Welcome to Our Generation USA!
Copyright © 2015 Bert N. Langford (Images may be subject to copyright. Please send feedback)
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:
Best of the Internet
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:
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:
- Text
- Background
- Establishment of religion
- Free exercise of religion
- Freedom of speech and of the press
- Petition and assembly
- Freedom of association
- See also:
- Censorship in the United States
- Freedom of thought
- Free speech zones
- Government speech
- List of amendments to the United States Constitution
- List of United States Supreme Court cases involving the First Amendment
- Marketplace of ideas
- Military expression
- Photography is Not a Crime
- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom
- Cornell Law School – Annotated Constitution
- First Amendment Center – The First Amendment Library
- Cohen, Henry (October 16, 2009). "Freedom of Speech and Press: Exceptions to the First Amendment" (PDF). Legislative Attorney. Congressional Research Service. Retrieved January 1, 2012.
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
- Amy Goodman wrote Standing up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times (2008).
- David Brock wrote The Republican Noise Machine (2004).
- Al Franken wrote Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, (2003), in which he argues that mainstream media organizations have neither a liberal nor a conservative political bias, but there exists a right-wing media that seeks to promote conservative ideology rather than report the news.
- Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols wrote Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (2002).
- Jim Hightower in There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos (1997; ISBN 0-06-092949-9) uses humor to deflate claims of liberal bias, and gives examples of how media support corporate interests.
- Michael Parenti wrote Inventing Reality: the Politics of News Media (1993).
- Eric Alterman wrote What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (2003) in which he disputes the belief in liberal media bias, and suggests that over-correcting for this belief resulted in conservative media bias:
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
- Steve Levy--Bias in the Media: How the Media Switches Against Me After I Switched Parties.
- Tim Groseclose--Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind, 2011.
- Ben Shapiro--Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, 2011.
- John Ziegler—writer, director, and producer of the documentary film Media Malpractice: How Obama Got Elected and Palin was Targeted, 2009.
- Brian C. Anderson--South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, 2005.
- John Stossel--Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media, 2004, gives Stossel's views on liberal bias in the established media.
- Bob Kohn--Journalistic Fraud: How The New York Times Distorts the News and Why It Can No Longer Be Trusted, 2003, a criticism of The New York Times.
- Ann Coulter--Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, 2002, a critique on widespread liberal bias directed at American television and print news.
- Jim A. Kuypers wrote Partisan Journalism: A History of Media Bias in the United States (2014) and Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues (2002).
- Bernard Goldberg
- Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News. Regnery Publishing; 25 February 2001, a criticism of liberal bias directed towards CBS, his former employer.
- Arrogance: Rescuing America from the Media Elite. Grand Central Publishing; 2003, showing how the media slant their coverage while insisting they're just reporting the facts.
- A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (And Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance Between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. Regnery Publishing; 2008, arguing that the left-leaning mainstream media crossed the line during the 2008 presidential election campaign and helped to determine the outcome.
- S. Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman and Linda Lichter--The Media Elite, 1986, in which journalists' political views and voting records were compared with those of the general public.
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:
- History
- Alternative media (U.S. political right)
- Alternative media (U.S. political left)
- Climate change controversy
- CNN controversies#Allegations of bias
- Conservatism in the United States
- Political views of Sinclair Broadcast Group
- Fox News Channel controversies#Accusations of bias
- Group attribution error
- History of American journalism
- Hostile media effect
- Liberalism in the United States
- Media coverage of the Arab–Israeli conflict
- Media coverage of climate change
- Media coverage of the Iraq War
- Missing white woman syndrome
- MSNBC controversies#Assertions of left-wing bias
- News media in the United States
- Objectivity (journalism)
- Propaganda in the United States
- Propaganda model
- Organizations monitoring bias:
- External Links:
- HonestReporting, website defending Israel from media bias.
- "Those Aren't Stones, They're Rocks: The pro-Israel critique of Mideast coverage, by Seth Ackerman (FAIR), 2001, discussion of purported pro-Israel bias.
- Blinded By Science: How 'Balanced' Coverage Lets the Scientific Fringe Hijack Reality, by Chris Mooney, Discover, 2010.
- Chart – Real and Fake News (2016)/Vanessa Otero (basis) (Mark Frauenfelder)
- Chart – Real and Fake News (2014) (2016)/Pew Research Center
- Non-partisan:
- AllSides Media Bias Ratings, rates news media, mostly in the United States, according to bias on a left–right political spectrum.
- FactCheck.org, non-partisan fact checking of current media news.
- Facts on File, non-partisan facts (requires subscription).
- Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, studies of attitudes toward the media.
- DebatePolitics.com, a non-biased political debate forum addressing Bias in the Media.
- Website of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, a self-described "non-partisan research and educational organization".
