisher's opponents.

In an editorial for The American Conservative, Pat Buchanan wrote that reporting by "the liberal media establishment" on the Watergate scandal "played a central role in bringing down a president." Richard Nixon later complained, "I gave them a sword and they ran it right through me."

Nixon's Vice-President Spiro Agnew attacked the media in a series of speeches—two of the most famous having been written by White House aides William Safire and Buchanan himself—as "elitist" and "liberal." However, the media had also strongly criticized his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, for his handling of the Vietnam War, which culminated in him not seeking a second term.

In 2004, Steve Ansolabehere, Rebecca Lessem and Jim Snyder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analyzed the political orientation of endorsements by U.S. newspapers. They found an upward trend in the average propensity to endorse a candidate, and in particular an incumbent one.

There were also some changes in the average ideological slant of endorsements: while in the 1940s and in the 1950s there was a clear advantage to Republican candidates, this advantage continuously eroded in subsequent decades, to the extent that in the 1990s the authors found a slight Democratic lead in the average endorsement choice.

Riccardo Puglisi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology looks at the editorial choices of the New York Times from 1946 to 1997. He finds that the Times displays Democratic partisanship, with some watchdog aspects. This is the case, because during presidential campaigns the Times systematically gives more coverage to Democratic topics of civil rights, health care, labor and social welfare, but only when the incumbent president is a Republican.

These topics are classified as Democratic ones, because Gallup polls show that on average U.S. citizens think that Democratic candidates would be better at handling problems related to them. According to Puglisi, in the post-1960 period the Timesdisplays a more symmetric type of watchdog behavior, just because during presidential campaigns it also gives more coverage to the typically Republican issue of Defense when the incumbent President is a Democrat, and less so when the incumbent is a Republican.

John Lott and Kevin Hassett of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute studied the coverage of economic news by looking at a panel of 389 U.S. newspapers from 1991 to 2004, and at a sub-sample of the two ten newspapers and the Associated Press from 1985 to 2004. For each release of official data about a set of economic indicators, the authors analyze how newspapers decide to report on them, as reflected by the tone of the related headlines.

The idea is to check whether newspapers display partisan bias, by giving more positive or negative coverage to the same economic figure, as a function of the political affiliation of the incumbent President. Controlling for the economic data being released, the authors find that there are between 9.6 and 14.7% fewer positive stories when the incumbent President is a Republican.

According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a liberal watchdog group, Democratic candidate John Edwards was falsely maligned and was not given coverage commensurate with his standing in presidential campaign coverage because his message questioned corporate power.

A 2000 meta-analysis of research in 59 quantitative studies of media bias in American presidential campaigns from 1948 through 1996 found that media bias tends to cancel out, leaving little or no net bias. The authors conclude "It is clear that the major source of bias charges is the individual perceptions of media consumers and, in particular, media consumers of a particularly ideological bent."

It has also been acknowledged that media outlets have often used horse-race journalism with the intent of making elections more competitive. This form of political coverage involves diverting attention away from stronger candidates and hyping so-called dark horse contenders who seem more unlikely to win when the election cycle begins.

Benjamin Disraeli used the term " dark horse" to describe horse racing in 1831 in The Young Duke, writing, "a dark horse which had never been thought of and which the careless St. James had never even observed in the list, rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph."

Political analyst Larry Sabato stated in his 2006 book Encyclopedia of American Political Parties and Elections that Disraeli's description of dark horses "now fits in neatly with the media's trend towards horse-race journalism and penchant for using sports analogies to describe presidential politics."

Often in contrast with national media, political science scholars seek to compile long-term data and research on the impact of political issues and voting in U.S. presidential elections, producing in-depth articles breaking down the issues.

2000 Presidential Election:
​
During the course of the 2000 presidential election, some pundits accused the mainstream media of distorting facts in an effort to help Texas Governor George W. Bush win the 2000 Presidential Election after Bush and Al Gore officially launched their campaigns in 1999.

Peter Hart and Jim Naureckas, two commentators for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), called the media "serial exaggerators" and argued that several media outlets were constantly exaggerating criticism of Gore, like falsely claiming that Gore lied when he claimed he spoke in an overcrowded science class in Sarasota, Florida, and giving Bush a pass on certain issues, such as the fact that Bush wildly exaggerated how much money he signed into the annual Texas state budget to help the uninsured during his second debate with Gore in October 2000.

In the April 2000 issue of Washington Monthly, columnist Robert Parry also argued that several media outlets exaggerated Gore's supposed claim that he "discovered" the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York during a campaign speech in Concord, New Hampshire on November 30, 1999, when he had only claimed he "found" it after it was already evacuated in 1978 because of chemical contamination.

Rolling Stone columnist Eric Boehlert also argued that media outlets exaggerated criticism of Gore as early as July 22, 1999, when Gore, known for being an environmentalist, had a friend release 500 million gallons of water into a drought stricken river to help keep his boat afloat for a photo shot; media outlets, however, exaggerated the actual number of gallons that were released and claimed it was 4 billion.

2008 Presidential election:

In the 2008 presidential election, media outlets were accused of discrediting Barack Obama's opponents in an effort to help him win the Democratic nomination and later the Presidential election. At the February debate, Tim Russert of NBC News was criticized for what some perceived as disproportionately tough questioning of Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton. 

Among the questions, Russert had asked Clinton, but not Obama, to provide the name of the new Russian President (Dmitry Medvedev). This was later parodied on Saturday Night Live. In October 2007, liberal commentators accused Russert of harassing Clinton over the issue of supporting drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants.

On April 16, 2008 ABC News hosted a debate in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos were criticized by viewers, bloggers and media critics for the poor quality of their questions. Many viewers said they considered some of the questions irrelevant when measured against the importance of the faltering economy or the Iraq war.

Included in that category were continued questions about Obama's former pastor, Clinton's assertion that she had to duck sniper fire in Bosnia more than a decade ago, and Obama's not wearing an American flag pin. The moderators focused on campaign gaffes and some believed they focused too much on Obama. Stephanopoulos defended their performance, saying "Senator Obama was the front-runner" and the questions were "not inappropriate or irrelevant at all."

In an op-ed published on April 27, 2008, in The New York Times, Elizabeth Edwards wrote that the media covered much more of "the rancor of the campaign" and "amount of money spent" than "the candidates' priorities, policies and principles."

Author Erica Jong commented that "our press has become a sea of triviality, meanness and irrelevant chatter." A Gallup poll released on May 29, 2008 also estimated that more Americans felt the media was being harder on Clinton than they were on Obama.

In a joint study by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and the Project for Excellence in Journalism, the authors found disparate treatment by the three major cable networks of Republican and Democratic candidates during the earliest five months of presidential primaries in 2007: "The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one.

Four-in-ten stories (41%) were clearly negative while just 14% were positive and 46% were neutral. The network provided negative coverage of all three main candidates with McCain faring the worst (63% negative) and Romney faring a little better than the others only because a majority of his coverage was neutral. It's not that Democrats, other than Obama, fared well on CNN either.

Nearly half of the Illinois Senator's stories were positive (46%), vs. just 8% that were negative. But both Clinton and Edwards ended up with more negative than positive coverage overall. So while coverage for Democrats overall was a bit more positive than negative, that was almost all due to extremely favorable coverage for Obama."

A poll of likely 2008 United States presidential election voters released on March 14, 2007 by Zogby International reports that 83 percent of those surveyed believe that there is a bias in the media, with 64 percent of respondents of the opinion that this bias favors liberals and 28 percent of respondents believing that this bias is conservative. 

In August 2008 the Washington Post ombudsman wrote that the Post had published almost three times as many page 1 stories about Obama than it had about John McCain since Obama won the Democratic party nomination that June. In September 2008 a Rasmussen poll found that 68 percent of voters believed that "most reporters try to help the candidate they want to win."

Forty-nine (49) percent of respondents stated that the reporters were helping Obama to get elected, while only 14 percent said the same regarding McCain. A further 51 percent said that the press was actively "trying to hurt" Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin with negative coverage.

In October 2008, Washington Post media correspondent Howard Kurtz reported that Palin was again on the cover of Newsweek, "but with the most biased campaign headline I've ever seen."

After the election was over, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell reviewed the Post's coverage and concluded that it was slanted in favor of Obama. "The Post provided a lot of good campaign coverage, but readers have been consistently critical of the lack of probing issues coverage and what they saw as a tilt toward Democrat Barack Obama. My surveys, which ended on Election Day, show that they are right on both counts."

Over the course of the campaign, the Post printed 594 "issues stories" and 1,295 "horse-race stories." There were more positive opinion pieces on Obama than McCain (32 to 13) and more negative pieces about McCain than Obama (58 to 32). Overall, more news stories were dedicated to Obama than McCain. Howell said that the results of her survey were comparable to those reported by the Project for Excellence in Journalism for the national media. (That report, issued on October 22, 2008, found that "coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable," with 57% of the stories issued after the conventions being negative and only 14% being positive.

For the same period, 36% of the stories on Obama were positive, 35% were neutral or mixed, and 29% were negative. While rating the Post's biographical stories as generally quite good, she concluded that "Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin 'Tony' Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager."

Various critics, particularly Hudson, have shown concern over the link between the news media's reporting and what they see as the trivialized nature of American elections.

Hudson argued that America's news media elections coverage damages the democratic process. He argues that elections are centered on candidates, whose advancement depends on funds, personality and sound-bites, rather than serious political discussion or policies offered by parties. His argument is that it is on the media which Americans are dependent for information about politics (this is of course true almost by definition) and that they are therefore greatly influenced by the way the media report, which concentrates on short sound-bites, gaffes by candidates, and scandals.

The reporting of elections avoids complex issues or issues which are time-consuming to explain. Of course, important political issues are generally both complex and time-consuming to explain, so are avoided.

Hudson blames this style of media coverage, at least partly, for trivialized elections:
"The bites of information voters receive from both print and electronic media are simply insufficient for constructive political discourse. ... candidates for office have adjusted their style of campaigning in response to this tabloid style of media coverage. ... modern campaigns are exercises in image manipulation. ... Elections decided on sound bites, negative campaign commercials, and sensationalized exposure of personal character flaws provide no meaningful direction for government".

2016 Presidental Election:

Beginning in the middle of May 2016, Donald Trump attacked CNN and other media outlets that he believes is spreading "fake news" and "is totally against him"

Post Election Coverage:

As of December 2017, President Trump has continued to call media outlets "fake news".

Coverage of Foreign Issues:

​In addition to philosophical or economic biases, there are also subject biases, including criticism of media coverage about foreign policy issues as being overly centered in Washington, D.C.. Coverage is variously cited as being: 'Beltway centrism', framed in terms of domestic politics and established policy positions, only following Washington's 'Official Agendas', and mirroring only a 'Washington Consensus'.

Regardless of the criticism, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, "No news subject generates more complaints about media objectivity than the Middle East in general and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular."

Coverage of the Vietnam War:
Main article: U.S. news media and the Vietnam War

Coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict:
Main article: Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict

Pro-Israel media: 

Stephen Zunes wrote that "mainstream and conservative Jewish organizations have mobilized considerable lobbying resources, financial contributions from the Jewish community, and citizen pressure on the news media and other forums of public discourse in support of the Israeli government."
​
According to CUNY professor of journalism Eric Alterman, debate among Middle East pundits, "is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel". In 2002, he listed 56 columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel "reflexively and without qualification." Alterman only identified five pundits who consistently criticize Israeli behavior or endorse pro-Arab positions.

Journalists described as pro-Israel by Mearsheimer and Walt include: the New York Times' William Safire, A.M. Rosenthal, David Brooks, and Thomas Friedman (although they say that the latter is sometimes critical of areas of Israel policy); the Washington Post's Jim Hoagland, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer and George Will; and the Los Angeles Times' Max Boot, Jonah Goldberg and Jonathan Chait.

The 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy argued that there is a media bias in favor of Israel. It stated that a former spokesman for the Israeli Consulate in New York said that: "Of course, a lot of self-censorship goes on. Journalists, editors, and politicians are going to think twice about criticizing Israel if they know they are going to get thousands of angry calls in a matter of hours. The Jewish lobby is good at orchestrating pressure."

Journalist Michael Massing wrote in 2006 that "Jewish organizations are quick to detect bias in the coverage of the Middle East, and quick to complain about it. That's especially true of late. As The Forward observed in late April [2002], 'rooting out perceived anti-Israel bias in the media has become for many American Jews the most direct and emotional outlet for connecting with the conflict 6,000 miles away.'"

The Forward related how one individual felt: "'There's a great frustration that American Jews want to do something,' said Ira Youdovin, executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. 'In 1947, some number would have enlisted in the Haganah,' he said, referring to the pre-state Jewish armed force. 'There was a special American brigade. Nowadays you can't do that. The battle here is the hasbarah war,' Youdovin said, using a Hebrew term for public relations. 'We're winning, but we're very much concerned about the bad stuff.'"

A 2003 Boston Globe article on the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America media watchdog group by Mark Jurkowitz argued that: "To its supporters, CAMERA is figuratively – and perhaps literally – doing God's work, battling insidious anti-Israeli bias in the media. But its detractors see CAMERA as a myopic and vindictive special interest group trying to muscle its views into media coverage."

Pro-Palestine media:

Several sources indicate that increased support of Palestine and increased bias against Israel by international media are correlated to spikes in anti-semitic acts. According to Gary Weiss, due to intimidation of international journalists by Palestine and bias in American mainstream media, American media have "become part of the Hamas war machine".

Coverage of the Iraq War:
Main article: Media coverage of the Iraq War

Suggestions of insufficiently critical media coverage. In 2003, a study released by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting stated the network news disproportionately focused on pro-war sources and left out many anti-war sources. According to the study, 64% of total sources were in favor of the Iraq War while total anti-war sources made up 10% of the media (only 3% of US sources were anti-war). The study stated that "viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1."

In February 2004, a study was released by the liberal national media watchdog group FAIR. According to the study, which took place during October 2003, current or former government or military officials accounted for 76 percent of all 319 sources for news stories about Iraq which aired on network news channels.

On March 23, 2006, the US designated the Hezbollah affiliated media, Al-Nour Radio and Al-Manar TV station, as "terrorist entities" through legislative language as well as support of a letter to President Bush signed by 51 senators.

Suggestions of overly critical media coverage:

Some critics believe that, on the contrary, the American media have been too critical of U.S. forces. Rick Mullen, a former journalist, Vietnam veteran, and U.S. Marine Corps reserve officer, has suggested that American media coverage has been unfair, and has failed to send a message adequately supportive of U.S. forces.

Mullen calls for a lesser reporting of transgressions by US forces (condemning "American media pouncing on every transgression"), and a more extensive reporting of US forces' positive actions, which Mullen feels are inadequately reported (condemning the media for "ignoring the legions of good and noble deeds by US and coalition forces"). Mullen compares critical media reports to the 9/11 terrorist attacks:

​"I have got used to our American media pouncing on every transgression by U.S. Forces while ignoring the legions of good and noble deeds performed by U.S. and coalition forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan... This sort of thing is akin to the evening news focusing on the few bad things that happen in Los Angeles or London and ignoring the millions of good news items each day... I am sure that you are aware that it is not the enemy's objective to defeat us on the battlefield but to defeat our national will to prevail.

That battle is fought in the living rooms of America and England and the medium used is the TV news and newspapers. The enemy is not stupid. As on 9/11, they plan to use our "systems" against us, the news media being the most important "system" in their pursuit to break our national will."  —Rick Mullen, Letter to The London Times, 2006.
​
News sources:

A widely cited public opinion study documented a correlation between news source and certain misconceptions about the Iraq war. Conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes in October 2003, the poll asked Americans whether they believed statements about the Iraq war that were known to be false. Respondents were also asked for their primary news source: Fox News, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, "Print sources," or NPR.
​
​By cross referencing the respondents to their primary news source, the study showed that more Fox News watchers held those misconceptions about the Iraq war. Director of Program on International Policy (PIPA) Stephen Kull said, "While we cannot assert that these misconceptions created the support for going to war with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions."

Bias in entertainment media:
​
Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, a 2011 book by Ben Shapiro, argues that producers, executives and writers in the entertainment industry are using television to promote a liberal political agenda.

The claims include both blatant and subtle liberal agendas in entertainment shows, discrimination against conservatives in the industry, and misleading advertisers regarding the value of liberal leaning market segments. As one part of the evidence, he presents statements from taped interviews made by celebrities and T.V. show creators from Hollywood whom he interviewed for the book.

Some comic strips have been accused of bias. The Doonesbury comic strip has a liberal point of view. In 2004 a conservative letter writing campaign was successful in convincing Continental Features, a company that prints many Sunday comics sections, to refuse to print the strip, causing Doonesbury to disappear from the Sunday comics in 38 newspapers.

Of the 38, only one editor, Troy Turner, executive editor of the Anniston Star in Alabama, continued to run the Sunday Doonesbury, albeit necessarily in black and white. Mallard Fillmore by Bruce Tinsley and Prickly City by Scott Stantis are both conservative in their views.

In older strips, Li'l Abner by Al Capp routinely parodied Southern Democrats through the character of Senator Jack S. Phogbound, but later adopted a strongly conservative stance. 

Pogo by Walt Kelly caricatured a wide range of political figures including Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace, Robert F. Kennedy, and Eugene McCarthy. 

Little Orphan Annie espoused a strong anti-union pro-business stance in the story "Eonite" from 1935, where union agitators destroy a business that would have benefited the entire human race.

Causes of the Perception of Bias:

Jonathan M. Ladd, who has conducted intensive studies of media trust and media bias, concluded that the primary cause of belief in media bias is media telling their audience that particular media are biased.

People who are told that a medium is biased tend to believe that it is biased, and this belief is unrelated to whether that medium is actually biased or not. The only other factor with as strong an influence on belief that media is biased is extensive coverage of celebrities. A majority of people see such media as biased, while at the same time preferring media with extensive coverage of celebrities.

Watchdog Groups:

​Reporters Without Borders has said that the media in the United States lost a great deal of freedom between the 2004 and 2006 indices, citing the Judith Miller case and similar cases and laws restricting the confidentiality of sources as the main factors. They also cite the fact that reporters who question the American "war on terror" are sometimes regarded as suspicious.

They rank the U.S. as 53rd out of 168 countries in freedom of the press, comparable to Japan and Uruguay, but below all but one European Union country (Poland) and below most OECD countries (countries that accept democracy and free markets). In the 2008 ranking, the U.S. moved up to 36, between Taiwan and Macedonia, but still far below its ranking in the late 20th century as a world leader in having a free and unbiased press.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), is a self-described progressive media watch group.

Media Matters for America, another self-described progressive media watch group, dedicates itself to "monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."

Conservative organizations Accuracy In Media and Media Research Center argue that the media has a liberal bias, and are dedicated to publicizing that opinion. The Media Research Center, for example, was founded with the specific intention to "prove ... that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values".

Groups such as FactCheck argue that the media frequently gets the facts wrong because they rely on biased sources of information. This includes using information provided to them from both parties.

After the Press is a news blog that follows the press to stories of national interest across America and shows the side of the story that mainstream media does not air.[

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Media Bias in the United States:







​The Washington Post and the Bezos Effect
YouTube Video: Jeff Bezos Paid Asking Price for Washington Post
Pictured: Jeff Bezos, current owner of The Washington Post

The Bezos Effect: How Amazon’s Founder Is Reinventing The Washington Post – and What Lessons It Might Hold for the Beleaguered Newspaper Business by the Shorenstein Center, June 8, 2016.

