Media News

News about the media.

NPR / PBS, CPB Investigated?

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Update

Article in Washington Post by Anne Branigin, 1/31/25

Headline:  “Trump’s FCC chief orders investigation into NPR and PBS sponsorships”

Subhead: “FCC’s Brendan Carr also suggests an investigation could be relevant to conservative congressional efforts to defund the public broadcasters.”

“President Donald Trump’s newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS over their alleged “airing of commercials,” and suggested that the public broadcasters could be at risk of losing their federal funding.

““I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” Brendan Carr wrote to the heads of both organizations Wednesday. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/2025/01/31/trump-fcc-npr-pbs-investigation/

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Article in Freepress by Timothy Karr, 1/20/25

Headline:  “Trump’s Censorship Czar Orders NPR and PBS Investigation”

“On Thursday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS. In a letter to the chief executives of both publicly funded networks, Carr used the investigation as a pretext to suggest that Congress end federal funding for NPR and PBS.

“To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars,” Carr wrote.”

https://www.freepress.net/news/press-releases/fcc-chairman-carr-npr-pbs-investigation

Losing the Battle for Media

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Article in Raw Story by Thom Hartmann, 1/30/24

Headline:  “Fatal flaw: Democrats keep losing the media war — here’s why “

“Saturday afternoon, Donald Trump held a rally in Las Vegas. It was streamed and mentioned on social media millions of times within an hour of his repeating his “No tax on tips” mantra. By the time Facebook, Meta, X, TikTok, and Instagram were done with the weekend, using their now-heavily-tilted-to-Republicans algorithms, it’s safe to bet Trump’s rally got hundreds of millions of impressions.

“Senator Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, read the most boring speech ever on the floor of the Senate condemning Trump, evoking the Democratic version of the old “tree falls in the forest” question. I listened to it online (couldn’t find it on social media), but, frankly, it was so deadly tedious that I can’t remember a word he said.

“Being media savvy — and exploiting the hottest new media — isn’t a new thing. You’d think Democrats would have figured this out by now; they sure did in past generations.”

https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/fatal-flaw-democrats-keep-losing-the-media-war-here-s-why/

Another Medium Pays Homage

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Article in UPI by Mike Heuer, 1/29/25

Headline:  “Meta to pay $25M to settle Trump censorship lawsuit”

“Social media giant Meta has agreed to pay $25 million to settle censorship accusations made by President Donald Trump after Meta suspended his Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2021.

“About $22 million of the settlement will help fund the Trump Presidential Library, which so far is a website operated by the National Archives but likely will have a physical site in the future, NBC News, CNN and Variety reported.”

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2025/01/29/trump-zuckerberg-meta-25M-settlement/2931738199020/

Playing 3-Card Monte With Press Corps

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Article in The Daily Beast by William Vaillancourt, 2/1/25

Headline:  “Hegseth Replaces Mainstream Media With MAGA Sites at Pentagon”

“Four members of the Pentagon Press Corps will no longer have office space in that building in order to make room for outlets that haven’t had that opportunity, according to a Defense Department memo Friday obtained by CNN. “Each year, one outlet from each press medium—print, online, television, and radio—that has enjoyed working from a physical office in the Pentagon will rotate out of the building,” the memo states. On February 14, The New York Times, NBC News, National Public Radio, and Politico will vacate their office space. They will be replaced by the New York Post, One America News Network, Breitbart News Network, and The Huffington Post.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/four-media-outlets-stripped-of-office-space-in-pentagon/

Noted Journalist Flees NYT

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Article in The Contrarian by Paul Krugman, 1/29/25

Headeline: “Departing the New York Times”

Subhea:  “I left to stay true to my byline”

“As many people reading this know, last month I retired from my position as an opinion writer at the New York Times—a job I had done for 25 years. Despite the encomiums issued by the Times, it was not a happy departure. If you check out my Substack, you will see that I have by no means run out of energy or topics to write about. But from my perspective, the nature of my relationship with the Times had degenerated to a point where I couldn’t stay.”

“. . . (I) believe that the story of why I left says something important about the current state of legacy journalism.”

“. . .I feel sorry about abandoning loyal readers who still rely on legacy media and who may not follow me to Substack. But my situation had become intolerable, and I haven’t felt a moment’s regret over the new direction and recovering my freedom.”

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/departing-the-new-york-times

 

Graduate With Journalism Degree?

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Stephen J. Adler, 1/30/25

Headline:  “Does It Still Make Sense to Be a Journalist?”

Subhead:  “An antidote to perpetual despondency.”