- Claims of conservative bias:
- Media Matters for America, website claiming to expose conservative bias.
- Fairness and accuracy in reporting (FAIR), claims of conservative media bias.
- Claims of liberal bias:
- Accuracy in Media, site claiming to expose liberal bias.
- TheMediaReport.com, monitors the mainstream media's coverage of the Catholic Church sex abuse narrative.
- NewsBusters, site assessing what it perceives to be bias; a project of the Media Research Center.
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.
___________________________________________________________________________
The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper. Published in Washington, D.C., it was founded on December 6, 1877.
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:
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.
___________________________________________________________________________
The Washington Post is an American daily newspaper. Published in Washington, D.C., it was founded on December 6, 1877.
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:
- Beirut,
- Berlin,
- Beijing,
- Bogota,
- Cairo,
- Hong Kong,
- Islamabad,
- Jerusalem,
- Kabul,
- London,
- Mexico City,
- Moscow,
- Nairobi,
- New Delhi,
- Paris,
- and Tokyo.
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:
- History
- Founding and early period
- Meyer–Graham period
- Jeff Bezos era (2013–present)
- Political stance
- 1970–2000
2000–present
Political endorsements
- 1970–2000
- Controversies
- Executive officers and editors (past and present)
- See also:
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:
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:
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:
- Sunday Review (formerly the Week in Review),
- The New York Times Book Review,
- The New York Times Magazine
- and T: The New York Times Style Magazine (T is published 13 times a year).
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:
- History
- Organization
- Content
- Style
- Products
- Interruptions
- Editorial stance
- Criticism and controversies
- Failure to report famine in Ukraine
- World War II
- Fashion news articles promoting advertisers
- Iraq War
- Jayson Blair plagiarism
- Duke University lacrosse case
- Israeli–Palestinian conflict
- M.I.A. quotes out of context
- Delayed publication of 2005 NSA warrantless surveillance story
- Irish student controversy
- Nail salon series
- Iran
- Hiring practices
- Accusations of bias
- Reputation
- Awards
- See also:
- List of newspapers in the United States
- List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times
- List of The New York Times employees
- New York Times Building (disambiguation)
- New York Times Index
- The New York Times Best Seller list
- Official NYT websites
- Unofficial NYT-related websites
- Curated collection of most pre-1923 issues at Online Books Page
- The New York Times Company records (1836–2000) – The New York Public Library
- Works by or about The New York Times at Internet Archive (archives)
- Works by The New York Times at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
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.
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.
[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:
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:
- Early life and career
- Disaffection with Vietnam War
- The Pentagon Papers
- Fielding break-in
- Trial and dismissal
- Later activism and views
- Awards and honors
- Personal life
- Books
- Films
- See also:
- Jack Anderson
- Thomas Andrews Drake
- List of peace activists
- Tran Ngoc Chau
- Official website
- Appearances on C-SPAN
- Daniel Ellsberg on IMDb
- The Daniel Ellsberg collection at the Internet Archive
- The Truth-Telling Project – Project formed by Ellsberg for whistleblowers
- 2006 Right Livelihood Award Recipient 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:
- Contents
- Leak
- The Nixon administration's restraint of the media
- The Supreme Court allows further publication
- Legal charges against Ellsberg
- Impact
- Full release in 2011
- In films and television
- See also:
- First Amendment to the United States Constitution
- Global surveillance disclosures
- James L. Greenfield
- United States diplomatic cables leak
- Watergate
- The Pentagon Papers. U.S. National Archives. The complete, un-redacted report.
- Pentagon Papers (Complete Gravel ed.). mtholyoke.edu. Complete text with supporting documents, maps, and photos.
- "Battle for the Pentagon Papers". Top Secret. a resource site that supports a currently playing docu-drama about the Pentagon Papers. The site provides historical context, time lines, bibliographical resources, information on discussions with current journalists, and helpful links.
- Gravel, Mike & Ellsberg, Daniel (July 7, 2002). "Special: [How the Pentagon Papers Came to Be Published by the Beacon Press". Democracy Now!. Archived from the original on July 3, 2007. (audio/video and transcript).
- "Nixon Tapes & Supreme Court Oral Arguments". gwu.edu.
- Holt, Steve (1971). "The Pentagon Papers: A report". WCBS Newsradio 880 (WCBS-AM New York). Archived from the original on 2008-01-11. Part of WCBS 880's celebration of 40 years of newsradio.
- Trzop, Allison. Beacon Press & The Pentagon Papers. Beacon Press.
- "The Most Dangerous Man in America: New Documentary Chronicles How Leak of the Pentagon Papers Helped End Vietnam War". Democracy Now!. September 16, 2009.