A new paper by Dan Kennedy, Joan Shorenstein Fellow (spring 2016) and associate professor in the School of Journalism at Northeastern University, provides insight into The Washington Post’s digital strategy and business model following its acquisition by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Many of the strategies Bezos is pursuing are applicable to any newspaper, writes Kennedy: Invest in journalism and technology, seek out both large-scale and elite audiences, and maintain a relentless focus on building the size of the digital audience.

Kennedy details how the Post is dealing with these challenges and others, and also provides a glimpse into the Post’s culture through exclusive interviews with Executive Editor Martin Baron, Chief Information Officer Shailesh Prakash, and other Washington Post staff.

Read an excerpt at Nieman Lab, “5 things publishers can learn from how Jeff Bezos is running The Washington Post.”

Introduction:

The nation’s capital was still digging out from the two feet of snow that had fallen the previous weekend. But inside the gleaming new headquarters of The Washington Post, a celebration was under way.

Among the speakers that day—Thursday, January 28, 2016—was Jason Rezaian, the Post reporter who had just been released by the Iranian government. “For much of the eighteen months I was in prison, my Iranian interrogators told me that The Washington Post did not exist.

That no one knew of my plight. And that the United States government would not lift a finger for my release,” said Rezaian, pausing occasionally to keep his emotions in check. “Today I’m here in this room with the very people who proved the Iranians wrong in so many ways.”

Also speaking were publisher Frederick Ryan, executive editor Martin Baron, Secretary of State John Kerry, and the region’s top elected officials. But they were just the opening act.

The main event was a short speech by the host of the party: Jeffrey Preston Bezos, founder and chief executive of the retail and technology behemoth Amazon, digital visionary, and, since October 1, 2013, owner of The Washington Post.

It was Bezos who had purchased the storied newspaper from the heirs of Eugene Meyer and Katharine Graham for the bargain-basement price of $250 million. It was Bezos who had opened his checkbook so that the Post could reverse years of shrinkage in its reportorial ranks and journalistic ambitions.

It was Bezos who had moved the Post from its hulking facility on 15th Street to its bright and shiny offices on K Street, overlooking Franklin Square. And it was Bezos who had flown Jason Rezaian and his family home from Germany on his private jet. Now it was time for Bezos—a largely unseen, unheard presence at the Post except among the paper’s top executives—to step to the podium.

The vision Bezos outlined for his newspaper that day was simultaneously inspiring and entirely at odds with the wretched state of the news business.

Like Fred Ryan and Marty Baron, Bezos was wearing a lapel pin that announced “#JasonIsFree,” the Twitter hashtag that had replaced “#FreeJason” upon Rezaian’s release.

“We couldn’t have a better guest of honor for our grand opening, Jason, because the fact that you’re our guest of honor means you’re here. So thank you,” Bezos began. Next he praised Secretary Kerry.

And then he turned his attention to the Post, combining boilerplate (“I am a huge fan of leaning into the future”), praise (“I’m incredibly proud of this team here at the Post”), and humility (“I’m still a newbie, and I’m learning”). For a speech that lasted just a little more than seven minutes, it was a bravura performance.

He called himself “a fan of nostalgia,” but added, “It’s a little risky to let nostalgia transition into glamorizing the past.” He invoked tradition. Marty Baron, in his remarks, had referred to the Post’s “soul,” and Bezos picked up on that. “Important institutions like the Post have an essence, they have a heart, they have a core—what Marty called a soul,” he said. “And if you wanted that to change, you’d be crazy. That’s part of what this place is, it’s part of what makes it so special.”

And, finally, he offered some humor aimed at charging up the troops: “Even in the world of journalism, I think the Post is just a little more swashbuckling. There’s a little more swagger.

There’s a tiny bit of bad-assness here at the Post.” Bezos paused while the audience laughed and applauded, then continued: “And that is pretty special. Without quality journalism, swashbuckling would just be dumb. Swashbuckling without professionalism leads to those epic-fail YouTube videos. It’s the quality journalism at the heart of everything. And then when you add that swagger and that swashbuckling, that’s making this place very, very special.”

The vision Bezos outlined for his newspaper that day was simultaneously inspiring and entirely at odds with the wretched state of the news business. Of course, the Post is different—but in large measure because of Bezos’s vast personal wealth (his stake in Amazon was worth an estimated $46 billion in early 2016) and his willingness to spend some of it on his newspaper. Inside the Post, all was optimism and hope. Elsewhere, it was cold and bitter.

At a time when virtually every newspaper’s staff was being cut in an effort to stay ahead of diminishing revenues, the Post was moving in an entirely different direction.

Insiders at the Post emphasize that Bezos is operating the Post as a business, not as an extravagant personal plaything. Although he has bolstered the newsroom, its staffing remains well below the level it reached at the peak of the Graham era. But almost alone among owners of major newspapers, he has shown a willingness to invest now in the hopes of reaching future profitability.

The Washington Post’s revival under Jeff Bezos is not just the story of one newspaper. Of far more significance is what it might tell us about prospects for the newspaper business as a whole. Because the internet has led to profound changes in the way journalism is distributed and paid for (or not paid for), newspapers have been struggling since the mid–1990s, slowly at first and more rapidly during the past decade.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze what steps Bezos and his team are taking to restore the Post not just to its former status as a powerhouse news organization with the resources to compete as a leading source of national and international news, but also to achieve some measure of profitability—and perhaps to serve as a lesson for newspaper owners everywhere.

The Washington Post’s revival under Jeff Bezos is not just the story of one newspaper. Of far more significance is what it might tell us about prospects for the newspaper business as a whole.

As we will see, Bezos’s Post has invested an enormous effort in building the paper’s digital audience, now the largest among American newspapers. In 2014 Matthew Hindman, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, identified a number of steps that newspapers should take to increase online traffic.

Significantly, the Post has taken every one of them: it has boosted the speed of its website and of its various mobile apps; it has lavished attention on the design and layout of those digital platforms; it is developing personalized recommendation systems; it is publishing more content with frequent updates; it regularly tests different headlines and story treatments to see which attract more readers; it is fully engaged with social media; and it offers a considerable amount of multimedia content, with a heavy emphasis on video.

The strategies Bezos is pursuing are applicable to any newspaper: invest in journalism and technology, understanding that a news organization’s consumers will not pay more for less; pursue both large-scale and elite audiences, a strategy that could be called mass and class; and maintain a relentless focus on building the size of the digital audience.

The specifics of how the Post is dealing with those challenges will be discussed later in this paper.

Bezos, who rarely speaks to journalists (even reporters at the Post), was not interviewed for this paper. He did not respond to a number of requests sent by email and regular mail over a period of months to him and to several public-relations executives at both Amazon and the Post.

But in his remarks at the dedication, he said he bought the Post because of its importance as an institution—and he emphasized that transforming it into a profitable enterprise will make it stronger journalistically as well.

“The people who meet with me here at the Post will have heard me many times say we’re not a snack-food company. What we’re doing here is really important. It’s different,” he said.

“This needs to be a sustainable business because that’s healthy for the mission. But that’s not why we do this business. We’re not just trying to make money. We think this is important.”

A Breathtaking Decline:

The disintegration of the news business—and, especially, of newspapers, which continue to produce most of the journalism aimed at holding government and other powerful institutions to account—has been nothing short of breathtaking. Paid daily circulation in the United States fell from a post–1940 high of more than 60 million in 1968 to just 40.4 million in 2014, with a similarly calamitous decline on Sundays.

Advertising revenue plunged from $49.4 billion in 2005 to just $19.9 billion in 2014; even worse, the digital share of that total, $3.5 billion in 2014, had barely budged since 2007.

Full-time newsroom employment fell from 56,900 in 1989 to 36,700 in 2013.

Thus no small amount of hopeful longing greeted Bezos’s acquisition of the Post in 2013. Two other wealthy newspaper owners also gave rise to some cautious optimism that year—Aaron Kushner, a former greeting-card executive who was rebuilding The Orange County Register, and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry, a wealthy financier who purchased The Boston Globe just three days before Bezos made his move.

By the spring of 2016, though, Kushner was long gone and Henry was having his ups and downs with the Globe. Bezos, on the other hand, was firing on all cylinders.

One of the most significant milestones of the Bezos era came in October 2015, when the Post moved ahead of The New York Times in web traffic. According to the analytics firm comScore, the Post attracted 66.9 million unique visitors that month compared to 65.8 million for the Times—a 59 percent increase for the Post over the previous year. And the good news continued.

In February 2016, according to comScore, the Post received 890.1 million page views, beating not just the Times(721.3 million) but the traffic monster BuzzFeed (884 million) as well, although by some measures BuzzFeed continued to be ahead. The only American news site that attracted a larger audience was CNN.com, with more than 1.4 billion page views.

…the Post has bolstered the ranks of its engineers by thirty-five positions since Bezos assumed ownership, with eighty engineers working alongside journalists in the newsroom.
The Post’s growth in online readership has been accompanied by a continuing drop in paid print circulation. As is the case with virtually all newspapers, the Post’s print edition has shrunk substantially over the years and will almost certainly continue to do so.

In September 2015, the Alliance for Audited Media reported that the Post’s weekday circulation was about 432,000—just a little more than half of its peak, 832,000, which it reached in 1993. Sunday circulation, meanwhile, slid from 881,000 in 2008 to 572,000 in September 2015. 

Given the newspaper business’s continued reliance on print for most of its revenues, the Graham family clearly would have faced a difficult challenge if the decision hadn’t been made to sell the paper.

Indeed, under Graham family ownership, the size of the Post’s newsroom had been shrinking for years. Under Bezos, it has been growing. As of March 2016, the Post employed about 700 full-time journalists, an expansion of about 140* positions from the time that Bezos bought the paper.

That’s about half the number employed by The New York Times, but it is enough to allow the Post to deploy reporters both nationally and internationally to a degree not previously possible. In addition, the Post has bolstered the ranks of its engineers by thirty-five positions since Bezos assumed ownership, with eighty engineers working alongside journalists in the newsroom.

Those engineers—led by chief information officer and vice president of technology Shailesh Prakash, a highly regarded Graham-era holdover—are involved in an array of projects, from building the paper’s website and apps, to designing tools for infographics and database reporting, to developing an in-house content-management system and analytics dashboard.

Then there are the intangibles. Bezos had the good sense to retain not just Prakash but also Marty Baron, who had been hired by Katharine Weymouth, the last of the Graham family publishers. Baron is widely considered to be one of the best editors working today. (A headline in Esquire asked, “Is Martin Baron the Best Editor of All Time?”)

In addition, the Post won national attention—and Pulitzer Prizes—for its coverage (along with The Guardian) of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency, lapses within the Secret Service, and police-involved shootings of civilians. The paper’s principled and very public advocacy on Jason Rezaian’s behalf served as a reminder of the Post’s institutional importance.

Baron speaks of Bezos’s approach as one of a willingness to try out a variety of new ideas in the hopes that some of them will work.

“He said at the beginning—he was absolutely straightforward about it—that he didn’t have a plan in his pocket, he wasn’t coming in with the magic pill, the silver bullet, whatever term we want to use,” Baron told me. “He wanted to try a lot of different things, most of which have worked pretty well and others that are still to be proven out.”

Bezos actually represents The Washington Post’s second brush with New Economy wealth. The first came in 2005, when Post Company chief executive Donald Graham graciously allowed Mark Zuckerberg—then the twenty-year-old founder of a tech start-up called Thefacebook—to walk away from a handshake agreement that would have given the Post Company a 10 percent stake in return for a $6 million investment.

Zuckerberg accepted a higher offer from Accel, a Silicon Valley–based venture-capital firm. Zuckerberg and Graham remained close, with Graham later serving as a member of Facebook’s board. But the opportunity to fund the Post with Facebook riches was lost.

During the final years of Graham ownership, the Post got much, much smaller. In 2008, with losses mounting, 231 employees took early-retirement buyouts. Over the previous five years, the size of the newsroom had shrunk from more than 900 full-time journalists to fewer than 700. 

The Post Company’s revenues fell by 10 percent, to $3.15 billion, during the first three quarters of 2011. Profit was down 72 percent, to $55 million. Toward the end, the Post itself was losing money, at least on paper: the company’s newspaper division (which also included a few smaller publications) reported an operating loss of $9.8 million in 2010, $18.2 million in 2011 (later revised to $21.2 million), and $53.7 million in 2012, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Despite all that, Don Graham, in messages to shareholders and employees, said that the Post remained profitable in the years leading up to the sale. In the Washington Post Company’s 2012 annual report, Graham wrote that the Post had recorded its third straight profitable year “before one-time costs and non-cash pension expense.”

And in his remarks to Post employees on the day that the sale to Bezos was announced, he said that cost-cutting had enabled the Post to remain in the black. “As the Post fell to tens of millions of dollars in losses in 2009, I wasn’t sure the paper could be profitable again soon,” Graham said. He praised publisher Katharine Weymouth (his niece) “and her outstanding team” for returning the paper “to cash-flow profitability the next year, and it remains there, making your job and Jeff’s far easier.”

Indeed, Graham sounded as though his family might be able to keep the Post indefinitely when he spoke with interviewers in April 2013. “We are uniquely structured so we didn’t give a damn what we made for any given quarter or any year,” he said. “That remains the great strength of the place. As a business, the Washington Post Company can be genuinely, no kidding, long-term-minded. If somebody said to me there’s a way out for newspapers but you’re going to have to lose $100 million a year to get there four to five years from now I would sign up for it in a minute.”

Four months later, Graham announced that Jeff Bezos would buy the Post.
On Monday, August 5, staff members gathered in the Washington Post’s auditorium for a 4:30 p.m. meeting. As rumor had it, Graham would announce that the paper’s building had been sold.

The news turned out to be quite a bit more significant than that. In an interview with his own paper, Graham echoed what he had said in April, that the sale was not strictly necessary. Nevertheless, he suggested that continued Graham-family stewardship would have meant a subsistence existence for the Post, and he wanted more than that.

“The Post could have survived under the company’s ownership and been profitable for the foreseeable future,” Graham said. “But we wanted to do more than survive. I’m not saying this guarantees success, but it gives us a much greater chance of success.”

Within a few weeks, Bezos arrived in Washington for two days of meetings to see what he was getting for his $250 million. During a town hall–style meeting with employees, he made it clear that he had thought a great deal about what the Postneeded to move forward.

He promised to support the paper’s investigative reporting efforts. And he identified a story that he particularly liked, “9 questions about Syria that you were too embarrassed to ask,” which combined substantive background information on that country’s conflict, an informal tone, and even a link to a song by a Syrian pop star. It was exactly the kind of serious story with a light approach that has come to define a certain subset of Post journalism.

Intriguingly, Bezos also outlined a couple of thoughts that seemed more in keeping with those of a digital troglodyte than with someone who had built one of the world’s most successful technology companies. The first were his lamentations over the rise of aggregators such as The Huffington Post, which could rewrite a story that had taken journalists months to report “in seventeen minutes,” as he put it.

The second was his belief in the primacy of the “bundle”—that is, the package of local, national, and international news, sports, culture, business, entertainment, comics, and everything else that comprised the traditional print newspaper.

Bezos was not advocating a return to print, of course, though he said it would continue to be an important medium for readers who lived in the Washington area. But he did say that he thought selling a Washington Post bundle to subscribers via tablet was a more promising proposition than getting people to pay for one story at a time on the web.

“People will buy a package,” Bezos said. “They will not pay for a story.”
Bezos’s latter point brought a retort by one of the Post’s own journalists, Timothy B. Lee, who wrote that social sharing through Facebook and Twitter was simply a superior way of being exposed to the best journalism across the web.

A new generation of news consumers, Lee said, had no interest in chaining themselves to—and paying for—news from just a few outlets. “Trying to recreate the ‘bundle’ experience in Web or tablet form means working against the grain of how readers, especially younger readers, consume the news today,” Lee wrote. “In the long run, it’s a recipe for an aging readership and slow growth.”

Lee’s warnings notwithstanding, the Post has had some success in appealing to younger readers. Citing statistics from comScore, the Post reported that it had 56 million mobile users in March 2016, an increase of 61 percent over the previous year. Even more encouraging, 45 percent of the Post’s mobile audience were millennials.

Mobile usage matters:

ComScore found in 2014 that millennials—generally defined as people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four—are not only more likely to access the internet on their smartphones or tablets than are older generations, but a significant proportion of them use mobile exclusively.

That proportion is only going to grow over time.

Essentially, Bezos has taken a multifaceted approach, embracing the bundle that Timothy Lee disparaged as well as social media. And he is offering different versions of that bundle aimed at different types of news consumers.

Click here for full Article.

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The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper. Published in Washington, D.C., it was founded on December 6, 1877.
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Located in the capital city of the United States, the newspaper has a particular emphasis on national politics. Daily editions are printed for the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia. It is published as a broadsheet.

The newspaper has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. This includes six separate Pulitzers awarded in 2008, second only to The New York Times' seven awards in 2002 for the highest number ever awarded to a single newspaper in one year. Post journalists have also received 18 Nieman Fellowships and 368 White House News Photographers Association awards.

In the early 1970s, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press' investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal; reporting in the newspaper greatly contributed to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

In years since, its investigations have led to increased review of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

In 2013, its longtime controlling family, the Graham family, sold the newspaper to billionaire entrepreneur and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million in cash.

​The newspaper is owned by Nash Holdings LLC, a holding company Bezos created for the acquisition.

Overview:

​The Washington Post is generally regarded as one of the leading daily American newspapers, along with The New York Times, The L.A. Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

The Post has distinguished itself through its political reporting on the workings of the White House, Congress, and other aspects of the U.S. government. It is one of the two daily broadsheets published in Washington D.C., the other being its smaller rival The Washington Times.

Unlike The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post does not print an edition for distribution away from the East Coast. In 2009, the newspaper ceased publication of its National Weekly Edition, which combined stories from the week's print editions, due to shrinking circulation. 

The majority of its newsprint readership is in District of Columbia and its suburbs in Maryland and Northern Virginia.

The newspaper is one of a few U.S. newspapers with foreign bureaus, located in the following cities: 
In November 2009, it announced the closure of its U.S. regional bureaus—Chicago, Los Angeles and New York—as part of an increased focus on "...political stories and local news coverage in Washington". The newspaper has local bureaus in Maryland (Annapolis, Montgomery County, Prince George's County, Southern Maryland) and Virginia (Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun County, Richmond, and Prince William County).

As of May 2013, its average weekday circulation was 474,767, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, making it the seventh largest newspaper in the country by circulation,While its circulation (like that of almost all newspapers) has been slipping, it has one of the highest market-penetration rates of any metropolitan news daily.

For many decades, the Post had its main office at 1150 15th Street NW. This real estate remained with Graham Holdings when the newspaper was sold to Jeff Bezos' Nash Holdings in 2013. Graham Holdings sold 1150 15th Street (along with 1515 L Street, 1523 L Street, and land beneath 1100 15th Street) for US$159 million in November 2013. 