“This is the question I hear most from students and early-career reporters. It is usually posed something like this: ‘Journalism jobs are disappearing. Where they do exist, the pay is low. Even if I work ethically, lots of people won’t trust my reporting—and some may threaten my well-being, online and even in the real world. I worry all this will get worse in Trump’s second term. Have I made a mistake in committing to be a journalist? Should I switch fields now?’ ”

“This is such a painful and difficult question, especially for a journalism professor who has spent his adult life in the news business. . . ”

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/does-it-still-make-sense-to-be-journalist-adler-finances-turmoil-industry-trust-career.php

Rt. Wing Media & Church Raids

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Episcopal News Service

Article in Media Matters by Noah Howard & Torri Lonergan, 1/29/25

Headline:  “Right-wing media figures defend Trump policy allowing ICE arrests at schools, churches, and hospitals”

Subhead:  “Newsmax host Greg Kelly: ‘Serial killers, a lot of them, are churchgoers’ “.

“Right-wing media figures defend Trump policy allowing ICE arrests at schools, churches, and hospitals

“After President Donald Trump issued new guidance allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to raid ‘sensitive locations’ — including schools, churches, and hospitals — right-wing media jumped to his defense by fearmongering that murderers, gang members, rapists, and pedophiles are hiding out in these spaces. One host defended raids on churches by going so far as to suggest that “serial killers, a lot of them, are churchgoers.’ ”

https://www.mediamatters.org/immigration/right-wing-media-figures-defend-trump-policy-allowing-ice-arrests-schools-churches-and

 

Devil’s in the Post

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Article in The New Republic by Jason Linkins, 1/25/25

Headline:  “The Washington Post Commits an Unpardonable January 6 Sin”

Subhead:  “Jeff Bezos’s increasingly meretricious newspaper stooped to publish a pathetic “both-sides” defense of the violent mob that stormed the Capitol.”

“Well, I hate to say I told you so. Back in December, I warned that Donald Trump’s plan to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists was going to be greeted by the media with prewritten takes about how President Biden’s own use of the pardon power justified a decision to free a violent mob. Today, The Washington Post’s editorial board, tasked with the mission of obtaining 200 million paying users while simultaneously following owner Jeff Bezos’s directive to make the venerable newspaper substantially more mendacious, made me look prescient.

“ ‘The outgoing and incoming presidents both abused their pardon powers on Monday, undermining the rule of law and setting dangerous precedents that perpetuate America’s divisions,’ they wrote. . .”

“To put it charitably, this is a bungle from the editorial board. In the first place, the editors demonstrate a real inability to follow cause and effect chains; here asserting that the ‘the trouble’ began with Biden’s preemptive pardons, when the use of the term ‘preemptive’ clearly suggests a precipitating event. In this case, somebody forgot the well-documented history of Donald Trump publicly announcing his plans to persecute members of Biden’s family and administration, over and over again. Just this week, Trump intimated in an interview that he might go after Biden specifically because he wasn’t corrupt enough to pardon himself on the way out the door.”

https://newrepublic.com/post/190626/washington-post-january-6-pardon

CNN Taking on Water

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Article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Betsy Morais, 1/24/25

Headline:  “The Flurry at CNN”

Subhead:  “A major network charts a digital course—and makes layoffs.”

“Washington weather report: “In a flurry of activity that is happening almost too swiftly to follow,” per CNN, “Trump is giving his critics every reason to think their worst fears for his new presidency will be realized and worse.” Back at CNN headquarters, there was other news in the air: a major restructuring that will cut about two hundred jobs focused on the company’s television programming and put about as many to work on digital products and services. “Recruiting the right people will take some time,” Mark Thompson, the CEO, wrote in a memo to the staff, “but we hope to open up and fill at least 100 new posts in the coming months to help execute the new plans.” He told the New York Times, “This is a moment where the digital story feels like an existential question. If we do not follow the audiences to the new platforms with real conviction and scale, our future prospects will not be good.”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/cnn_digital_layoffs_mark_thompson.php

Media Overload

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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 1/27/25

Headline:  “Too Much News, Redux”

Subhead:  “Trump floods the zone in his first week back in power.”

“Exhausted yet?” Last Thursday, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser posed that question at the beginning of a column about the frantic pace of news generated in President Trump’s first half-week or so back in power, before reeling off a long list of major things he had done already, from pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord through the sweeping pardons for January 6 insurrectionists to his ‘pissing match’ with an Episcopalian bishop. Trump ‘loves to drown us in outrage,’ Glasser wrote. ‘The overwhelming volume is the point—too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus.     It can’t fight back . . .’ ”

“. . . In the summer of 2020, toward the end of Trump’s last term in office, I wrote a column arguing that there was “too much news”—a joking refrain among exhausted journalists that was also literally true, in ways that limited the news media’s ability to cover major stories as extensively as they individually merited; such stories, I wrote, weren’t just coinciding randomly, but existed in ‘a messy ecosystem of cause, effect, suggestion, escalation, and acceleration,’ with one big story triggering another and so on. I wrote at the time that the pace of developments made the news cycle of 2018—which had felt ‘impossibly frenetic’ at the time—feel ‘quaint’ in hindsight . . .”

https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/too-much-news-redux.php