- Blanton, Thomas S. (Editor) & Prados, John; Meadows, Eddie; Burr, William & Evans, Michael (Compilers) (June 5, 2001). THE PENTAGON PAPERS: SECRETS, LIES AND AUDIOTAPES (The Nixon Tapes and the Supreme Court Tapes, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 48. The National Security Archive at The George Washington University (UPDATED 29 JUNE 2001 - The Secret Briefs and the Secret Evidence ed.).
[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:
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:
- Wiretapping of the Democratic Party's headquarters
- Cover-up and its unraveling
- Final investigations and resignation
- President Ford’s pardon of Nixon
- Aftermath
- Purpose of the break-in
- Worldwide Reactions
- Domestic reactions
- See also:
- List of federal political scandals in the United States
- List of scandals with "-gate" suffix
- Second-term curse
- Watergate Babies
- Watergate.info
- Washington Post Watergate Archive
- Washington Post Watergate Tapes Online – The Washington Post
- Watergate Trial Conversations – Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum
- FBI Records: The Vault – Watergate at vault.fbi.gov
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:
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:
- Overview
- Legality of whistleblowing in the United States
- Advocacy for whistleblower rights and protections
- Modern methods used for whistleblower protection
- In popular culture
- See also:
- Informant
- Supergrass (informer)
- Benetech Martus
- Complaint system
- Conflict of interest
- ECC: Leniency policy
- False Claims Act
- Nuclear whistleblowers
- List of nuclear whistleblowers
- Misplaced loyalty
- Organizational retaliatory behavior
- SEC Office of the Whistleblower
- Shooting the messenger
- TrumpiLeaks (a website to solicit leaks of material about the U.S. president)
- Whistleblower Office
- Ed Yong (28 November 2013). "3 ways to blow the whistle" (PDF). Nature Vol 503.
- National Security Whistleblowers, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report
- Survey of Federal Whistleblower and Anti-Retaliation Laws, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report
- Whistleblower Protection Program & information at U.S. Department of Labor
- Why be a whistleblower?
- Author Eyal Press discusses whistleblowers and heroism on Conversations from Penn State
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:
- Law
- Disclosing misconduct, free speech and retaliation
- Acts
- National security protections
- Reporting
- Exemptions and limitations to whistleblower protections
- See also:
- Ag-gag
- Military Whistleblower Protection Act
- Employment law: Department of Labor
- Environmental law: Environmental Protection Agency
- Occupational health & safety law: Department of Labor
- Indoor air quality: Environmental Protection Agency
- Worker protection standard: Environmental Protection Agency
- Hazard communication: Environmental Protection Agency
- GSA: facilities standards for the public buildings service (federal building code)
- Laws:
- Regulations:
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:
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:
- 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:
- Muckraking
- Fake News
- Nieman Watchdog: Questions the Press Should Ask – Official site (Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University).
- News Media Watchdog
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:
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:
- Entry and prize consideration
- History
- Repeat recipients
- Categories including Changes to categories
- Board
- Controversies
- Criticism and studies
- See also:
- List of Pulitzer Prizes awarded to The New York Times
- Man Booker Prize
- Nautilus Book Awards
- National Book Award
- Commonwealth Writers Prize
- Prix Goncourt
- National Magazine Awards
- Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism
- Official website
- Pulitzer Prizes Collection at Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library
- Writers of African Descent to Win Pulitzer Prize
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:
Viacom Holdings include:
The Walt Disney Company Holdings include:
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:
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:
- Fox,
- Fox News Channel,
- Fox Business Channel,
- Fox Sports,
- National Geographic Channel,
- FX,
- 27 local television stations, film production companies including:
- 20th Century Fox,
- Fox Searchlight Pictures
- Blue Sky Studios,
- and a 39.14% stake on Sky plc.
News Corp Holdings include:
- the Wall Street Journal,
- the New York Post,
- the magazines Barron's and SmartMoney,
- book publisher HarperCollins and numerous Web sites including MarketWatch.com.
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:
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:
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:
- Google News
- CNN
- NBC News
- The New York Times
- The Wall Street Journal
- The Washington Post
- The Guardian
- The National Times
- The Times
See also:
- Digital media
- Electronic journalism
- History of French journalism
- Internet
- Internet radio
- Internet television
- Newspaper
- Online magazine
- World Wide Web
- List of online newspaper archives
- List of online Newspapers by country at Newspapers List
- Online archive of newspapers at Google News Archive
- US newspaper and obituaries directory at LDS Genealogy
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.
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:
- media-partner NBC News;
- Emerson Collective, the investment vehicle of Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs;
- Greycroft Partners;
- and David and Katherine Bradley, owners of Atlantic Media.
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:
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:
- Bloomberg Terminals,
- Bloomberg Television,
- Bloomberg Radio,
- Bloomberg Businessweek,
- Bloomberg Markets,
- Bloomberg.com
- and Bloomberg's mobile platforms.