The Washington Post continued to lease space at 1150 L Street NW. In May 2014, The Washington Post leased the west tower of One Franklin Square, a high-rise building at 1301 K Street NW in Washington, D.C. The newspaper moved into their new offices December 14, 2015.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about The Washington Post:






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The New York Times
YouTube Video: All That Mattered: New York Times publishes Pentagon Papers
Pictured: (L) Entrance to the New York Times on 620 Eighth Avenue in New York; (R) New York Times covering Women’s March January 21, 2017

The New York Times (sometimes abbreviated as The NYT or The Times) is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won 122 Pulitzer Prizes, more than any other newspaper.

As of September 2016, it had the largest combined print-and-digital circulation of any daily newspaper in the United States. The New York Times is ranked 18th in the world by circulation.

The paper is owned by The New York Times Company, which is publicly traded but primarily controlled by the Ochs-Sulzberger family through a dual-class share structure. It has been owned by the family since 1896; A.G. Sulzberger the paper's publisher and, his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. the company's chairman, is the fourth and fifth generation of the family to helm the paper.

Nicknamed "The Gray Lady", The New York Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record". The paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print", appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page.

Since the mid-1970s, The New York Times has greatly expanded its layout and organization, adding special weekly sections on various topics supplementing the regular news, editorials, sports, and features.

Since 2008,The New York Times has been organized into the following sections:
  • News,
  • Editorials/Opinions-Columns/Op-Ed,
  • New York (metropolitan),
  • Business,
  • Sports of The Times,
  • Arts,
  • Science,
  • Styles,
  • Home,
  • Travel,
  • and other features.

On Sunday, The New York Times offers the following supplement:
The New York Times stayed with the broadsheet full page set-up (as some others have changed into a tabloid lay-out) and an eight-column format for several years, after most papers switched to six, and was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography, especially on the front page.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about The New York Times:
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​Walter Cronkite
YouTube Video JFK assassination: Cronkite informs a shocked nation
​Pictured: Walter Cronkite LEFT: covering President John F. Kennedy’s assassination; RIGHT reporting on the Apollo 11 Flight Crewlanding and walking on the Moon.

Walter Leland Cronkite, Jr. (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) was an American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years (1962–81).

During the heyday of CBS News in the 1960s and 1970s, he was often cited as "the most trusted man in America" after being so named in an opinion poll. He reported many events from 1937 to 1981, including bombings in World War II; the Nuremberg trials; combat in the Vietnam War; Watergate; the Iran Hostage Crisis; and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, civil rights pioneer Martin Luther King, Jr., and Beatles musician John Lennon.

He was also known for his extensive coverage of the U.S. space program, from Project Mercury to the Moon landings to the Space Shuttle. He was the only non-NASA recipient of a Moon-rock award. Cronkite is well known for his departing catchphrase "And that's the way it is," followed by the broadcast's date.

Click here for more about Walter Conkrite.


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[Your Web Host: the following topic is relevant to the importance of a truly free press and the role of whistleblowers (see later topic below).

I attempted to enlist right out of college as I believed in the Vietnam War in order to  defeat Communism. Due to a medical condition, however, I was unable to serve our country. Given what we have learned since, it was just as well, as our Government concealed that we could not win this war, in spite of the continuing loss of our brave soldiers.

The revelation of the Pentagon Papers caused then-President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek a second term

I also included the movie trailer of "Apocalypse Now", a powerful anti-Vietnam War movie!]

Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers
YouTube Video: Daniel Ellsberg: Secrets - Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers
YouTube Video of the Movie Trailer for "Apocalpyse Now" (1979): a great anti-war movie about the horrors of the Vietnam War
Apocalypse Now (1979)

Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is an American activist and former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers (below), a top-secret Pentagon study of U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers.

Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years.


Due to governmental misconduct and illegal evidence gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973.

Ellsberg was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2006. He is also known for having formulated an important example in decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox, and for having voiced support for Wikileaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Daniel Ellsberg: ___________________________________________________________________________

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.

The papers were released by Daniel Ellsberg (see above), who had worked on the study; they were first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The New York Times in 1971. 

A 1996 article in The New York Times said that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress".

More specifically, the papers revealed that the U.S. had secretly enlarged the scope of its actions in the Vietnam War with the bombings of nearby Cambodia and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of which were reported in the mainstream media.

For his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg was initially charged with conspiracy, espionage, and theft of government property, but the charges were later dismissed after prosecutors investigating the Watergate Scandal discovered that the staff members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts to discredit Ellsberg.

In June 2011, the entirety of the Pentagon Papers was declassified and publicly released.

Click on any of the folloiwing blue hyperlinks for more about the Pentagon Papers:
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[Your Web Host: current events center around Donald Trump, who had allegedly conspired with our greatest adversary, Russia, to overthrow the 2016 Presidential elections by Russia's hacking voter rolls and other government web sites. Comparisons are being made to the Watergate Scandal (below), but IMHO the charges being compiled about Trump and his organization and family are much worst, as they constitute an act of (cyber) war by Russia on our democracy! Hopefully Robert Mueller can finish his investigation with obstruction charges enabling our country to remove Trump, conceivably even jail him, as it is an act of treason under any normal circumstances.]

​The Watergate Scandal (1972)
YouTube Video: Richard Nixon's Resignation Speech
YouTube Video of the Movie Trailer for "All the President's Men" (1976)
​Pictured Top: Actual reporters Woodward and Bernstein; Bottom: Dustin Hoffman (as Bernstein)and Robert Redford (as Woodward) from the Movie "All the President's Men" (1976)

​The Watergate scandal was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States during the early 1970s, following a break-in by five men at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. on June 17, 1972, and President Richard Nixon's administration's subsequent attempt to cover up its involvement.

After the five burglars were caught and the conspiracy was discovered, Watergate was investigated by the United States Congress. Meanwhile, Nixon's administration resisted its probes, which led to a constitutional crisis.

The term Watergate has come to encompass an array of clandestine and often illegal activities undertaken by members of the Nixon administration. Those activities included such "dirty tricks" as bugging the offices of political opponents and people of whom Nixon or his officials were suspicious.

Nixon and his close aides also ordered investigations of activist groups and political figures, using the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as political weapons.

The scandal led to the discovery of multiple abuses of power by members of the Nixon administration, an impeachment process against the president that led to articles of impeachment, and Nixon's resignation. The scandal also resulted in the indictment of 69 people, with trials or pleas resulting in 48 being found guilty, many of whom were top Nixon officials.

The affair began with the arrest of five men for breaking into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex on Saturday, June 17, 1972. The FBI investigated and discovered a connection between cash found on the burglars and a slush fund used by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP), the official organization of Nixon's campaign. In July 1973, evidence mounted against the president's staff, including testimony provided by former staff members in an investigation conducted by the Senate Watergate Committee. 

The investigation revealed that Nixon had a tape-recording system in his offices and that he had recorded many conversations.

After a series of court battles, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously ruled that the president was obliged to release the tapes to government investigators (United States v. Nixon). The tapes revealed that Nixon had attempted to cover up activities that took place after the break-in, and to use federal officials to deflect the investigation. 

Facing virtually certain impeachment in the House of Representatives and equally certain conviction by the Senate, Nixon resigned the presidency on August 9, 1974, preventing the House from impeaching him. 

On September 8, 1974, his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him.

The name "Watergate" and the suffix "-gate" have since become synonymous with political and non-political scandals in the United States, and some other parts of the world.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Watergate Scandal:​







Whistleblowers, including Whistleblower Protection in the United States as well as a List of Whistleblowers

[Your Webhost: The following Videos are about Mark Felt, aka "Deep Throat" during the Nixon Watergate Scandal: see previous topic above]
YouTube Video: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat
YouTube Video: Watergate, Deep Throat by CNN News


Pictured: Federal government of the United States's whistleblower awareness poster. See "Whistleblower Protection in the United States" below.

Click here for a List of International Whistleblowers.

​A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower) is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public. 

The information of alleged wrongdoing can be classified in many ways: violation of company policy/rules, law, regulation, or threat to public interest/national security, as well as fraud, and corruption.

Those who become whistleblowers can choose to bring information or allegations to surface either internally or externally. Internally, a whistleblower can bring his/her accusations to the attention of other people within the accused organization such as an immediate supervisor.

Externally, a whistleblower can bring allegations to light by contacting a third party outside of an accused organization such as the media, government, law enforcement, or those who are concerned. Whistleblowers, however, take the risk of facing stiff reprisal and retaliation from those who are accused or alleged of wrongdoing.

Because of this, a number of laws exist to protect whistleblowers. Some third party groups even offer protection to whistleblowers, but that protection can only go so far.

Whistleblowers face legal action, criminal charges, social stigma, and termination from any position, office, or job. Two other classifications of whistleblowing are private and public.

The classifications relate to the type of organizations someone chooses to whistle-blow on: private sector, or public sector. Depending on many factors, both can have varying results. However, whistleblowing in the public sector organization is more likely to result in criminal charges and possible custodial sentences. A whistleblower who chooses to accuse a private sector organization or agency is more likely to face termination and legal and civil charges.

Deeper questions and theories of whistleblowing and why people choose to do so can be studied through an ethical approach. Whistleblowing is a topic of ongoing ethical debate.

Leading arguments in the ideological camp that whistleblowing is ethical maintain that whistleblowing is a form of civil disobedience, and aims to protect the public from government wrongdoing. 

In the opposite camp, some see whistleblowing as unethical for breaching confidentiality, especially in industries that handle sensitive client or patient information. Legal protection can also be granted to protect whistleblowers, but that protection is subject to many stipulations.

Hundreds of laws grant protection to whistleblowers, but stipulations can easily cloud that protection and leave whistleblowers vulnerable to retaliation and legal trouble. However, the decision and action has become far more complicated with recent advancements in technology and communication.

Whistleblowers frequently face reprisal, sometimes at the hands of the organization or group they have accused, sometimes from related organizations, and sometimes under law. Questions about the legitimacy of whistleblowing, the moral responsibility of whistleblowing, and the appraisal of the institutions of whistleblowing are part of the field of political ethics.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Whistleblowers: ___________________________________________________________________________

Whistleblower Protection in the United States:

The Whistleblower Protection Act was made into federal law in the United States in 1989. It was made to protect federal whistleblowers who work for the government and report agency misconduct.

Whistleblower protection laws and regulations guarantee freedom of speech for workers and contractors in certain situations. Whistleblowers have the right to file complaints that they believe are reasonable evidences of a violation of a law, rule or regulation; gross mismanagement; gross waste of funds; an abuse of authority; or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Whistleblower Protection in the United States:







Watchdog Journalism
YouTube Video: How to do watchdog journalism (Associated Press)
YouTube Video: Tips from Bob Woodward on Investigative Journalism (Washington Post)

Watchdog journalism informs the public about goings-on in institutions and society, especially in circumstances where a significant portion of the public would demand changes in response. This might involve:
  • Fact-checking statements of public officials.
  • Interviewing public figures and challenging them with problems or concerns.
  • Beat reporting to gather information from meetings that members of the public might not otherwise attend, and to observe "on the ground" in broader society
  • Investigative journalism, which involves information-gathering on a single story for a long period of time

Like a literal guard dog that barks when it notices an intruder, a "watchdog" role involves alerting others when a problem is detected. Common subjects are the government decision-making process, illegal activity, immorality, consumer protection issues, and environmental degradation.

Watchdog journalism can be located in a variety of news media, such as radio, television, Internet, and print media where it may be seen as "a unique strength of newspapers", and additional new media and concepts such as weblogs and citizen journalism. Watchdog journalists also are called "watchmen", "agents of social control", or "moral guardians".

Role:

The role of a watchdog journalist can be that of a protector or guardian. The role of a watchdog journalist as a guardian is to supply the citizens with information they must have "to prevent the abuse of power", and to "warn citizens about those that are doing them harm". 

In order to conduct their role as a watchdog, journalists need to have a certain distance from the powers and challenge them, as opposed to "propagandist" journalists, who are loyal to the ruling powers and elites.

Because of the power distance and its overseeing function, watchdog journalism often officiates as the fourth estate, or is used in the context of that term. The array of topics for watchdog journalism is wide and includes "personal scandals, financial wrongdoing, political corruption, enrichment in public office, and other types of wrongdoing".

In order to expose wrongdoings the watchdog aims at "finding hidden evidence". The aforementioned aspects are necessary for the role of the watchdog journalist to help "maintain order" and "warn against disorder".

"Detached watchdog":

"Detached watchdog" journalism ("dedicated to objectivity, neutrality, fairness, and impartiality") is one of the four identified journalism cultures in a study conducted by communication researchers Thomas Hanitzsch, Epp Lauk, and others, between 2007 and 2011. The study comparatively surveyed 2100 active journalists worldwide. It exists next to the idea of a journalist as a populist disseminator, critical change agent or opportunist facilitator.

The goal of the study was to create a better understanding of journalism culture and journalistic views. The study detected four global professional milieus of journalists: the populist disseminator, detached watchdog, critical change agent, and the opportunist facilitator.The detached watchdog is an absolutely "detached observer".

In addition to the watchdog functions described earlier, the detached watchdog is not interventionist, but uninvolved. In order to achieve that status he has to be objective, neutral, and impartial. Still, because of his watchdog function, he articulates his "skeptical and critical attitude towards the government and business elites". The detached watchdog milieu is accredited as the most prototypical of western journalism. Countries where this milieu predominated at the time of the study were Germany, Austria, United States, Switzerland, and Australia.

In Practice:

Watchdog journalism can lead to the successful resignation of power holders. A well-known example is the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post and the subsequent resignation of U.S. president Richard Nixon in 1974.

Another more recent example took place in the Philippines, where president Joseph Estrada was arrested and resigned in 2001. The daily newspaper, Pinoy Times, covered the case of Estrada till "the ouster of Estrada". 

In a country that guarantees freedom of the press, watchdog journalism can be "a highly effective mechanism of external control on corruption". Yet, the mechanisms of watchdog journalism can also work in countries that abridge freedom of the press. A journalist in authoritarian contexts might not be able to cover all topics, but can still find an important journalistic niche.

For example, in China where free press is still not established or guaranteed "the notion of the press as watchdogs of power is embedded in the self-definition of journalists". Here it makes a difference at whom the critique is directed. Journalists are able to criticize power abuse by individuals even when criticism pointed at major state policies is frowned upon and not feasible for established journalists. In free societies "the idea of the media as the eyes and ears" of the public is widely accepted.

​Criticism:

The concept of watchdog journalism is not free of criticism. The whole field of watchdog journalism has decreased over time and parts of journalism and in 2005 observers affirmed that the current period was "not a time of rich watchdog reporting in any media". 

This comes with the framework and the problem that many journalists tend "towards reflecting the status quo, rather than radically challenging it". This decrease, however, cannot lead to the presumption that there are not enough critical topics to write or report about.

In fact, the opposite is the case, and there is enough material to work with. While watchdog journalism in the U.S. helped to force Nixon out of office in 1974, the situation presented itself differently in 2003.

During the Iraq war part of the established media turned out to take more of a "pro-war attitude", without adequately fulfilling their function of a critical watchdog. Many professionals in the media "appeared to feel that it was not their role to challenge the administration". 

​Critics direct the blame in part to the general public itself, however, since their interest in watchdog journalism is "inconstant and fleeting at times". They also see the role of watchdog journalism as "driven by its own interests rather than by a desire to protect the public interest".

See  also:







Pulitzer Prize, including a List of Winners
YouTube Video of ​Thomas Friedman's 'Code Red' Warning About President Donald Trump by Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC ​interview of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, winner of 3 Pulitzer Prizes)

Click here for a list of Pulitzer Prize Winners

The Pulitzer Prize  is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine and online journalism, literature, and musical composition in the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of American (Hungarian-born) Joseph Pulitzer who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher, and is administered by Columbia University in New York City. 

Prizes are awarded yearly in twenty-one categories. In twenty of the categories, each winner receives a certificate and a US$15,000 cash award (raised from $10,000 in 2017). The winner in the public service category of the journalism competition is awarded a gold medal.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism:







News Media in the United States including a List of News Anchors
YouTube Video: Fox vs. MSNBC: Michelle Obama's Speech
Pictured below: (Clockwise from Upper Left) Anderson Cooper; Katie Couric; Rachel Maddow; and Sean Hannity

Click here for a List of American News Anchors.

Mass media are the means through which information is transmitted to a large audience. This includes newspapers, television, radio, and more recently the Internet. Those who provide news and information, and the outlets for which they work, are known as the news media.

Structure of US news media:

​Public sector news media:

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is the primary non-profit television service, with 349 member public broadcasters. News and public affairs programs include: 
In September 2012, PBS rated 88% above CNN in public affairs programming, placing it competitively with cable news outlets but far behind private broadcasters ABC, CBS, and NBC. PBS does not produce 24-hour news, but some member stations carry MHz WorldView, NHK World, or World as a digital subchannel.

National Public Radio (NPR) is the primary non-profit radio service, offered by over 900 stations. Its news programming includes All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

PBS and NPR are funded primarily by member contributions and corporate underwriters, with a relatively small amount of government contributions.

Other national public television program distributors include American Public Television and NETA. Distributors of radio programs include: 
Public broadcasting in the United States also includes Community radio and College radio stations, which may offer local news programming.

Private-sector news media:

There are thousands of newspapers in the Uision networks NBC and Telemundo, Universal Pictures, Focus Features, 26 local television stations throughout the United States, and cable networks MSNBC, Bravo and Syfy:

21st Century Fox:

The Fox Broadcasting Company, television and cable networks such as: 
News Corp Holdings include:
Time Warner Holdings include:
  • CNN,
  • the CW (a joint venture with CBS),
  • HBO,
  • Cinemax,
  • Cartoon Network,
  • TBS,
  • TNT,
  • America Online,
  • MapQuest,
  • Moviefone,
  • Netscape,
  • Warner Bros. Pictures,
  • Castle Rock
  • and New Line Cinema.
  • Time Inc. Holdings include: Over 150 magazines such as Time, Cooking Light, Marie Claire and People.

Viacom Holdings include:
  • Music Television,
  • Nickelodeon,
  • VH1,
  • BET,
  • Comedy Central,
  • Paramount Pictures,
  • Paramount Home Entertainment,
  • Atom Entertainment,
  • publishing company Famous Music and music game developer Harmonix,
  • Viacom 18 is a joint venture with the Indian media company Global Broadcast news.

The Walt Disney Company Holdings include:
  • ABC Television Network,
  • cable networks including
    • ESPN,
    • the Disney Channel,
    • SOAPnet,
    • A&E
    • and Lifetime,
  • 227 radio stations,
  • music and book publishing companies,
  • production companies:
    • Touchstone,
    • Miramax
    • and Walt Disney Pictures,
  • Pixar Animation Studios,
  • and the cellular service Disney Mobile.

Major news sources include Major providers of television news: Major newspapers include: Major news magazines:
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about News Media in the United States:







Internet News Websites including a List of American News Websites
YouTube Video: Another Top 10 John Oliver Moments on Last Week Tonight
Pictured: Online News Surpass Newspapers and Radio

Click here for a List of American News Web Sites.

An online newspaper is the online version of a newspaper, either as a stand-alone publication or as the online version of a printed periodical.

Going online created more opportunities for newspapers, such as competing with broadcast journalism in presenting breaking news in a more timely manner. The credibility and strong brand recognition of well established newspapers, and the close relationships they have with advertisers, are also seen by many in the newspaper industry as strengthening their chances of survival.

The movement away from the printing process can also help decrease costs.

Online newspapers, like printed newspapers, have legal restrictions regarding libel, privacy and copyright, also apply to online publications in most countries as in the UK.

Also, the UK Data Protection Act applies to online newspapers and news pages. Up to 2014, the PCC ruled in the UK, but there was no clear distinction between authentic online newspapers and forums or blogs. In 2007, a ruling was passed to formally regulate UK-based online newspapers, news audio, and news video websites covering the responsibilities expected of them and to clear up what is, and what isn't, an online news publication.

News reporters are being taught to shoot video and to write in the succinct manner necessary for internet news pages. Some newspapers have attempted to integrate the internet into every aspect of their operations, e.g., the writing of stories for both print and online, and classified advertisements appearing in both media, while other newspaper websites may be quite different from the corresponding printed newspaper.

An early example of an "online only" newspaper or magazine was (PLATO) News Report, an online newspaper created by Bruce Parrello in 1974 on the PLATO system at the University of Illinois. 

Beginning in 1987, the Brazilian newspaper Jornaldodia ran on the state-owned Embratel network, moving to the internet in the 1990s. By the late 1990s, hundreds of U.S. newspapers were publishing online versions, but did not yet offer much interactivity. One example is Britain's Weekend City Press Review, which provided a weekly news summary online beginning in 1995.

Today, online news has become a huge part of society which leads people to argue whether or not it is good for society. Austra Taylor author of the popular book The Peoples Platform argues that online news does not provide the detail needed to fully understand what actually happened. It is more just a fast summary to inform people what happened, but does not give a solution or fixation to the problem.

Very few newspapers in 2006 claimed to have made money from their websites, which were mostly free to all viewers. Declining profit margins and declining circulation in daily newspapers forced executives to contemplate new methods of obtaining revenue from websites, without charging for subscription.

This has been difficult. Newspapers with specialized audiences such as The Wall Street Journal and The Chronicle of Higher Education successfully charge subscription fees. Most newspapers have an online edition, including: 
The Guardian experimented with new media in 2005, offering a free twelve-part weekly podcast series by Ricky Gervais. Another UK daily to go online is The Daily Telegraph.

In Australia, most major newspapers offer an online version, with or without a pay-walled subscription option. In Algeria, the number of daily visitors of news websites and online editions of newspapers surpasses the number of daily readers of print newspapers since the end of 2016.

Online-only Newspapers:

​An online-only paper has no print-media connections. An example is the UK Southport Reporter, introduced in 2000—a weekly regional newspaper that is not produced or run in any format than 'soft-copy' on the internet by its publishers, PCBT Photography.

Unlike blog sites and other news websites, online-only newspapers are run as a newspaper and is recognized by media groups such as the NUJ and/or the IFJ. They fall under relevant press regulations and are signed up to the official UK press regulator IMPRESS. Another example is the Atlantic Highlands Herald, a New Jersey-based web-only daily newspaper published in the US since 1999.

allNovaScotia is an online newspaper based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada that publishes business and political news six days a week. The website was the first online-only newspaper in Atlantic Canada and has been behind a paywall since starting in 2001.

Even print media is turning to online only publication. As of 2009, the collapse of the traditional business model of print newspapers has led to various attempts to establish local, regional or national online-only newspapers - publications that do original reporting, rather than just commentary or summaries of reporting from other publications.

An early major example in the U.S. is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which stopped publishing after 149 years in March 2009 and went online only. In Scotland, in 2010, Caledonian Mercury became Scotland's first online-only newspaper, with the same aims as Southport Reporter in the UK, with The Yorkshire Times following suit and becoming Yorkshire's first online-only paper in 2011.

In the US, technology news websites such as CNET, TechCrunch, and ZDNet started as web publications and enjoy comparable readership to the conventional newspapers.

Also, with the ever-rising popularity of online media, veteran publications like the U.S. News & World Report are abandoning print and going online-only. Another example of an online-only English daily newspaper is the Arabian Post], focusing on the Middle East's current affairs and business. There are a few niche online-only news websites such as:
  • Engadget, 
  • Mashable, 
  • Nagina News Portal,
  • Polygon,
  • Aperture Games,
  • and Game Rant.

Trends:

In 2015 55 percent of people reported that print was their preferred method for reading a newspaper, down 4% from 2014. 

The methods people use to get their news from digital means was at 28%, as opposed to 20% of people attaining the news through print newspapers. These trends indicate an increase in digital consumption of newspapers, as opposed to print.

Today, ad revenue for digital forms of newspapers is nearly 25%, while print is constituting the remaining 75%. Contrastingly, ad revenue for digital methods was 5% in 2006.

Hybrid Newspapers:

Hybrid newspapers are predominantly focused on online content, but also produce a print form. Trends in online newspapers indicate publications may switch to digital methods, especially online newspapers in the future.

The New York Times is an example of this model of newspaper as it provides both a home delivery print subscription and a digital one as well. 

There are some newspapers which are predominantly online, but also provide limited hard copy publishing. An example is annarbor.com, which replaced the Ann Arbor News in the summer of 2009. It is primarily an online newspaper, but publishes a hard copy twice a week. Other trends indicate that this business model is being adopted by many newspapers with the growth of digital media.

Use:

​In 2013, the Reuters Institute commissioned a cross-country survey on news consumption, and gathered data related to online newspaper use that emphasize the lack of use of paid online newspaper services. 

The countries surveyed were France, German, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Japan, Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

All samples within each country were nationally representative. Half of the sample reportedly paid for a print newspaper in the past 7 days, and only one-twentieth of the sample paid for online news in the past 7 days. That only 5% of the sample had recently paid for online newspaper access is likely because most people access news that is free. People with portable devices, like tablets or smartphones, were significantly more likely to subscribe to digital news content.

Additionally, younger people—25- to 34-year-olds—are more willing to pay for digital news than older people across all countries. This is in line with the Pew Research Center’s finding in a survey of U.S. Americans that the Internet is a leading source of news for people less than 50.

List of online news websites:
See also:
​




​

Axios (News Website) including its Official Website
YouTube Video: Grading President Donald Trump's First Year
by Axios Editor Mike Allen | CNBC
Pictured below: Politico Founders Launch Axios, Land Donald Trump Interview on Day 1

Axios (stylized as AXIOS) is an American news and information website founded in 2016 by Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei, Politico's former Chief White House correspondent Mike Allen, and former Politico Chief Revenue Officer Roy Schwartz. The site's name, based on the term Greek: ἄξιος (áxios), "worthy", officially launched in 2017. The company had raised $30 million, as of November, 2017.

Background:

The company initially targeted coverage of a mix of news about business, politics, technology, healthcare and media. Founder VandeHei said Axios would focus on the “collision between tech and areas such as bureaucracy, health care, energy, and the transportation infrastructure."

At launch, Nicholas Johnston, a former managing editor at Bloomberg LP was named editor in chief.

VandeHei said Axios news articles are characterized by "smart brevity", intended to be brief, specialized, high-quality and easily shareable. Typical articles feature bullet points for easy scanning and are shorter than 300 words.

The content is designed to live on digital platforms, such as Facebook and Snapchat, as well as its own website. Reporters have made appearances on television news on NBC News and MSNBC through a deal with NBC. Its NBC Universal partnership has featured Axios co-founder Mike Allen on its show Morning Joe.

Content is distributed via newsletters covering politics, technology, healthcare and other subjects. Among the newsletters is a daily report by Mike Allen, who formerly wrote the Playbook newsletter for Politico.

In January, 2017, the company hired as an executive vice president Evan Ryan, the assistant secretary of state for Educational and Cultural Affairs and a former staffer for Vice President Joe Biden.

In March 2017, the company said it had 60 employees with 40 working in editorial. Axios.com has six million visitors in September 2017, according to comScore.

As of November, 2017, Axios said it had 200,000 subscribers to 11 newsletters, with an average open rate of 52%. That same month, Axios said it would use a new $20 million investment to expand data analysis, product development, fund audience growth an increase staff to 150, up from 89.

Overview:

​The company launched with a mission statement that consisted of, "Media is broken—and too often a scam." It planned to focus on "business, technology, politics, and media trends". 

Furthermore, they disavowed the use of banner ads, pop-ups and clickbait titles, using native advertising instead. The article style was focused on brevity, clear structure and often features bullet points.

The company earned more than $10 million in revenue in its first seven months, primarily with native advertising that appears in between stories. The company has projected half its revenue to come through subscriptions.

Financials:

In the summer of 2016, Axios secured $10 million in a round of financing led by Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Backers include the following:
In November 2017, Axios said that it had raised an additional $20 million. WndrCo, a media-and-technology firm founded by DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, is a new investor in the round.







​

Michael Bloomberg, Founder of  Bloomberg News including its Official Web Site
​YouTube Video: Celebrating 25 Years of News at Bloomberg
Pictured below: Bloomberg TV's new look

About Michael Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg properties covered below
Michael Rubens Bloomberg (born on February 14, 1942) is an American businessman, engineer, author, politician, and philanthropist.

As of February 9, 2018, his net worth was estimated at $50.8 billion, making him the 7th-richest person in the United States and the 10th richest person in the world. He has joined The Giving Pledge, whereby billionaires pledge to give away at least half of their wealth.

Bloomberg is the founder, CEO, and owner of Bloomberg L.P., a global financial services, mass media, and software company that bears his name, and is notable for its Bloomberg Terminal, a computer software system providing financial data widely used in the global financial services industry.

Bloomberg began his career at the securities brokerage Salomon Brothers, before forming his own company in 1981 and spending the next twenty years as its chairman and CEO.

Bloomberg also served as chairman of the board of trustees at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, from 1996 to 2002.

Bloomberg served as the 108th Mayor of New York City, holding office for three consecutive terms, beginning with his first election in 2001. A Democrat before seeking elective office, Bloomberg switched his party registration in 2001 to run for mayor as a Republican. He defeated opponent Mark Green in a close election held just weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Bloomberg won a second term in 2005, and left the Republican Party two years later. Bloomberg campaigned to change the city's term limits law, and was elected to his third term in 2009 as an Independent candidate on the Republican ballot line.

Bloomberg was frequently mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Presidential elections in 2008, and 2012, as well as for Governor of New York in 2010. He declined to seek either office, opting to continue serving as the Mayor of New York City.

On January 1, 2014, Bill de Blasio succeeded Bloomberg as the Mayor of New York City. After a brief stint as a full-time philanthropist, Bloomberg re-assumed the position of CEO at Bloomberg L.P. by the end of 2014. On March 7, 2016, Bloomberg announced that he would not run as a third party candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election despite widespread speculation that he would, and later endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president.

Click here for more about Michael Bloomberg.
___________________________________________________________________________


Bloomberg News is an international news agency headquartered in New York, United States and a division of Bloomberg L.P. 

Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through the following:
As of 2015, John Micklethwait served as editor-in-chief.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Bloomberg News:







(Our) Fourth Estate
YouTube Video: Journalism: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Pictured: DO WE NEED TO CALL TIME ON THE FOURTH ESTATE? EXACTLY WHAT DO WE WANT FROM THE MEDIA AND JOURNALISTS?

In the American political system, the unofficial fourth branch of government refers to a group that influences the other three branches of the US federal government defined in the American Constitution (Legislative, Executive and Judicial).

Such groups can include the press (an analogy for the Fourth Estate), the people, and interest groups. US independent administrative government agencies, while technically part of the Executive branch (or, in a few cases, the Legislative branch) of government, may also be referred to as the fourth branch.

The Press:

The concept of the media or press as a fourth branch stems from a belief that the news media's responsibility to inform the populace is essential to the healthy functioning of the democracy.  The phrase "Fourth Estate" may be used to emphasize the independence of the press particularly when this is contrasted with the press as a "fourth branch".

The People:

Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion, The People are the fourth branch via grand juries . The grand jury is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but not in the body of the Constitution. It has not been textually assigned, therefore, to any of the branches described in the first three Articles”. It "is a constitutional fixture in its own right". In fact the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people (United States v. Williams, 1992).

Interest Groups:

In an article titled "The 'Fourth Branch' of Government", Alex Knott of the Center for Public Integrity asserted in 2005 that "special interests and the lobbyists they employ have reported spending, since 1998, a total of almost $13 billion to influence Congress, the White House and more than 200 federal agencies."

Administrative agencies:

The administrative agencies that are funded from public money may exercise powers granted by Congress. Without appropriate controls and oversight this practice may result in a bureaucracy (in the original literal sense).

Some critics have argued that a central paradox at the heart of the American political system is democracy's reliance on what the critics view as undemocratic bureaucratic institutions that characterize the administrative agencies of government.

An argument made for calling administrative agencies a "fourth branch" of government is the fact that such agencies typically exercise all three constitutionally divided powers within a single bureaucratic body: That is, agencies legislate (a power vested solely in the legislature by the Constitution) through delegated rule-making authority; investigate, execute, and enforce such rules (via the executive power these agencies are typically organized under); and apply, interpret, and enforce compliance with such rules (a power separately vested in the judicial branch).

Additionally, non-executive, or "independent" administrative agencies are often called a fourth branch of government, as they create rules with the effect of law, yet may be comprised at least partially of private, non-governmental actors.

Popular Culture:
​
  • In The Simpsons episode "Sideshow Bob Roberts" (originally aired October 9, 1994), Springfield's leading conservative talk radio host, Birch Barlow (a parody of leading American conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh) welcomes listeners to his show by introducing himself as the "fourth branch of government" and the "51st state."
  • In 2007, the short-lived ABC drama-thriller Traveler, the fourth branch existed as a secret society created by the Founding Fathers and composed of the oldest families in the United States, whose purpose is to implement checks and balances on the U.S. government to guide the true course of America.
  • Rapper and political activist Immortal Technique has a track entitled the "4th branch," in which he applies the role of said branch to the media in a pejorative manner. He implies in this track (or pretty much explicitly states) that corporately owned mass-media outlets of the United States act more like another part of the government instead of as independent entities, and he gives some of his reasons for this belief on the track.
  • "4th Branch" is also the name of a record label - 4th Branch Records, owned by DJ Prezzident, based in Columbia, Missouri.

See also:







Rupert Murdoch, Chairman & CEO of Fox News Pictured below: Rupert Murdoch and President Trump: A Friendship of Convenience (NY Times 12/23/17)
Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC KCSG (born 11 March 1931) is an Australian-born American media mogul who founded News Corp.

​Murdoch's father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a reporter and editor who became a senior executive of The Herald and Weekly Times publishing company, covering all Australian states except New South Wales. After his father's death in 1952, Murdoch declined to join his late father's registered public company and created his own private company, News Limited.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Murdoch acquired a number of newspapers in Australia and New Zealand  before expanding into the United Kingdom in 1969, taking over the News of the World, followed closely by The Sun.

In 1974, Murdoch moved to New York City, to expand into the U.S. market; however, he retained interests in Australia and Britain. In 1981, Murdoch bought The Times, his first British broadsheet and, in 1985, became a naturalized U.S. citizen, giving up his Australian citizenship, to satisfy the legal requirement for U.S. television network ownership.

In 1986, keen to adopt newer electronic publishing technologies, Murdoch consolidated his UK printing operations in Wapping, causing bitter industrial disputes. His holding company News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox (1985), HarperCollins (1989), and The Wall Street Journal (2007).

​Murdoch formed the British broadcaster BSkyB in 1990 and, during the 1990s, expanded into Asian networks and South American television. By 2000, Murdoch's News Corporation owned over 800 companies in more than 50 countries, with a net worth of over $5 billion.

In July 2011, Murdoch faced allegations that his companies, including the News of the World, owned by News Corporation, had been regularly hacking the phones of celebrities, royalty, and public citizens. Murdoch faced police and government investigations into bribery and corruption by the British government and FBI investigations in the U.S. 

On 21 July 2012, Murdoch resigned as a director of News International. On 1 July 2015, Murdoch left his post as CEO of 21st Century Fox. However, Murdoch and his family would continue to own both 21st Century Fox (until 2019) and News Corp through the Murdoch Family Trust.

In July 2016, after the resignation of Roger Ailes due to accusations of sexual harassment, Murdoch was named the acting CEO of Fox News (below).

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Rupert Murdoch: ___________________________________________________________________________

​Fox News (officially Fox News Channel and abbreviated FNC) is an American conservative pay television news channel. It is owned by the Fox News Group, which itself was owned by News Corporation from 1996–2013, 21st Century Fox from 2013–2019, and Fox Corporation since 2019.

The channel broadcasts primarily from studios at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in New York City. Fox News is provided in 86 countries or overseas territories worldwide, with international broadcasts featuring Fox Extra segments during ad breaks.

The channel was created by Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch (see above) to appeal to a conservative audience, hiring former Republican Party media consultant and CNBC executive Roger Ailes as its founding CEO. It launched on October 7, 1996, to 17 million cable subscribers.

Fox News grew during the late 1990s and 2000s to become the dominant subscription news network in the U.S. As of February 2015, approximately 94,700,000 US households (81.4% of television subscribers) receive Fox News. Murdoch is the current executive chairman and Suzanne Scott is the CEO.

Fox News has been described as practicing biased reporting in favor of the Republican Party, the George W. Bush and Donald Trump administrations, and conservative causes while slandering the Democratic Party and spreading harmful propaganda intended to negatively affect its members' electoral performances. 

Critics have cited the channel as detrimental to the integrity of news overall. Fox News employees have said that news reporting operates independently of its opinion and commentary programming, and have denied bias in news reporting, while former employees have said that Fox ordered them to "slant the news in favor of conservatives". 

During Trump's presidency, observers have noted a pronounced tendency of Fox News to serve as a "mouthpiece" for the administration, providing "propaganda" and a "feedback loop" for Trump, with one presidential scholar stating, "it’s the closest we’ve come to having state TV."

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Fox News:







The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)Pictured below: WSJ Reorganization Continues as Editors Reapply for Positions
The Wall Street Journal is a U.S. business-focused, English-language international daily newspaper based in New York City. The Journal, along with its Asian and European editions, is published six days a week by Dow Jones & Company, a division of News Corp. The newspaper is published in the broadsheet format and online. The Journal has been printed continuously since its inception on July 8, 1889, by Charles Dow, Edward Jones, and Charles Bergstresser.

The Wall Street Journal is one of the largest newspapers in the United States by circulation, with a circulation of about 2.617 million copies (including nearly 1,818,000 digital subscriptions) as of August 2019, compared with USA Today's 1.7 million.

The Journal publishes the luxury news and lifestyle magazine WSJ, which was originally launched as a quarterly but expanded to 12 issues as of 2014. An online version was launched in 1996, which has been accessible only to subscribers since it began.

The newspaper is known for its award-winning news coverage, and has won 37 Pulitzer Prizes (as of 2019). The editorial pages of the Journal are typically conservative in their position. The Journal editorial board has promoted pseudo-scientific views on the science of climate change, acid rain, and ozone depletion, as well as on the health harms of second-hand smoke, pesticides and asbestos.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Wall Street Journal:







News Media Pictured (9/19/2022) David Muir (ABC), Norah O’Donnell (CBS) and Lester Holt (NBC) on network news’ mission in covering the George Floyd story
The news media or news industry are forms of mass media that focus on delivering news to the general public or a target public. These include: 
History:

Some of the first news circulations occurred in Renaissance Europe. These handwritten newsletters contained news about wars, economic conditions, and social customs and were circulated among merchants.

The first printed news appeared by the late 1400s in German pamphlets that contained content that was often highly sensationalized.

The first newspaper written in English was The Weekly Newes, published in London in 1621. Several papers followed in the 1640s and 1650s.

In 1690, the first American newspaper was published by Richard Pierce and Benjamin Harris in Boston. However, it did not have permission from the government to be published and was immediately suppressed.

In the United States:
Main article: News media in the United States

In 1729, Benjamin Franklin began writing a new form of newspaper that was more satirical and more involved in civic affairs than previously seen.

In 1735, John Peter Zenger was accused of seditious libel by the governor of New York, William Cosby. Zenger was found not guilty, largely in part to his attorney Andrew Hamilton, who later wrote a paper in which he argued that newspapers should be free to criticize the government as long as it was true.

Later, with the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, freedom of the press would be guaranteed by the First Amendment.

In the 1830s, newspapers started seeking commercial success and turned toward reportage. This began with the New York Sun in 1833. Advancements in technology made it cheaper to print newspapers and "penny papers" emerged. These issues sought out local news and coverage of society. Later, news gathering became a central function of newspapers.

With the invention of the telegraph in 1845, the "inverted pyramid" structure of news was developed. Through the latter half of the 1800s, politics played a role in what newspapers published. By the end of the century, modern aspects of newspapers, such as banner headlines, extensive use of illustrations, "funny pages," and expanded coverage of organized sporting events, began to appear.

Also, media consolidation began with many independent newspapers becoming part of "chains".

The early 1900s saw Progressive Era journalists using a new style of investigative journalism that revealed the corrupt practices of government officials. These exposing articles became featured in many newspapers and magazines. The people who wrote them became labeled as "muckrakers". They became very influential and were a vital force in the Progressive reform movement.

However, after 1912 muckraking declined. The public began to think the exposés were sensationalized, but they did make a great impact on future policies.

During the 1920s, radio became a news medium, and was a significant source of breaking news. Although, during World War I, radio broadcasts in America were only given information about Allied victories because Great Britain had a monopoly on the transatlantic radio lines. For the newspapers, the government suppressed any radical content from German papers during and after the war.

With the introduction of the television came The Communications Act of 1934. It was an agreement between commercial television and the people of the United States that established that:
  • The airways are public property;
  • Commercial broadcasters are licensed to use the airways;
  • The main condition for use will be whether the broadcaster served "the public interest, convenience, and necessity."

During the Vietnam War, the media reporting directly challenged the government, drawing attention to the "credibility gap" — official lies and half-truths about the war.

Television news continued to expand during the 1970s, and by 1990, more than half of American homes had cable systems and nationally oriented newspapers expanded their reach.

With technological advancements in the newsroom, notably the Internet, a new emphasis on computer-assisted reporting and a new blending of media forms emerged, with one reporter preparing the same story in print, online, and on camera for a newspaper's cable station.

Etymology:

A "medium" (plural "media") is a carrier of something. Common things carried by media include information, art, or physical objects. A medium may provide transmission or storage of information or both.

The industries which produce news and entertainment content for the mass media are often called "the media" (in much the same way the newspaper industry is called "the press"). In the late 20th century it became commonplace for this usage to be construed as singular ("The media is...") rather than as the traditional plural.

"Press" is the collective designation of media vehicles that carry out journalism and other functions of informative communication, in contrast to pure propaganda or entertainment communication.

The term "press" comes from the printing press of Johannes Gutenberg in the sixteenth century and which, from the eighteenth century, was used to print newspapers, then the only existing journalistic vehicles. From the middle of the 20th century onwards, newspapers also began to be broadcast (radio news and television news).

The advent of the World Wide Web brought with it online newspapers, which then expanded to include online news videos and online streaming news in the 2010s. The use of the term "press", however, was maintained.

Broadcasting:
Main article: Broadcasting

Broadcasting is the distribution of audio and video signals (programs) to a number of recipients ("listeners" or "viewers") that belong to a large group. This group may be the public in general, or a relatively large audience within the public.

Thus, an Internet channel may distribute text or music worldwide, while a public address system in (for example) a workplace may broadcast very limited ad hoc soundbites to a small population within its range.

The sequencing of content in a broadcast is called a schedule.

Television and radio programs are distributed through radio broadcasting or cable, often simultaneously. By coding signals and having decoding equipment in homes, the latter also enables subscription-based channels and pay-per-view services.

A broadcasting organization may broadcast several programs at the same time, through several channels (frequencies), for example BBC One and Two. On the other hand, two or more organizations may share a channel and each use it during a fixed part of the day. Digital radio and digital television may also transmit multiplexed programming, with several channels compressed into one ensemble.

When broadcasting is done via the Internet the term webcasting is often used.

Broadcasting forms a very large segment of the mass media.

​Broadcasting to a very narrow range of audience is called narrowcasting.

Television:

In a broadcast system (television), journalists or reporters are also involved with editing the video material that has been shot alongside their research, and in working on the visual narrative of the story. Broadcast journalists often make an appearance in the news story at the beginning or end of the video clip.

In television or broadcast journalism, news analysts (also called news-casters or news anchors) examine, interpret, and broadcast news received from various sources of information. Anchors present this as news, either videotaped or live, through transmissions from on-the-scene reporters (news correspondents).

News films ("clips") can vary in length; there are some which may be as long as ten minutes, others that need to fit in all the relevant information and material in two or three minutes.

News channels these days have also begun to host special documentary films that stretch for much longer durations and are able to explore a news subject or issue in greater detail.

The desk persons categorize news stories with various formats according to the merit of the story. Such formats include AVO, AVO Byte, Pkg, VO SOT, VOX POP, and Ancho Visual:
  • The AVO, or Anchor Voice Over, is the short form of news. The story is written in a gist. According to the script visual is edited. The anchor reads the news while the visual is broadcast simultaneously. Generally, the duration of an AVO is 30 to 40 seconds. The script is three to four lines. At first the anchor starts to read the news, and, after reading one or one-and-a-half lines, the visual is aired, overlapping the face of anchor.
  • The AVO Byte has two parts: An AVO, and one or more bytes. This is the same as an AVO, except that as soon as the AVO ends, the Byte is aired.
  • The Pkg has three parts: Anchor, Voice Over, and Sign Off. At first a Script is written. A voice over anchor reads the anchor or anchor intro part.

Newspapers:
Main article: Newspaper

A newspaper is a lightweight and disposable publication (more specifically, a periodical), usually printed on low-cost paper called newsprint. It may be general or of special interest, and may be published daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly.

General-interest newspapers are usually journals of current news on a variety of topics. Those can include: 
​Print journalism:

A story is a single article, news item or feature, usually concerning a single event, issue, theme, or profile of a person. Correspondents report news occurring in the main, locally, from their own country, or from foreign cities where they are stationed.

Most reporters file information or write their stories electronically from remote locations. In many cases, breaking stories are written by staff members, through information collected and submitted by other reporters who are out on the field gathering information for an event that has just occurred and needs to be broadcast instantly.

Radio and television reporters often compose stories and report "live" from the scene. Some journalists also interpret the news or offer opinions and analysis to readers, viewers, or listeners. In this role, they are called commentators or columnists.

Reporters take notes and also take photographs or shoot videos, either on their own, by citizens or through a photographer or camera person. In the second phase, they organize the material, determine the focus or emphasis (identify the peg), and finally write their stories.

The story is then edited by news or copy-editors (U.S. style) or sub-editors in Europe, who function from the news desk. The headline of the story is decided by the news desk, and practically never by the reporter or the writer of the piece.

Often, the news desk also heavily re-writes or changes the style and tone of the first draft prepared by the reporter / writer originally. Finally, a collection of stories that have been picked for the newspaper or magazine edition, are laid out on dummy (trial) pages, and after the chief editor has approved the content, style and language in the material, it is sent for publishing.

The writer is given a byline for the piece that is published; his or her name appears alongside the article.

This process takes place according to the frequency of the publication. News can be published in a variety of formats (broadsheet, tabloid, magazine and periodical publications) as well as periods (daily, weekly, semi-weekly, fortnightly or monthly).

Newsmagazines:
Main article: Newsmagazine

A newsmagazine, is a usually weekly magazine featuring articles on current events. News magazines generally go more in-depth into stories than newspapers, trying to give the reader an understanding of the context surrounding important events, rather than just the facts.

Newsreels:

A newsreel was a documentary film common in the first half of the 20th century, that regularly released in a public presentation place containing filmed news stories.

Created by Pathé Frères of France in 1908, this form of film was a staple of the typical North American, British, and Commonwealth countries (especially Canada, Australia and New Zealand), and throughout European cinema programming schedule from the silent era until the 1960s when television news broadcasting completely supplanted its role.

Online journalism:
Main articles: Online newspaper and Online magazine
​
​Online journalism is reporting and other journalism produced or distributed via the Internet. The Internet has allowed the formal and informal publication of news stories through mainstream media outlets, social media platforms, as well as blogs and other self-published news stories.

Journalists working on the Internet have been referred to as J-Bloggers, a term coined by Australian Media Academic Dr Nicola Goc to describe journalists who [blog] and [blog]gers who produce journalism. "J-Bloggers: Internet bloggers acting in the role of journalists disseminating newsworthy information, who subscribe to the journalistic ideals of an obligation to the truth and the public's right to know".

An early leader was The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

Many news organizations based in other media also distribute news online. How much they take advantage of the medium varies. Some news organizations use the web only or primarily.

The Internet challenges traditional news organizations in several ways. They may be losing classified ads to Web sites, which are often targeted by interest instead of geography.

The advertising on news web sites is sometimes insufficient to support the investment.
Even before the Internet, technology and perhaps other factors were dividing people's attention, leading to more but narrower media outlets.

Online journalism also leads to the spread of independent online media such as openDemocracy and the UK, Wikinews as well as allowing smaller news organizations to publish to a broad audience.

Streaming Journalism:

Live online streaming journalism began on various online platforms in the late 2010s, such as youtube.com and twitch.tv (which began primarily as a live streaming platform targeting gamers, then expanding into non-gaming topics including news and political reporting and commentary).

Tea accounts are a rising class of social media accounts on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram that report on the latest news and gossip on the internet. These content creators are known to create an eco-system of drama and further escalate online scandals.

While mainstream news outlets often fail to report news on influencers and internet celebrities, tea accounts have capitalized on this opportunity to meet the great demand for such news stories. Notable tea accounts on YouTube include the Shade Room and DramaAlert.

News coverage and new media:

By covering news, politics, weather, sports, entertainment, and vital events, the daily media shape the dominant cultural, social and political picture of society. Beyond the media networks, independent news sources have evolved to report on events which escape attention or underlie the major stories.

In recent years, the blogosphere has taken reporting a step further, mining down to the experiences and perceptions of individual citizens.

An exponentially growing phenomenon, the blogosphere can be abuzz with news that is overlooked by the press and TV networks. Due to the rise of social media involvement in news, the most common news value has become entertainment in recent years. 

Apropos of this was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s 11,000-word Rolling Stone article apropos of the 2004 United States presidential election, published June 1, 2006. By June 8, there had been no mainstream coverage of the documented allegations by President John F. Kennedy's nephew. On June 9, this sub-story was covered by a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article.

Media coverage during the 2008 Mumbai attacks highlighted the use of new media and Internet social networking tools, including Twitter and Flickr, in spreading information about the attacks, observing that Internet coverage was often ahead of more traditional media sources.

In response, traditional media outlets included such coverage in their reports. However, several outlets were criticized as they did not check for the reliability and verifiability of the information. Some public opinion research companies have found that a majority or plurality of people in various countries distrust the news media.

Fake news;
Main article: Fake news

Fake news articles are untruthful-on-purpose stories. They have the purpose of misleading the reader to think one way. With the rise of new media through social media, there has been an increase in fake news. This increase in fake news has progressed over time and continues to show, especially in today's media.

The use of Twitter, Facebook, etc. has made it easier for false or misleading articles to be seen. The amount of misleading news articles that are produced are causing audiences to believe that every piece of information on the internet is true.

A major problem is the issue of unbiased articles showing up in a timeline next to fake articles. This makes it hard for others to determine between what is fact and what is opinion.

Specifically, the media coverage during the 2016 United States presidential election saw numerous misleading articles for both candidates.

Media integrity:

Media integrity refers to the ability of a news media outlet to serve the public interest and democratic process, making it resilient to institutional corruption within the media system, economy of influence, conflicting dependence and political clientelism.

Media integrity encompasses following qualities of a media outlet:
The concept was devised particularly for the media systems in the region of South East Europe, within the project South East European Media Observatory, gathering organizations which are part of the South East European Network for Professionalization of Media (SEENPM).

See also:
​




​

Cable News Network (CNN), including a List of Programs Broadcast by CNN * - In Anderson's dual role as a correspondent for 60 Minutes
Pictured below: ​How CNN Anchor Erin Burnett Serves As A Role Model For Young Women In Investigative Reporting
Click here for A ​List of Programs Broadcast by CNN

Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational cable news channel headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. It is owned by CNN Global, which is part of Warner Bros. Discovery. It was founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel. Upon its launch in 1980, CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage and the first all-news television channel in the United States.

As of September 2018, CNN had 90.1 million television households as subscribers (97.7% of households with cable). 

According to Nielsen, in June 2021 CNN ranked third in viewership among cable news networks, behind Fox News and MSNBC, averaging 580,000 viewers throughout the day, down 49% from a year earlier, amid sharp declines in viewers across all cable news networks. 

While CNN ranked 14th among all basic cable networks in 2019, then jumped to 7th during a major surge for the three largest cable news networks (completing a rankings streak of Fox News at number 5 and MSNBC at number 6 for that year), it settled back to number 11 in 2021.

Globally, CNN programming has aired through CNN International, seen by viewers in over 212 countries and territories; since May 2019, however, the US domestic version has absorbed international news coverage in order to reduce programming costs.

The American version, sometimes referred to as CNN (US), is also available in Canada, some islands of the Caribbean and in Japan, where it was first broadcast on CNNj in 2003, with simultaneous translation in Japanese.

Programming:
See also: List of programs broadcast by CNN

CNN's current weekday schedule consists mostly of rolling news programming during daytime hours, followed by in-depth news and information programs during the evening and prime time hours.

The network's morning programming consists of Early Start, an early-morning news program hosted by Christine Romans and Laura Jarrett at 5–6 a.m. ET, which is followed by New Day, the network's morning show, hosted by John Berman and Brianna Keilar at 6–9 a.m. ET.

Most of CNN's late-morning and early afternoon programming consists of CNN Newsroom, a rolling news program hosted by Jim Sciutto and Poppy Harlow in the morning and Ana Cabera, Victor Blackwell, and Alisyn Camerota in the afternoon. In between the editions of Newsroom, At This Hour with Kate Bolduan airs at 11 a.m. to noon Eastern, followed by Inside Politics with John King, hosted by John King at noon Eastern.

CNN's late afternoon and early evening lineup consists of The Lead with Jake Tapper, hosted by Jake Tapper at 4–6 p.m. ET, and The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, hosted by Wolf Blitzer at 6 p.m. ET.

The network's evening and primetime lineup shifts towards more in-depth programming, including Erin Burnett OutFront at 7 p.m. ET, Anderson Cooper 360° at 8 p.m. ET, and Don Lemon Tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern.

Weekend primetime – from 9 p.m. ET – is dedicated mostly to factual programming, such as documentary specials and miniseries, and documentary-style reality series (such as Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and United Shades of America), as well as acquired documentary films presented under the banner CNN Films.

The network's weekend morning programming consists of CNN Newsroom (simulcast from CNN International) at 4–6 a.m. ET, which is followed by the weekend editions of New Day, hosted by Christi Paul and Boris Sanchez, which airs every Saturday at 6–9 a.m. ET and Sunday at 6–8 a.m. ET, and the network's Saturday program Smerconish with Michael Smerconish at 9 a.m. Eastern.

Sunday morning lineup consists primarily of political talk shows, including Inside Politics Sunday, hosted by Abby Phillip at 8 a.m. Eastern and State of the Union, co-hosted by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash at 9 a.m. Eastern and replayed at noon Eastern and the international affairs program Fareed Zakaria GPS, hosted by Fareed Zakaria at 10 a.m. Eastern and replayed at 1 p.m. Eastern. Weekend programming other than aforementioned slots is filled with CNN Newsroom by Fredricka Whitfield, Jim Acosta, Pamela Brown, and other rolling anchors.

For the 2014–15 season, after cancelling Piers Morgan Tonight (which, itself, replaced the long-running Larry King Live), CNN experimented with running factual and reality-style programming during the 9:00 p.m. ET hour, such as: 
Then-president Jeff Zucker explained that this new lineup was intended to shift CNN away from a reliance on pundit-oriented programs, and attract younger demographics to the network. Zucker stated that the 9:00 p.m. hour could be pre-empted during major news events for expanded coverage.

These changes coincided with the introduction of a new imaging campaign for the network, featuring the slogan "Go there". 

In May 2014, CNN premiered The Sixties, a documentary miniseries produced by Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman which chronicled the United States in the 1960s. Owing to its success, CNN commissioned follow-ups focusing on other decades. Anderson Cooper 360° was expanded to run two hours long, from 8 PM to 10 PM.

By 2019, CNN had produced at least 35 original series. Alongside the Hanks/Goetzman franchise (including the 2018 spin-off 1968), CNN has aired other documentary miniseries relating to news and U.S. policies, such as: 
  • The Bush Years, and American Dynasties: The Kennedys—which saw the highest ratings of any CNN original series premiere to-date, with 1.7 million viewers. 
  • Parts Unknown concluded after the 2018 death by suicide of its host Anthony Bourdain;
  • CNN announced several new miniseries and docuseries for 2019, including: 
    • American Style (a miniseries produced by the digital media company Vox Media), 
    • The Redemption Project with Van Jones, 
    • Chasing Life with Sanjay Gupta, 
    • Tricky Dick (a miniseries chronicling Richard Nixon), 
    • The Movies (a spin-off of the Hanks/Goetzman decades miniseries),
    • and Once in a Great City: Detroit 1962–64.

On-air presentation:

CNN began broadcasting in the high-definition 1080i resolution format in September 2007. This format is now standard for CNN and is available on all major cable and satellite providers.

CNN's political coverage in HD was first given mobility by the introduction of the CNN Election Express bus in October 2007. The Election Express vehicle, capable of five simultaneous HD feeds, was used for the channel's CNN-YouTube presidential debates and for presidential candidate interviews.
​
In December 2008, CNN introduced a comprehensive redesign of its on-air appearance, which replaced an existing style that had been used since 2004.

On-air graphics took a rounded, flat look in a predominantly black, white, and red color scheme, and the introduction of a new box next to the CNN logo for displaying show logos and segment-specific graphics, rather than as a large banner above the lower-third. The redesign also replaced the scrolling ticker with a static "flipper", which could either display a feed of news headlines (both manually inserted and taken from the RSS feeds of CNN.com), or "topical" details related to a story.
​
CNN's next major redesign was introduced on January 10, 2011, replacing the dark, flat appearance of the 2008 look with a glossier, blue and white color scheme, and moving the secondary logo box to the opposite end of the screen. Additionally, the network began to solely produce its programming in the 16:9 aspect ratio, with standard definition feeds using a letterboxed version of the HD feed. 

On February 18, 2013, the "flipper" was dropped and reverted to a scrolling ticker; originally displayed as a blue background with white text, the ticker was reconfigured a day later with blue text on a white background to match the look of the 'flipper'.

On August 11, 2014, CNN introduced a new graphics package, dropping the glossy appearance for a flat, rectangular scheme incorporating red, white, and black colors, and the Gotham typeface.

The ticker now alternates between general headlines and financial news from CNN Business, and the secondary logo box was replaced with a smaller box below the CNN bug, which displays either the title, hashtag, or Twitter handle for the show being aired or its anchor.

In April 2016, CNN began to introduce a new corporate typeface, known as "CNN Sans", across all of its platforms. Inspired by Helvetica Neue and commissioned after consultations with Troika Design Group, the font family consists of 30 different versions with varying weights and widths to facilitate use across print, television, and digital mediums.
​
In August 2016, CNN announced the launch of CNN Aerial Imagery and Reporting (CNN AIR), a drone-based news collecting operation to integrate aerial imagery and reporting across all CNN branches and platforms, along with Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner entities.

​Staff:
Main article: List of CNN personnel

On July 27, 2012, CNN president Jim Walton announced he was resigning after 30 years at the network. Walton remained with CNN until the end of that year. In January 2013, former NBCUniversal President Jeff Zucker replaced Walton.

On January 29, 2013, longtime political analysts James Carville and Mary Matalin, and fellow political contributor Erick Erickson were let go by CNN.

In February 2022, Zucker was asked to resign by Jason Kilar, the chief executive of CNN's owner WarnerMedia, after Zucker's relationship with one of his lieutenants was discovered during the investigation into former CNN primetime host Chris Cuomo's efforts to control potentially damaging reporting regarding his brother Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York.

Kilar announced that the interim co-heads would be executive vice presidents Michael Bass, Amy Entelis, and Ken Jautz. On February 26, 2022, it was announced that Chris Licht—known for his work at MSNBC and CBS—would be the next president of CNN; he is planned to be instated after the spin off and merger of WarnerMedia into Discovery Inc.

Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about CNN:






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​MSNBC (as Microsoft NBC) including list of MSNBC Programs and Hosts Pictured below Former and Present MSNBC Hosts:
MSNBC (short for Microsoft NBC) is an American news-based television channel and website headquartered in New York City. It is owned by NBCUniversal — a subsidiary of Comcast — and provides news coverage and political commentary.

The network produces live broadcasts for its channel from studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan, New York City, and aggregates its coverage and commentary on its website, msnbc.com.

As of September 2018, approximately 87 million households in the United States (90.7 percent of pay television subscribers) were receiving MSNBC.

In the third quarter of 2023, MSNBC was the second most-watched cable news network in the U.S., averaging 792,000 total day viewers, behind rival Fox News, which averaged 1.07 million viewers, and ahead of CNN, which averaged 457,000 viewers. 

In 2023, one of MSNBC's most watched shows, The Beat with Ari Melber, averaged 1.8 million viewers. 

As of November 2023, MSNBC's top five highest-rated shows were: 
MSNBC and its website were founded in 1996 under a partnership between Microsoft and General Electric's NBC unit, hence the network's naming.

Microsoft divested itself of its stakes in the MSNBC channel in 2005 and its stakes in msnbc.com in July 2012. The general news site was rebranded as NBCNews.com, and a new msnbc.com was created as the online home of the cable channel. 

In the late summer of 2015, MSNBC revamped its programming by entering into a dual editorial relationship with its organizational parent NBC News.


History:

Development:

MSNBC was established under a strategic partnership between NBC and Microsoft. NBC executive Tom Rogers was instrumental in developing this partnership. James Kinsella, a Microsoft executive, served as president of the online component, MSNBC.com, and represented the technology company in the joint venture. 

Microsoft invested $221 million for a 50 percent share of the cable channel. MSNBC and Microsoft shared the cost of a $200 million newsroom in Secaucus, New Jersey, for msnbc.com.

The network took over the channel space of NBC's 2-year-old America's Talking (AT) network, although in most cases cable carriage had to be negotiated with providers who had never carried AT.

1996–2007
​Main article: History of MSNBC: 1996–2007

MSNBC was launched on July 15, 1996. The first show was anchored by Jodi Applegate and included news, interviews, and commentary. 

During the day, rolling news coverage continued with The Contributors, a show that featured Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, as well as interactive programming coordinated by Applegate, John Gibson, and John Seigenthaler. Stories were generally longer and more detailed than the stories CNN was running. NBC also highlighted their broadcast connections by airing stories directly from NBC's network affiliates, along with breaking news coverage from the same sources.
​
MSNBC gradually increased its emphasis on politics. After completing its seven-year survey of cable channels, the Project for Excellence in Journalism said in 2007 that "MSNBC is moving to make politics a brand, with a large dose of opinion and personality."

In January 2001, Mike Barnicle's MSNBC show started, but it was canceled in June 2001 because of high production costs. In June, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer said that he would not have started MSNBC had he foreseen the difficulty of attracting viewers.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, NBC used MSNBC as an outlet for the up-to-the-minute coverage being provided by NBC News as a supplement to the longer stories on broadcast NBC.

With little financial news to cover, CNBC and CNBC Europe ran MSNBC for many hours each day following the attacks. The year also boosted the profile of Ashleigh Banfield, who was present during the collapse of Building 7 while covering the World Trade Center on September 11. Her Region In Conflict program capitalized on her newfound celebrity and showcased exclusive interviews from Afghanistan.

In the aftermath of September 11, MSNBC began calling itself "America's NewsChannel" and hired opinionated hosts like Alan Keyes, Phil Donahue, Pat Buchanan, and Tucker Carlson.

This branding makeover, however, was followed by declining ratings.
​
On December 23, 2005, NBCUniversal announced its acquisition of an additional 32 percent share of MSNBC from Microsoft, which solidified its control over television operations and allowed NBC to further consolidate MSNBC's backroom operations with NBC News and its other cable properties.

(The news website msnbc.com remained a separate joint venture between Microsoft and NBC for another seven years.)

NBC later exercised its option to purchase Microsoft's remaining 18 percent interest in MSNBC.

In late 2005, MSNBC began attracting liberal and progressive viewers as Keith Olbermann began critiquing and satirizing conservative media commentators during his Countdown With Keith Olbermann program. He especially focused his attention on the Fox News Channel and Bill O'Reilly, its principal primetime commentator.

On June 7, 2006, Rick Kaplan resigned as president of MSNBC after holding the post for two years. 

Five days later, Dan Abrams, a nine-year veteran of MSNBC and NBC News, was named general manager of MSNBC with immediate effect. NBC News senior vice president Phil Griffin would oversee MSNBC while continuing to oversee NBC News' Today program, with Abrams reporting to Griffin.

On June 29, 2006, Abrams announced the revamp of MSNBC's early-primetime and primetime schedule. On July 10, Tucker (formerly The Situation with Tucker Carlson) started airing at 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. ET (taking over Abrams' old timeslot), while Rita Cosby's Live & Direct was canceled.

Cosby was made the primary anchor for MSNBC Investigates at 10 and 11 p.m. ET, a new program that took over Cosby and Carlson's timeslots. According to the press release, MSNBC Investigates promised to "complement MSNBC's existing programming by building on [the channel's] library of award-winning documentaries." 

The move to taped programming during 10 and 11 p.m. probably resulted from MSNBC's successful Friday "experiment" of replacing all primetime programming with taped specials.

On September 24, 2007, Abrams announced that he was leaving his general manager position so he could focus on his 9:00 p.m. ET talk show, Live With Dan Abrams. Oversight of MSNBC was shifted to Phil Griffin, a senior vice president at NBC.

MSNBC and NBC News began broadcasting from their new studios at NBC's 30 Rockefeller Center complex in New York City on October 22, 2007. The extensive renovations of the associated studios allowed NBC to merge its entire news operation into one building.

All MSNBC broadcasts and NBC Nightly News originate from the new studios. More than 12.5 hours of live television across the NBC News family originate from the New York studios daily. MSNBC also announced new studios near the Universal Studios lot.

MSNBC's master control did not make the move to 30 Rock. It remained in the old Secaucus headquarters until it completed its move to the NBC Universal Network Origination Center located inside the CNBC Global Headquarters building in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on December 21, 2007.

Shortly thereafter, Major League Baseball firmed up a long-term lease of the former MSNBC building to become the home studios of MLB Network, which launched from the facility on January 1, 2009.

2008–2015:
​Main article: History of MSNBC: 2008–2015

From mid-2007 to mid-2008, MSNBC enjoyed a large increase in its Nielsen ratings. Primetime viewings increased by 61 percent. In May 2008, NBC News president Steve Capus said, "It used to be people didn't have to worry about MSNBC because it was an also-ran cable channel.... That's not the case anymore." Tim Russert's sudden death in June 2008 removed the person whom The Wall Street Journal called the "rudder for the network" and led to a period of transition.

During the 2008 presidential election, MSNBC's coverage was anchored by Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and David Gregory. They were widely viewed as the face of the channel's political coverage. During the first three months of the presidential campaign, MSNBC's ratings grew by 158 percent.

Olbermann and Matthews, however, were criticized for expressing left-leaning opinions on the channel. Both were later removed from their anchor positions. Audience viewership during the 2008 presidential campaign more than doubled from the 2004 presidential election, and the channel topped CNN in ratings for the first time during the last three months of the campaign in the key 25–54 age demographic.

In September 2008, the channel hired political analyst and Air America Radio personality Rachel Maddow to host a new political opinion program called The Rachel Maddow Show. The move to create a new program for the channel was widely seen as a well-calculated ratings move, where beforehand, MSNBC lagged behind in coveted primetime ratings.

The show regularly outperformed CNN's Larry King Live, and made the channel competitive in the program's time slot for the first time in over a decade.

In the first quarter of 2010, MSNBC beat CNN in primetime and overall ratings, marking the first time doing so since 2001. The channel also beat CNN in total adult viewers in March, marking the seventh out of the past eight months that MSNBC achieved that result. In addition, the following  finished ahead of their time slot competitors at CNN:
In the third quarter of 2010, MSNBC continued its solid lead over CNN, beating the network in total day for the first time since the second quarter of 2001 in the key adult demographic.

The network also beat CNN for the fourth consecutive quarter, among both primetime and total viewers, as well as becoming the only cable news network to have its key adult demographic viewership grow over the last quarter, increasing by 4 percent. During this time, MSNBC also became the number-one cable news network in primetime among both African American and Hispanic viewers.

On October 11, 2010, MSNBC unveiled a new televised advertising campaign and slogan called "Lean Forward". "We've taken on CNN and we beat them," MSNBC president Phil Griffin told employees at a series of celebratory "town hall" meetings. "Now it's time to take on Fox."

Concerning the campaign, Griffin said, "It is active, it is positive, it is about making tomorrow better than today, a discussion about politics and the actions and passions of our time." The new campaign embraces the network's politically progressive identity. 

The two-year advertising campaign would cost $2 million and consist of internet, television, and print advertising. The new positioning has created brand image issues for msnbc.com, the umbrella website for the television network. A New York Times article quotes Charlie Tillinghast, president of msnbc.com, a separate company, as saying, "Both strategies are fine, but naming them the same thing is brand insanity." 

As a result, msnbc.com eventually changed its name to prevent confusion with the television network, MSNBC; it rebranded the more news-driven msnbc.com as NBCNews.com in July 2012.

On January 21, 2011, Olbermann announced his departure from MSNBC and the episode would be the final episode of Countdown. His departure received much media attention. MSNBC issued a statement that it had ended its contract with Olbermann, with no further explanation.

Olbermann later revealed that he had taken his show to Current TV.

NBCUniversal News Group was created on July 19, 2012, under chairwoman Pat Fili-Krushe. It has been the news division of NBCUniversal. It is composed of the NBC News, CNBC and MSNBC units.

During 2014, MSNBC's total ratings in the 25–54 demographic declined 20 percent, falling to third place behind CNN. Nevertheless, MSNBC retained its lead among the Hispanic and African-American demographics.

2015–present

​In 2015, to help revive the struggling network, Griffin announced he was transitioning MSNBC from left-leaning, opinionated programming to hard news programming. Nearly all daytime opinionated news programs were replaced with more generic news programs. The following lost their shows as a result:
Al Sharpton's PoliticsNation was relegated to the weekend.

The following replaced the opinion shows: ​
The revamped on-air presentation debuted in late summer 2015 and included a new logo, news ticker, and graphics package. MSNBC Live had at least eight hours of programming each day, barring any breaking news that could extend its time.

Daytime news coverage was led primarily by:
  • Brian Williams, 
  • Stephanie Ruhle,
  • Jose Diaz-Balart,
  • Andrea Mitchell,
  • Craig Melvin,
  • Thomas Roberts,
  • and Kate Snow,
  • in addition to "beat leaders" stationed throughout the newsroom.
  • These included

​Morning and primetime programming did not change and remained filled mostly by opinionated personalities.

In April 2016, MSNBC launched a promotional ad campaign with the theme, "in order to know beyond, you have to go beyond." The campaign portrayed MSNBC's reporting and perspectives as "in depth" and an alternative to "talking points" coverage on other cable news outlets. A new tagline "This is who we are" appeared on MSNBC in June 2016.

Promotional campaigns including the slogan were aired in March 2017.

In July 2016, the network debuted Dateline Extra, which was an abridged version of Dateline NBC and another step towards aligning MSNBC and NBC News. The new program was hosted by MSNBC Live anchor Tamron Hall.

In September 2016, MSNBC launched The 11th Hour with Brian Williams as a nightly wrap-up of the day's news and a preview of the following day's headlines. This was MSNBC's first new primetime program in nearly four years.

In January 2017, MSNBC debuted a program in the 6 pm EST hour entitled For the Record with Greta, hosted by former Fox News Channel anchor Greta Van Susteren. The program aired for six months before being cancelled in late June 2017.

The network promoted Ari Melber, the network's chief legal correspondent, to host The Beat with Ari Melber at 6pm.

In March 2017, MSNBC began to increase its use of the NBC News branding during daytime news programming, as part of an effort to emphasize MSNBC's relationship with the division. 

On May 8, 2017, MSNBC introduced a new late-afternoon program, Deadline: White House, hosted by NBC political analyst former White House communications director Nicolle Wallace. 

That month, MSNBC became the highest rated American cable news network in primetime for the first time. MSNBC's increasing viewership was accompanied by declining numbers at Fox News Channel. MSNBC's May 15–19 programming topped the programming of both CNN and Fox News in total viewers and viewers 18–49.
​
On April 16, 2018, MSNBC premiered a new early morning program, Morning Joe First Look, to replace Way Too Early. The same day, MSNBC also retired its on-air news ticker, citing a desire to reduce distractions and "[put] our reporting more front and center".
​
On March 2, 2020, Chris Matthews abruptly announced his resignation from Hardball effective immediately, after comparing the rise of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential campaign to the German invasion of France.

The 7 p.m. hour was hosted by rotating anchors until July 20, when it was replaced by The ReidOut with Joy Reid.

On December 7, 2020, MSNBC announced that Rashida Jones would succeed Griffin as president in 2021. Jones stated goals to increase the network's investment into documentary-style programs, and to have viewers "clearly understand" the differences and value of its news-based and analysis-driven programming, as both were "critical to our future success", and "need to exist in a clear and compelling form on every single platform where news consumers go."

As part of this remit, Jones named separate senior vice presidents for news programming and "perspective and analysis" programming.

In January 2021, MSNBC had its highest-rated week ever in the wake of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, exceeding the ratings of Fox News for the first time since 2000.

On March 29, 2021, M*SNBC introduced a refreshed logo and on-air imaging, including a rebranding of its MSNBC Live rolling news block as MSNBC Reports (in support of Jones' goal of clearer separation between news- and analysis-based programs).

Brian Williams departed the network in late 2021 and was succeeded on The 11th Hour by Stephanie Ruhle. 

Meanwhile, as part of her new contract with NBCUniversal, Rachel Maddow took an extended hiatus from her program in order to focus on other film and podcast projects, with rotating guest hosts filling in for her.

Upon Maddow's return, she announced that she would only host the show on Monday nights beginning in May 2022, and continue to feature guest hosts throughout the rest of the week. The guest hosts appeared under the MSNBC Prime banner until August 16, 2022, when Alex Wagner returned to host Alex Wagner Tonight in that timeslot.

During the months of October and November and with the 2022 United States elections, Steve Kornacki started hosting The Kornacki Countdown every Friday, temporarily replacing The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell from October 14 to Election Day November 8. 

Between February and September of 2023, the Monday edition of All In with Chris Hayes also featured rotating guest hosts, with Chris Hayes only hostings from Tuesdays to Fridays in order to accommodate Hayes' other projects.

On September 7, 2023, it was announced that Jen Psaki, who launched her MSNBC Show, Inside with Jen Psaki on Sunday afternoons since March 19, 2023, would also host her show on Monday nights at 8 p.m., starting on September 25, with Hayes' hosting All In for the rest of the week.
​
On March 10, 2022, MSNBC announced it would offer on-demand episodes of all of its news programming, excluding MSNBC Reports, The Rachel Maddow Show, and Alex Wagner Tonight on Peacock, and The Choice from MSNBC folded into the MSNBC hub on the service, where it would also include documentaries from MSNBC Films.


Ratings and reception:

In September 2018, approximately 87 million households in the United States were receiving MSNBC, amounting to 90.7 percent of pay television subscribers. Nielsen ratings showed that MSNBC ranked second among basic cable networks, averaging 1.8 million viewers in 2019, behind rival Fox News.
​
In 2023, Variety reported "the most-watched news programs on cable are Fox News‘ 'The Five' and MSNBC’s 'The Beat With Ari Melber'."

In 2022, average weekday primetime viewership was 1.2 million, compared to rival Fox News's 2.3 million, a decline of 21% from the previous year, and with 148,000 viewers in the "key demographic" of viewers aged 25-54.

During the first night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, MSNBC had an average viewership of over 5 million, the highest among three major cable news networks and ahead of CNN. 

In 2023, The A.P. reported “'The Beat with Ari Melber' is often the most-watched" show on MSNBC.

Demographics:

A 2014 Pew Research Center study found that MSNBC's audience was more moderate than that of BuzzFeed, Politico, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, but slightly more liberal than CNN's audience.

A 2019 Pew Research Center survey showed that among Americans who named MSNBC as their main source for political news, 74% are ages 50 or older, with 44% ages 65 or older. 95% of those who named MSNBC as their main political news source identify as Democrats; among the eight most commonly named main sources for political and election news by US adults, MSNBC and Fox News have the most partisan audiences.


Carrier issues
​​
Before 2010, MSNBC was not available to Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-verse television subscribers in the portions of New York State, northern New Jersey, and Connecticut that overlapped Cablevision's service area. One of several reasons for this was an exclusive carriage agreement between MSNBC and Cablevision that prohibited competing wired providers from carrying MSNBC. The terms of the agreement were not publicly known.

In 2009, Verizon filed a formal "program-access complaint" with the Federal Communications Commission and petitioned for termination of the deal. In support of Verizon, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal argued that the arrangement could be illegal.

After entering into a new contract, FiOS added the channel in New York City and New Jersey on February 2, 2010.


MSNBC International
See also: MSNBC Canada
​
In southern Africa, MSNBC is distributed free-to-air on satellite on Free2View TV as MSNBC Africa, a joint venture between Great Media Limited and MSNBC. Free2View airs MSNBC's programming from 4 p.m. to midnight ET in a block that repeats twice (live for the first airing), with local Weather Channel forecasts.

In Australia, MSNBC launched November 2019 on the Fetch TV online PayTV network, on channel 171. As in Canada, this is a direct US feed of MSNBC, without any delay. Although Fetch TV has no MSNBC catchup channel/service, it also offers MSNBC programs on a reverse EPG which allows any shows from the previous 24 hours to be selected and watched.

The channel was added to subscription-television outlet Foxtel and its streaming service Flash in April 2023, as part of a negotiated programming agreement between the Foxtel Group and NBCUniversal.

In Asia and Europe, MSNBC is not shown on a dedicated channel. When MSNBC started in 1996, they announced plans to start broadcasting in Europe during 1997. This never happened although MSNBC was seen occasionally on affiliate channel CNBC Europe until the end of the 2000s, showing the channel overnight at the weekend and during the afternoon on American public holidays as well as during breaking news events.

In Turkey, NTV-MSNBC is the news channel of the Turkish broadcaster NTV Turkey. The channel is a joint partnership between the two, although very little Turkish content is shown on English MSNBC. English content on MSNBC is translated into Turkish.


​Online:
Main article: NBCNews.com

MSNBC and its website msnbc.com were launched concurrently. Unlike the network, msnbc.com was operated as the general online news outlet of NBC News in partnership with Microsoft's MSN.com portal. The network and website also remained editorially separate.

The website did not adopt the network's increasingly liberal viewpoints and remained a joint venture with Microsoft even after it had sold its stake in MSNBC.

In July 2012, NBC acquired Microsoft's remaining stake in msnbc.com and re-branded it as NBCNews.com. After being redirected to the new name for a period, msnbc.com was re-launched in 2013 as the website for MSNBC. The website included opinion columns from hosts, correspondents, and guests, along with live and on-demand videos from MSNBC programs.
​
Shift:
Main article: Shift (MSNBC)

In July 2014, msnbc.com launched msnbc2, a brand for several web-only series hosted by MSNBC personalities. In December 2014, msnbc2 was renamed shift, with a programming schedule that was less focused on politics and more tailored to a younger audience.


Radio:

MSNBC launched on XM Satellite Radio channel 120 and Sirius Satellite Radio channel 90 on April 12, 2010. This is the second time MSNBC has been available on satellite radio.

The channel was dropped from XM Radio on September 4, 2006.

The simulcast of MSNBC's programming is on SiriusXM channel 118.


Controversies:
Main article: MSNBC controversies

​Liberal bias:
Main article: Media bias in the United States § Liberal bias

According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, "MSNBC is generally considered to be liberal or left-leaning."
​
In November 2007, a New York Times article stated that MSNBC's primetime lineup was tilting more to the left. 

Since then, commentators have argued that MSNBC has a bias towards liberal politics and the Democratic Party. Washington Post media analyst Howard Kurtz said in 2008 that the channel's evening lineup "has clearly gravitated to the left in recent years and often seems to regard itself as the antithesis of Fox News."

In 2011, Politico referred to MSNBC as "left-leaning", and Steve Kornacki of Salon.com stated that, "MSNBC's prime-time lineup is now awash in progressive politics." Regarding changes in the channel's evening programming, senior vice president of NBC News Phil Griffin said that "it happened naturally. There isn't a dogma we're putting through. There is a 'Go for it.'"

In the February 2008 issue of Men's Journal magazine, an MSNBC interviewee quoted a senior executive as saying that liberal commentator Keith Olbermann "runs MSNBC" and that "because of his success, he's in charge" of the channel. In 2007, The New York Times called Olbermann MSNBC's "most recognizable face". In September 2008, MSNBC stated that Olbermann and Chris Matthews would no longer anchor live political events, with David Gregory assuming that role.

MSNBC cited the growing criticism that they were "too opinionated to be seen as neutral in the heat of the presidential campaign." Olbermann's show Countdown continued to run before and after the presidential and vice presidential debates, and both Matthews and Olbermann joined Gregory on the channel's election night coverage.

On November 13, 2009, in the days leading up to the release of 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue, MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan used photoshopped pictures of Palin on the channel's Morning Meeting program.Ratigan apologized a few days later.

In October 2010, MSNBC began using the tagline "Lean Forward". Some media outlets, including msnbc.com, claimed that the network was now embracing its politically progressive identity.
​
In January 2012, MSNBC used Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, and other network commentators during its coverage of the Iowa Republican caucuses. Nando Di Fino of the Mediaite website said MSNBC was "giving up on the straight news coverage, and instead [appearing] to be aiming to create some controversy."

In November 2012, The New York Times called MSNBC "The Anti-Fox" and quoted former President Bill Clinton as saying, "Boy, it really has become our version of Fox." Citing data from the A.C. Nielsen TV ratings service, the article noted that while the Fox News Channel had a larger overall viewership than MSNBC, the two networks were separated by only around 300,000 viewers among the 25–54 age bracket most attractive to advertisers.

In the Pew Research Center's 2013 "State of the News Media" report, MSNBC was found to be the most opinionated news network, with 85 percent of the content being commentary or opinions and the remaining 15 percent being factual reporting. The report also stated that in 2012, MSNBC spent only $240 million on news production compared to CNN's $682 million and the Fox News Channel's $820 million.

In October 2019, American socialist magazine Jacobin argued that "MSNBC embodies the politics and sensibility of Trump-era liberalism.", but argued that MSNBC "wasn't always liberal."

Writing for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in February 2021, senior media writer Tom Jones argued that the primary distinction between MSNBC and Fox News is not left bias vs. right bias, but rather that much of the content on Fox News, especially during its primetime programs, is not based in truth.
​
Favoritism towards Barack Obama:

Some Democratic Party supporters, including former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell and Bill Clinton advisor Lanny Davis, criticized MSNBC during and after the 2008 Democratic Party primaries as covering Barack Obama more favorably than Hillary Clinton. Rendell said, "MSNBC was the official network of the Obama campaign," and called their coverage "absolutely embarrassing". Rendell later became an on-air contributor to MSNBC.

A study done by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that MSNBC had less negative coverage of Obama (14 percent of stories versus 29 percent in the press overall) and more negative stories about Republican presidential candidate John McCain (73 percent of its coverage versus 57 percent in the press overall). 

MSNBC's on-air slogan during the week of the 2008 presidential election, "The Power of Change", was criticized for being too similar to Obama's campaign slogan of "Hope and Change". 

After the election, conservative talk show host John Ziegler made a documentary entitled Media Malpractice.... How Obama Got Elected, which was very critical of the media's role, especially MSNBC's, in the election. While promoting the documentary, he had an on-air dispute with MSNBC news anchor Contessa Brewer about how the media, especially MSNBC, had portrayed Sarah Palin.
​
During MSNBC's coverage of the Potomac primary, MSNBC's Chris Matthews said, "I have to tell you, you know, it's part of reporting this case, this election, the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama's speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don't have that too often." This led Fox News to assert that both he and MSNBC were biased toward Obama.

Rise of the New Right documentary:

In June 2010, the MSNBC documentary Rise of the New Right aired. It featured interviews with right-wing figures, including Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, Orly Taitz, a leading figure in the "birther" movement, and conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones. The documentary also showed the Michigan Militia's survival training camp and hit the campaign trail with Kentucky senatorial candidate Rand Paul.

The documentary angered Tea Party movement figures and others on the right. After the documentary aired, FreedomWorks, chaired by Armey, called for a boycott of Dawn and Procter & Gamble, which advertised during Hardball with Chris Matthews. The attempted boycott was ineffective as Procter & Gamble continued to advertise on the show.

Romney coverage during 2012 election:

A study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism found that MSNBC's coverage of Mitt Romney during the final week of the 2012 presidential campaign (68 percent negative with no positive stories in the sample) was far more negative than the overall press, and even more negative than it had been during October 1 to 28, when 5 percent was positive, and 57 percent was negative. 

On the other hand, their coverage of Barack Obama improved in the final week before the presidential election. From October 1 to 28, 33 percent of stories were positive and 13 percent negative.

During the campaign's final week, 51 percent of MSNBC's stories were positive, while there were no negative stories about Obama in the sample.


Allegations of conservative bias:

Others have argued that MSNBC has a bias against progressive politics. Phil Donahue's show was canceled in 2003 due to his opposition to the Iraq War, and Donahue later commented that the management of MSNBC required that "we have two conservative (guests) for every liberal. I was counted as two liberals." 

Cenk Uygur, after his departure from MSNBC in 2011, said that MSNBC management had told him "people in Washington" were "concerned about [his] tone," and that he "didn't want to work in a place that didn't challenge power."

Others have also noted that MSNBC anchors tended to be conservative or centrist and wealthy. For example, in 2000, host Joe Scarborough received a 95 rating from the American Conservative Union and supported anti-abortion policies when he was a U.S. representative, while host Stephanie Ruhle, a former hedge fund manager, declared, "I don't have any political ideals that I'm tied to."

Former host Chris Matthews identifies as a "liberal" but voted for George W. Bush in 2000, while current host Nicolle Wallace, a registered Republican, worked for both Bush and Sarah Palin.

Lack of diversity of views:

Maria Bustillos noted in 2019 that "MSNBC's bland, evenhanded respectability is buttressed with a careful performance of diversity both 'ideological' and demographic", and that "the network actively discourages consideration of its anchors' personal convictions" in favor of "interchangeable 'television personalities'" who are "compressed into the network's identity and subservient to it." 

It has been argued that MSNBC, like other cable networks, "is simply not incentivized to be informative", and instead turns its "viewers into partisan junkies who don't change the channel because they need a fix that tells them they're right about everything (and that the other side is wrong)." Jason Linkins in 2014 claimed that MSNBC prefers "the incessant production of insidery ideations" over "the service of the public trust in an honest and equitable way."

Romney family grandchild:

Political commentator Melissa Harris-Perry and her guest panel, in a look back on the 2013 segment of her show, featured a picture of former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his extended family. Romney was holding on his knee his adopted grandchild, Kieran Romney, an African-American.

Harris-Perry and her guests, including actress Pia Glenn and comedian Dean Obeidallah, joked about coming up with captions for the photo. Glenn sang out, "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things just isn't the same."

Obeidallah said, "It sums up the diversity of the Republican Party and the [Republican National Committee], where they have the whole convention and they find the one black person." Afterwards, Harris-Perry gave an on-air apology as well as apologized in a series of tweets.

Coverage of the 2020 Democratic primary:

On February 2, 2019, NBC ran a story about presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard claiming that her campaign was benefiting from Russian state media, stating that she had received twice as many mentions on RT, Sputnik News and Russia Insider compared to expected front-runners Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.

In March 2019, Yashar Ali, a journalist for The Huffington Post accused Dafna Linzer, a managing editor at MSNBC, of ceding editorial control to the Democratic National Committee. Ali, who planned to announce the locations of the DNC debates in advance of MSNBC, received a call attempting to dissuade him with the phrase "let them make a few phone calls," referring to party leaders. A source quoted by CNN stated that this approach was necessary for any network that has enough of a relationship with the DNC to host its debates.

Candidate Andrew Yang and his supporters have been critical of MSNBC's coverage of his campaign and the speaking time allocated to Yang at a November 2019 primary debate hosted by MSNBC.

In December 2019, In These Times analyzed coverage of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary by MSNBC between August and September 2019.They said that "MSNBC talked about Biden twice as often as Warren and three times as often as Sanders", and that Sanders was the candidate spoken of negatively the most frequently of the three."
​
MSNBC came under particular scrutiny during the first three primary-season state votes in 2020 due to historical references made by two of their hosts: 

Chris Matthews compared Sanders to George McGovern in terms of electability on February 3 and criticized Sanders for adopting the "democratic socialist" label on February 7. In reference to Sanders' praise of some aspects of Fidel Castro's Cuba, Matthews said on air during Hardball, "I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones executed".

Matthews then questioned what Sanders meant when he used the term 'socialism'. 

The following week, Chuck Todd criticized the rhetoric of Sanders supporters by quoting a conservative article which compared them to Nazi brown shirts. 

Commenting on the 2020 Nevada Democratic caucuses, Matthews invoked "the fall of France" to the Nazis in 1940 as a metaphor for Sanders' apparent victory in the state. These analogies were criticized by the Sanders campaign and other commentators, who noted that members of Sanders' family had been murdered in the Holocaust. Matthews later issued an on-air apology to Sanders and his supporters.

Jason Johnson, an MSNBC contributor, was temporarily suspended in February 2020 after backlash over his accusing Bernie Sanders supporters of alienating minorities and saying of African-American Sanders staffers and surrogates, "I don't care how many people from the island of misfit black girls that you throw out to defend you on a regular basis." He was reinstated in July 2020.

Coverage of Israeli–Palestinian conflict:

Ayman Mohyeldin has been alleged to have an anti-Israel bias in his reporting. In 2015, Mohyeldin was reporting live from Gaza, where he claimed to have witnessed an unarmed Palestinian man being shot by Israeli police at the Damascus Gate; the man turned out to be wielding a large knife.

Following the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, it was reported by Semafor that a number of Muslim hosts (including Mehdi Hasan, Mohyeldin, and Ali Velshi) were sidelined from coverage.


Suspensions of hosts:

Michael Savage:

Michael Savage briefly hosted a weekend talk show in 2003. That July, Savage responded to a prank caller on his show by calling him a "pig" and a "sodomite", and telling him he "should get AIDS and die." Savage's show was canceled and he was dismissed from MSNBC shortly thereafter.

Don Imus:

Don Imus' radio show Imus in the Morning was simulcast on MSNBC for over ten years. In 2007, he described members of the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "some nappy-headed hoes." The racist remark was met with outrage, and advertisers withdrew from the show, with MSNBC canceling the simulcast. Both Imus and NBC News apologized to the Rutgers Basketball team for the remarks.

Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough:

On November 5, 2010, MSNBC President Phil Griffin suspended Keith Olbermann indefinitely without pay for having contributed $2,400 (the maximum personal donation limit) to each of three Democratic Party candidates during the 2010 midterm election cycle. NBC News policy prohibited contributions to political campaigns unless NBC News had given its prior permission.

On November 7, 2010, Olbermann posted a thank you message to supporters via Twitter. That same day, MSNBC announced that he would be back on the air starting on November 9.

Two weeks later, Griffin announced the suspension of Joe Scarborough for similar misconduct. The Morning Joe host had donated $4,000 to Republican candidates in Florida. Like Olbermann's suspension, Scarborough's was brief, and he returned to the airwaves on November 24.

Martin Bashir:

Host Martin Bashir resigned after making a controversial comment about Sarah Palin. On November 15, 2013, Bashir criticized Palin for equating the federal debt to slavery. Bashir referred to the cruel and barbaric punishment of slaves as described by slave overseer Thomas Thistlewood, specifically a punishment called "Derby's dose", which forced slaves to defecate or urinate into the mouth of another slave.

Bashir then said, "When Mrs. Palin invokes slavery, she doesn't just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, she would be the outstanding candidate."

Alec Baldwin:

Alec Baldwin's 2013 show Up Late with Alec Baldwin was suspended after five episodes because of a homophobic slur Baldwin made to a photographer in New York City.

See Also:







Anderson Cooper (AC360 Correspondent for CNN) and (CBS 60 Minutes) Pictured below: Anderson Cooper Comes to the Defense of Haitians and it was a thing of beauty
Anderson Cooper 360° (commonly shortened to either AC-360 or 360) is an American television news show on CNN and CNN International, hosted by CNN journalist and news anchor Anderson Cooper: see next topic for Cooper's biography.

​The show currently airs weeknights live from 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm ET.

Since May 20, 2019, 360° has been broadcast live from CNN's set in Studio 21L at CNN's offices in 30 Hudson Yards in New York City. It is also sometimes broadcast from CNN's studios in Washington, D.C. or from the site of a breaking news event, airing Monday through Friday evenings.


Beginnings:

360° was launched on September 8, 2003, as a laid-back news/talk program running for one hour at 7:00 pm ET. During Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, CNN executives noticed an impressive ratings boost of NewsNight due to Cooper's on-site reporting and growing popularity.

The executives decided to cancel NewsNight and expand 360° to two hours on November 7, 2005. In August 2011, the show was moved up to 8:00 pm ET while maintaining a replay of the show at its original 10:00 pm ET time slot.

In June 2013, however, CNN decided to stop airing regular repeats of the show, with the 10:00 pm ET time slot featuring its spin-off show, AC360° Later, which featured panel discussions on recent events led by Cooper.

After being faced with irregular and inconsistent scheduling (sometimes being replaced by CNN documentaries or re-runs of AC360° from earlier in the day), it was finally discontinued in February 2014.


Format:

The show is simulcast live on both CNN and CNN International.

Cooper often anchors the program from the site of a major news story, such as his extensive coverage from New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill, as well as Port-au-Prince after the 2010 Haiti earthquake (see Photo above), and also from the storm zone in Tacloban, Leyte, during the aftermath of Super Typhoon Haiyan.

On September 26, 2007, 360° began broadcasting in high definition on CNN HD.

Frequent analysts and contributors to the show include the following:
Other contributors include the following:
The following are fill-in hosts when Cooper is not available:
The show was first aired on CNN Philippines during its Paris attacks coverage of their parent network on November 14, 2015 (8:00 am local time), via a hook-up from the CNN/U.S. feed, and started to air during its Breaking News via a hook-up from CNN International starting 2016.

Eventually, AC 360° added to its local programming on August 22, 2016, as a dry-run, but was reduced to 30 minutes, giving way for Cebuano News. A week after, it was removed in the network's local programming lineup, due to CNN's initial refusal to air AC 360° on CNN Philippines.

However, after the local Newsroom edition on weekday mornings went off the air indefinitely on March 17, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Philippines, AC 360° was reinstated as a one-hour program to fill the 8:00 am slot when CNN Philippines went back on-air on March 23, with replays at 11:00 am on Tuesdays till Fridays with Saturday episodes at 10:00.

On November 2, 2020, the show was moved to 10:00 am on four-day weekdays and the 11:00 am replays were discarded, then it was moved again to 10:30 am on June 1, 2021, after CNN Philippines Sports Desk went back on the air after a 14-month hiatus, but as a morning show. 

AC 360° on Saturdays was also shifted to 10:30 am on June 19 and CNN Philippines ceased airing it completely every Saturday on July 17, 2022, with the start of the Silver Screen film programming.


Segments:
  • "360 Bulletin" appeared at the top and bottom of the hour and was most recently presented by Amara Walker, who provided a quick review of other top news stories. The segment is no longer included in most broadcasts. Previous presenters have included Isha Sesay and Erica Hill.
  • "Crime and Punishment" presented the background and latest developments of high-profile crimes. This segment has been included only minimally since 2011.
  • "Keeping Them Honest" exposes possible issues of government corruption, failed promises, and other anomalies from various sectors.
  • "The Ridiculist" presents more lighthearted and humorous stories and often airs near the end of the program. (Cooper has dissolved into extended fits of giggles at least twice during this segment: on August 17, 2011, when joking about Gérard Depardieu urinating in a plane, and on April 10, 2012, during a spot about Dyngus Day.) The segment has only appeared sporadically.


Supplements to the TV show:

The CNN website and its AC360 section provides visitors segments and video clips of previous episodes and interviews. A podcast version of each broadcast was available for download through 2012, in which Cooper recorded a new introduction before playing clips from the main broadcast. That feature was subsequently phased out.


Recognition:

In 2006, 360° was nominated twice for a GLAAD Media Award in the category of "Outstanding TV Journalism – News Segment." The nominated segments were "School Outing" and "Secret Sex Lives."

In 2006, the show has won the following News & Documentary Emmy Awards:
  • Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Story Long Form for the report Starving in Plain Sight on the famine in Nigeria.
  • Outstanding Feature Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for the report on Charity Hospital.

The show also won the following Business & Financial Reporting Emmy Award in 2006:
  • Outstanding Coverage of a Current Business News Story In a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for the report on Black Market Infertility

The show was nominated but did not win in 2007 for the following News & Documentary Emmy Awards:
  • Outstanding Live Coverage of a Breaking News Story – Long Form for the report on Sago Mines.
  • Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Lighting Direction & Scenic Design for the report High Rise Crash

The show won in 2007 for the following Business & Financial Reporting Emmy Awards:
  • Outstanding Coverage of a Current Business News Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for the report on Keeping Them Honest – Hidden Spending.

The show received two more nominations in 2008 but did not win:
  • Outstanding Feature Story in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for the report Unapproved Drugs
  • Outstanding Investigative Journalism in a Regularly Scheduled Newscast for the report Chicago Police Brutality

In 2010, Anderson Cooper 360° was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for "Outstanding TV Journalism – Newsmagazine" for the episode "Bullied to Death?" during the 21st GLAAD Media Awards.

In 2011, AC360 won two Emmys for their coverage of the earthquake in Haiti:
  • Outstanding coverage of a breaking news story in a regularly scheduled newscast, Haiti in ruins
  • Outstanding live coverage of a current news story – long form, crisis in Haiti

See also: ​___________________________________________________________________________

Anderson Cooper Bio:

Anderson Hays Cooper (born June 3, 1967) is an American broadcast journalist and political commentator currently anchoring the CNN news broadcast show Anderson Cooper 360° (Above).

In addition to his duties at CNN, Cooper serves as a correspondent for 60 Minutes on CBS News.

After graduating from Yale University with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989, he began traveling the world, shooting footage of war-torn regions for Channel One News. Cooper was hired by ABC News as a correspondent in 1995, but he soon took more jobs throughout the network, working for a short time as a co-anchor, reality game show host, and fill-in morning talk show host.

In 2001, Cooper joined CNN, where he was given his own show, Anderson Cooper 360°, in 2003; he has remained the show's host since. He developed a reputation for his on-the-ground reporting of breaking news events, with his coverage of Hurricane Katrina causing his popularity to sharply increase.

For his coverage of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Cooper received a National Order of Honour and Merit, the highest honor granted by the Haitian government.

From September 2011 to May 2013, he also served as the host of his own syndicated daytime talk show, Anderson Live.

Cooper has won 18 Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards, as well as an Edward Murrow Award from the Overseas Press Club in 2011. A member of the Vanderbilt family, he came out as gay in 2012, becoming "the most prominent openly gay journalist on American television". 

In 2016, Cooper became the first openly LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate, and he has received several GLAAD Media Awards.


Early life and education:

Cooper was born in Manhattan, New York City, the younger son of writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist Gloria Vanderbilt. His maternal grandparents were millionaire equestrian Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt of the Vanderbilt family and socialite Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and Reginald's patrilineal great-grandfather was business magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who founded the prominent Vanderbilt shipping and railroad fortune. 

He has two older half-brothers, Leopold Stanislaus "Stan" Stokowski (b. 1950) and Christopher Stokowski (b. 1952), from Gloria's ten-year marriage to conductor Leopold Stokowski. In 2014, Cooper appeared in Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots, where he learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States.

Cooper's media experience began early. As a baby, he was photographed by Diane Arbus for Harper's Bazaar. At the age of three, Cooper was a guest on The Tonight Show on September 17, 1970, appearing with his mother. At the age of nine, he appeared on To Tell the Truth as an impostor. From age 10 to 13, Cooper modeled with Ford Models for Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein and Macy's.

Wyatt experienced a series of heart attacks while undergoing open-heart surgery, and died January 5, 1978, at the age of 50. Cooper considers his father's book Families to be "sort of a guide on... how he would have wanted me to live my life and the choices he would have wanted me to make. And so I feel very connected to him."

When Cooper was 21, his older brother, Carter Vanderbilt Cooper, committed suicide on July 22, 1988, at age 23, by jumping from the 14th-floor terrace of Vanderbilt's New York City penthouse apartment. Gloria Vanderbilt later wrote about her son's death in the book A Mother's Story, in which she expressed her belief that the suicide was caused by a psychotic episode induced by an allergy to the anti-asthma prescription drug salbutamol.

Carter's suicide sparked Anderson's interest in journalism: "Loss is a theme that I think a lot about, and it's something in my work that I dwell on. I think when you experience any kind of loss, especially the kind I did, you have questions about survival: Why do some people thrive in situations that others can't tolerate? Would I be able to survive and get on in the world on my own?"

Cooper attended the Dalton School, a private co-educational day school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. At age 17, after graduating from Dalton a semester early, Cooper traveled around Africa for several months on a "survival trip". He contracted malaria on the trip and was hospitalized in Kenya. Describing the experience, Cooper wrote "Africa was a place to forget and be forgotten in." 

Cooper attended Yale University, where he resided in Trumbull College and was a coxswain on the lightweight rowing team. He was inducted into the Manuscript Society and majored in political science, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1989.


Career:

Early career:

During college, Cooper spent two summers as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency while studying political science. He pursued journalism with no formal journalistic education. He is a self-proclaimed "news junkie since [he] was in utero". 

After his first correspondence work in the early 1990s, he took a break from reporting and lived in Vietnam for a year, during which time he studied the Vietnamese language at Vietnam National University, Hanoi.

Channel One:

After Cooper graduated from Yale, he tried to gain entry-level employment with ABC answering telephones, but was unsuccessful. Finding it hard to get his foot in the door of on-air reporting, Cooper decided to enlist the help of a friend in making a fake press pass.

At the time, Cooper was working as a fact checker for the small news agency Channel One, which produces a youth-oriented news program that is broadcast to many junior high and high schools in the United States. Cooper then entered Myanmar on his own with his forged press pass and met with students fighting the Burmese government.

After reporting from Myanmar, Cooper lived in Vietnam for a year to study the Vietnamese language at the University of Hanoi. Persuading Channel One to allow him to bring a Hi8 camera with him, Cooper began filming and assembling reports of Vietnamese life and culture that aired on Channel One.

In 1992, he filmed stories from Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda.

After having been on such assignments for a couple of years, Cooper realized in 1994 that he had slowly become desensitized to the violence he was witnessing around him; the horrors of the Rwandan genocide became trivial: "I would see a dozen bodies and think, you know, it's a dozen, it's not so bad." One particular incident, however, snapped him out of it:
  • On the side of the road [Cooper] came across five bodies that had been in the sun for several days. The skin of a woman's hand was peeling off like a glove. Revealing macabre fascination, Cooper whipped out his disposable camera and took a closeup photograph for his personal album. As he did, someone took a photo of him. Later that person showed Cooper the photo, saying, "You need to take a look at what you were doing." "And that's when I realized I've got to stop, [...] I've got to report on some state fairs or a beauty pageant or something, to just, like, remind myself of some perspective."

ABC:

In 1995, Cooper became a correspondent for ABC News, eventually rising to the position of co-anchor on its overnight World News Now program on September 21, 1999. In 2000, he switched career paths, taking a job as the host of ABC's reality show The Mole:
  • "My last year at ABC, I was working overnights anchoring this newscast, then during the day at 20/20. So I was sleeping in two- or four-hour shifts, and I was really tired and wanted a change. I wanted to clear my head and get out of news a little bit, and I was interested in reality TV—and it was interesting."

Cooper was also a fill-in co-host for Regis Philbin on Live with Regis and Kelly in 2007 when Philbin underwent triple-bypass heart surgery. As of 2019, he still periodically serves as guest co-host on Live when one of the two hosts cannot go in to work.

CNN:

​​Cooper left The Mole after its second season to return to broadcast news. In 2001, he joined CNN, commenting, "Two seasons was enough, and 9/11 happened, and I thought I needed to be getting back to news." 

His first position at CNN was to anchor alongside Paula Zahn on American Morning. In 2002, he became CNN's weekend prime-time anchor. Since 2002, he has hosted CNN's New Year's Eve special from Times Square.

Anderson Cooper 360°:

On September 8, 2003, Cooper became the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360° (see above) on CNN. Describing his philosophy as an anchor, he has said:
  • "I think the notion of traditional anchor is fading away, the all-knowing, all-seeing person who speaks from on high. I don't think the audience really buys that anymore. As a viewer, I know I don't buy it. I think you have to be yourself, and you have to be real and you have to admit what you don't know, and talk about what you do know, and talk about what you don't know as long as you say you don't know it. I tend to relate more to people on television who are just themselves, for good or for bad, than I do to someone who I believe is putting on some sort of persona. The anchorman on The Simpsons is a reasonable facsimile of some anchors who have that problem."

In 2005, Cooper covered the following: 
In 2005, during CNN coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, he confronted Sen. Mary Landrieu, Sen. Trent Lott, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson about their perception of the government response.

As Cooper said later in an interview with New York magazine, "Yeah, I would prefer not to be emotional and I would prefer not to get upset, but it's hard not to when you're surrounded by brave people who are suffering and in need." 

A contributor to Broadcasting & Cable magazine wrote: "In its aftermath, Hurricane Katrina served to usher in a new breed of emo-journalism, skyrocketing CNN's Anderson Cooper to superstardom as CNN's golden boy and a darling of the media circles because of his impassioned coverage of the storm."

In September 2005, the format of CNN's NewsNight was changed from 60 to 120 minutes to cover the unusually violent hurricane season. To help distribute some of the increased workload, Cooper was temporarily added as co-anchor to Aaron Brown. This arrangement was reported to have been made permanent the same month by the president of CNN's U.S. operations, Jonathan Klein, who has called Cooper "the anchorperson of the future".

Following the addition of Cooper, the ratings for NewsNight increased significantly; Klein remarked that "[Cooper's] name has been on the tip of everyone's tongue." 

To further capitalize on this, Klein announced a major programming shakeup on November 2, 2005. Cooper's 360° program would be expanded to two hours and shifted into the 10:00pm ET slot formerly held by NewsNight, with the third hour of Wolf Blitzer's The Situation Room filling in Cooper's former 7:00pm ET slot.

With "no options" left for him to host shows, Aaron Brown left CNN, ostensibly having "mutually agreed" with Jonathan Klein on the matter.

In early 2007, Cooper signed a multi-year deal with CNN that would allow him to continue as a contributor to 60 Minutes, as well as doubling his salary from $2 million annually to a reported $4 million.

The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper:

On April 16, 2023, CNN launched a new Sunday primetime series, The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.

CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute:

In 2007, he began hosting CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute, a show about extraordinary deeds by ordinary people.

Planet in Peril documentary:

In October 2007, Cooper began hosting the documentary Planet in Peril with Sanjay Gupta and Jeff Corwin on CNN.

In 2008, Cooper, Gupta, and Lisa Ling from National Geographic Explorer teamed up for a sequel, Planet in Peril: Battle Lines, which premiered in December 2008.

Syndicated talk show: Anderson Live:

In September 2010, Warner Bros. and Telepictures (both corporate siblings of CNN) announced that Cooper had signed an agreement to host a nationally syndicated talk show.

The journalist Brian Stelter (at the time employed by The New York Times, and now by CNN), reported on Twitter that the new Warner Bros. daytime talk show would be named Anderson (now titled Anderson Live). 

The show premiered on September 12, 2011, and as part of negotiations over the talk show deal, Cooper signed a new multi-year contract with CNN to continue as the host of Anderson Cooper 360°. 

On October 29, 2012, it was announced that Anderson Live would end at the conclusion of its second season. The show, slightly renamed after season one and revamped with a variety of co-hosts, failed to achieve the ratings distributor Warner Brothers hoped for. The final Anderson Live aired on May 30, 2013.

2016 presidential debates:

Along with Martha Raddatz, Cooper moderated the second presidential election debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. This made him the first openly LGBT person to moderate a presidential debate in the general election.

New Years Eve:

In 2017, Cooper's close friend, Andy Cohen, joined Cooper in succeeding Kathy Griffin as co-host of CNN's New Year's Eve coverage. They again co-hosted CNN's New Year's Eve for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 .

60 Minutes:

​Cooper has been a correspondent for the CBS News program 60 Minutes since 2007, while concurrently serving as a CNN anchor and correspondent.


Other work

AC2:

Andy Cohen and Cooper announced that they would be going on a national tour to perform their conversational stage show AC2 beginning in March 2015. The tour opened in Boston, followed by Miami Beach, Chicago and Atlanta. 

The idea for the show came about after Cooper interviewed Cohen about his then-latest book, The Andy Cohen Diaries, at an event at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Since then, the two-man show has continued to tour, reaching more than fifty cities as of October 2018.

Broadway:

Cooper was the narrator for the 2011 Broadway revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, directed by Rob Ashford and starring Daniel Radcliffe.

Writings:

A freelance writer, Cooper has authored a variety of articles that have appeared in many other outlets, including Details magazine.

In May 2006, Cooper published a memoir for HarperCollins, Dispatches from the Edge, detailing his life and work in Sri Lanka, Africa, Iraq and Louisiana over the previous year. Some of the book's proceeds are donated to charity. The book topped The New York Times Best Seller list on June 18, 2006.

In 2017, Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, co-authored The Rainbow Comes and Goes: A Mother and Son on Life, Love, and Loss. Compiled from a series of emails, the memoir recounts their shared past, and Vanderbilt's tumultuous childhood.

Cooper said his goal in writing the book and correspondence was to leave "nothing left unsaid" between the pair. It landed on multiple best-seller lists the year of its publication.

Jeopardy!:

From April 19 to 30, 2021 Cooper served as a guest host on Jeopardy! following the death of Alex Trebek.


Personal life:

As of 2016, Cooper was not registered to any political party.

While promoting his book, Cooper told Oprah Winfrey he had dyslexia as a child.

Cooper is openly gay; as of 2012, he was (according to The New York Times) "the most prominent openly gay journalist on American television". For years, Cooper avoided discussing his private life in interviews. On July 2, 2012, however, he gave Andrew Sullivan permission to publish an email that stated, in part:
  • "I've begun to consider whether the unintended outcomes of maintaining my privacy outweigh personal and professional principle. It's become clear to me that by remaining silent on certain aspects of my personal life for so long, I have given some the mistaken impression that I am trying to hide something—something that makes me uncomfortable, ashamed or even afraid. This is distressing because it is simply not true. ... The fact is, I'm gay, always have been, always will be, and I couldn't be any more happy, comfortable with myself, and proud."

In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook, before making the decision to publicly come out as gay, sought Cooper's advice.

In 2014, Cooper and his long-term partner at the time, Benjamin Maisani, purchased Rye House, a historic estate in Connecticut. In March 2018, Cooper confirmed that he and Maisani had split up.

Cooper was friends with Anthony Bourdain, celebrity chef and host of the CNN series Parts Unknown. After Bourdain died by suicide on June 8, 2018, Cooper paid tribute to him in a CNN special program, Remembering Anthony Bourdain. Cooper also paid tribute to Bourdain on the Thanksgiving 2020 episode of Anderson Cooper Full Circle, saying that he "was proud to call Anthony Bourdain a friend", and adding: "He is so, so missed by so many."

In 2021, Cooper and co-author Katherine Howe published Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty, a history of the Vanderbilt family going back to his Vanderbilt ancestors who came to New Amsterdam in the 17th century.

Children:

On April 30, 2020, Cooper announced the birth of his son Wyatt Morgan Cooper by a surrogate on April 27. "On Monday I became a father. I've never said that out loud and it astonishes me. I have a son," he said at the end of a CNN Town Hall on his show, Anderson Cooper 360°.

He also went on to make an announcement on Instagram, stating that "Wyatt Morgan Cooper was born on Monday weighing 7 pounds 2 ounces."

Though Cooper and Benjamin Maisani are no longer romantically involved, the pair co-parent the child and Maisani was present in the delivery room for Wyatt's birth. Wyatt is named after Cooper's late father, Wyatt Cooper, and his middle name is derived from the Morgan side of his family, being the maiden name of his maternal grandmother Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt.

On February 10, 2022, Cooper announced at the beginning of his show on CNN that he had just become a father for a second time to a son named Sebastian Luke Maisani-Cooper.

Maisani is in the process of adopting Cooper's son Wyatt, after which Wyatt's surname will become Maisani-Cooper.


Awards
​
Cooper helped lead CNN's Peabody Award-winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina, and the network's Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award-winning coverage of the 2004 tsunami. He has won 18 Emmy Awards, including two for his coverage of the earthquake in Haiti, and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

Note: to see details of the following graph covering the years 1993 through 2023, click anywhere on the following images:
​​Other awards:

Career timeline:

Filmography

Books
See also:







Christiane AmanpourPictured below: Christiane Amanpour celebrates 40 years at CNN
Christiane Maria Heideh Amanpour. born 12 January 1958) is a British-Iranian journalist and television host.

Amanpour is the Chief International Anchor for CNN and host of CNN International's nightly interview program Amanpour and CNN's The Amanpour Hour on Saturdays. She is also the host of Amanpour & Company on PBS.


Early life and education:

Amanpour was born in the West London suburb of Ealing, the daughter of Mohammad Taghi Amanpour (Iranian) and Anne Patricia Hill (British). She was baptized at the Church of Saint Benedict in Ealing and was raised in Tehran until the age of eleven. Her father was Shia Muslim and her mother was Roman Catholic.

Her father worked as an airline executive for Iran Air and later lost his job and fortune after the Iran Revolution in 1979. After completing the more significant part of her primary school education in Iran, her parents sent her to a boarding school in England when she was 11.

She attended the Convent of the Holy Cross, an all-girls preparatory school in Chalfont Saint Peter, Buckinghamshire, and then, at the age of 16, she attended New Hall School, a Roman Catholic school in Chelmsford, Essex.

Christiane and her family returned to England shortly after the Islamic Revolution began. She maintains that they were not forced to leave the country but were returning to England due to the Iran–Iraq War. The family ultimately remained in England, finding it difficult to return to Iran.

After leaving New Hall, Amanpour moved to the United States to study journalism at the University of Rhode Island. During her time there, she worked in the news department at WBRU-FM in Providence, Rhode Island. She also worked for NBC affiliate WJAR in Providence as an electronic graphics designer.

In 1983, Amanpour graduated from the university summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. On 23 October 2007, she received the Commander badge (No. 3) of the Order of the British Empire for her journalism work

Click on  any of the following blue hyperlinks for  more about Chriastiane Aaanpour:*







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