As of 2015, John Micklethwait served as editor-in-chief.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Bloomberg News:
- History
- China coverage
- Bloomberg Businessweek
- Bloomberg Television
- Bloomberg Markets
- Bloomberg View
- Bloomberg Politics
- See also:
- Bloomberg News (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/) – Official website
- Bloomberg.com (https://www.bloomberg.com/) – Official Bloomberg L.P. website
- Bloomberg Politics (https://www.bloomberg.com/politics) - Official politics website
- Hoover's Bloomberg L.P. Company Profile (http://www.hoovers.com/company/Bloomberg_LP/cfjkri-1.html)
(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:
See also:
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
- YouTube Video: NY Times columnist: Murdoch empire is a global machine
- YouTube Video: Outfoxed • Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
- YouTube Video: Who is Rupert Murdoch?
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:
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:
- Early life
- Activities in Australia and New Zealand
- Activities in the United Kingdom
- News International phone hacking scandal
- Activities in the United States
- Activities in Europe
- Activities in Asia
- Personal life
- Portrayal on television, in film, books and music
- Influence, wealth and reputation
- See also:
- List of assets owned by 21st Century Fox
- List of assets owned by News Corp
- Metropolitan police role in phone hacking scandal
- Murdoch family
- News International phone hacking scandal
- Phone hacking scandal reference lists
- Rupert Murdoch on IMDb (Gives list of television and film appearances as himself, 1968-2015)
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:
- Official website
- History
- Outlets
- Ratings and reception
- Slogan
- Content
- Controversies
- International transmission
- Notable personalities
- See also:
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ)
- YouTube Video: How the White House Stores Documents | WSJ
- YouTube Video: Why Making Apple iPhones in America Is So Hard | WSJ
- YouTube Video: Trump photos posted on private Instagram raise eyebrows
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:
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:
- History
- Features and operations
- Editorial page and political stance
- Notable stories and Pulitzer Prizes
- 1987: RJR Nabisco buyout
- 1988: Insider trading
- 1997: AIDS treatment
- 2000: Enron
- 2001: 9/11
- 2007: Stock option scandal
- 2008: Bear Stearns fall
- 2010: McDonald's health care
- 2015: Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak and 1MDB
- 2015–present: Theranos investigation
- 2018–present: Investigation into Stormy Daniels payment
- See also:
- Official website (Mobile)
- The Wall Street Journal blogs
- How Dow Jones Remade Business Journalism, by Cynthia Crossen, Wall Street Journal, July 31, 2007
- The Economic Times
- Far Eastern Economic Review
- Index of Economic Freedom – an annual report published by the Journal together with The Heritage Foundation
- Journal Editorial Report, the weekly Fox News Channel series featuring WSJ editorial writers and board members
- Lucky duckies
- Media in New York City
- On the Money (2013 TV series) – the current title of a CNBC-produced program known as The Wall Street Journal Report from 1970 until the CNBC/Dow Jones split in January 2013.
- Other Wall Street Journal editions:
- Worth Bingham Prize
News Media
- YouTube Video: Sinclair Broadcast Group: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
- YouTube Video: How to Spot Fake News - FactCheck.org
- YouTube Video: The Pulitzer Prizes at 100
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:
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:
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:
- print media:
- broadcast news
- radio and television,
- and the Internet
- online newspapers,
- news blogs,
- news videos,
- live news streaming,
- etc.
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:
- political events,
- crime,
- business,
- sports,
- and opinions, as either editorials, columns, or political cartoons.
- Many also include weather news and forecasts. Newspapers increasingly use photographs to illustrate stories; they also often include comic strips and other entertainment, such as crosswords.
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:
- independence from private or political interests
- transparency about own financial interests
- commitment to journalism ethics and standards
- responsiveness to citizens
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:
- Chart – Real and Fake News (2016)/Vanessa Otero (basis) (Mark Frauenfelder)
- Chart – Real and Fake News (2014) (2016)/Pew Research Center
- Court of public opinion
- Hostile media effect
- Journalism
- Media bias in the United States
- Media regulation
- News media in the United States
- News media in Germany
- News presenter
- Yellow press
Cable News Network (CNN), including a List of Programs Broadcast by CNN
Pictured below: How CNN Anchor Erin Burnett Serves As A Role Model For Young Women In Investigative Reporting
- YouTube Video: Don Lemon speaks for the first time about his big move at CNN
- YouTube Video: 'Complete bunk': Erin Burnett calls out Sen. Hawley's explanation
- YouTube Video: Taking flight with Anderson Cooper*
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:
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:
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:
- Official website
- History
- Other platforms
- Specialized channels
- Bureaus
- Controversies and criticisms
- Awards and honors
- See also: