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News Overload Is Perfect for Trump

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‘Too Many Story Lines to Keep Track Of’

Prediction for Media Life Under Trump: Hellish

Trump’s M.O. Looks Familiar to Russian Eyes

Trump Revealing in Choices for Insults, Affection

Will Jeff Sessions Keep Eye on Chicago P.D.?

Fla. Paper Documents Failure to Punish Police

Is It That Americans Find Diversity Too Hard?

Doris Truong a Subject of Social Media Smear

Ballou Sworn In as National Press Club President

Examining Youth Who Grew Up Under Obama

Short Takes

‘Too Many Story Lines to Keep Track Of’

“Quick: Name the biggest story of the week,” Callum Borchers wrote Sunday for the Washington Post.

“If a clear answer didn’t just spring to mind, that is probably because there are so many stories to choose from. To wit:

“The news overload is enough to make you want to throw your hands up — or, perhaps, use them to reach for a cold beverage and a remote control, with which you can escape the transition tornado by tuning in to back-to-back NFL playoff doubleheaders on Saturday and Sunday.

“This is a near-perfect situation for Donald Trump. . . .”

Borchers also wrote, “During the campaign, Trump succeeded by giving the news media — and, by extension, voters — too many negative story lines to keep track of. . . .”

Meanwhile, the latest installment of NPR’s “On the Media” offered five podcast segments on covering Trump, including the role of journalists’ language.

The pieces were titled “Secret Dossiers, Muzzled Journalists…The Job of Reporters in 2017,” “A Taxonomy of Trump Tweets,” “How Not to Feed the Beast,” “Trump’s Reality Distortion Field,” and “Rebecca Solnit on Hope, Lies, and Making Change.”

One segment quoted Nathan J. Robinson, editor of Current Affairs, who, speaking to progressives, cautioned in December, “Criticisms should be of the things that matter: the serial sexual assaults, the deportation plans, the anti-Muslim sentiment, the handouts to the rich, the destruction of the earth. These are the things that matter, and if progressives actually do care about them, then these are the things we should spend our time discussing. Forget the gaffes. Forget the hypocrisy. Forget the hotels. Forget the hair. And don’t bother calling him Drumpf. . . .”

In “A Taxonomy of Trump’s Tweets,” George Lakoff, “a founding father of cognitive linguistics,” analyzed how Trump sets news agendas with his tweets through “preemptive framing,” diversion and sending out trial balloons, as Lakoff outlined in a story on salon.com Sunday by Paul Rosenberg.

To counter Trump’s strategy. Lakoff said, journalists should “begin by telling the truth and the evidence for that truth,” then discuss Trump’s tweets. “Keep going back to substance and the truth,” he said.

Prediction for Media Life Under Trump: Hellish

“At the northeast corner of the National Archives building sits Robert Aitken’s sculpture ‘The Future,’ inscribed with some famous words from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’: ‘What is past is prologue,’ “ Margaret Sullivan wrote Sunday for the Washington Post.

“If you buy that, it’s possible to have a solid idea of what Donald Trump’s presidency will be like for the American media and for citizens who depend on that flawed but essential institution.

“The short form: hellish. . . .”

Sullivan also wrote, “That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls ‘the gaslighter in chief’ — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (‘Gaslighting’ is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.)

“ ‘The techniques,’ Ghitis wrote, ‘include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.’

“But that’s just part of what experience teaches us to expect from Trump.

“Here’s another: Trump will punish journalists for doing their jobs. . . .”

Trump’s M.O. Looks Familiar to Russian Eyes

“Congratulations, US media! You’ve just covered your first press conference of an authoritarian leader with a massive ego and a deep disdain for your trade and everything you hold dear,” Alexey Kovalev wrote Thursday for medium.com under the headline, “A message to my doomed colleagues in the American media.

“We in Russia have been doing it for 12 years now — with a short hiatus when our leader wasn’t technically our leader — so quite a few things during Donald Trump’s press conference rang a bell. Not just mine, in fact — read this excellent round-up in The Moscow Times. . . .”

Kovalev also wrote, “These things are carefully choreographed, typically last no less than four hours, and Putin always comes off as an omniscient and benevolent leader tending to a flock of unruly but adoring children. Given that Putin is probably a role model for Trump, it’s no surprise that he’s apparently taking a page from Putin’s playbook.

“I have some observations to share with my American colleagues. You’re in this for at least another four years, and you’ll be dealing with things Russian journalists have endured for almost two decades now. I’m talking about Putin here, but see if you can apply any of the below to your own leader. . . .”

Trump Revealing in Choices for Insults, Affection

“John Lewis represents Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, one vote of four hundred and thirty-five,” David Remnick wrote Sunday for the New Yorker. “He is also the singular conscience of Capitol Hill. Lewis is a dismal institution’s griot, a historical actor and hero capable of telling the most complex and painful of American stories — the story of race. That is his job, his mission.

“With Dr. King and Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker long gone, Lewis remains nearly alone in his capacity to tell the story of that era as a direct witness and, because of all that he has seen and endured, to issue credible moral judgment.

“Only a heedless few would reject that judgment out of hand, no matter how wounding. Who would think to call John Lewis ‘all talk, talk, talk — no action or results’? Who would have the impoverished language to dismiss the whole of John Lewis as ‘sad’? As it happens, the President-elect of the United States.

“Donald Trump reveals his nature through the objects of his affection and the targets of his insults. He took his time before disavowing support from the likes of David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. He has only praise for Vladimir Putin. He flatters Alex Jones, the leading crackpot conspiracy theorist of the airwaves, as a man of ‘amazing’ reputation.

“Trump chose to launch his political career as a bloviating booster of the racist conspiracy theory known as ‘birtherism,’ declaring, in effect, that the Presidency of Barack Obama was illegitimate. But when Lewis went on ‘Meet the Press’ this weekend and challenged the legitimacy of Trump’s election, citing charges of Russian involvement in the campaign, Trump immediately reached for his phone. . . .”

Will Jeff Sessions Keep Eye on Chicago P.D.?

“The feds came down hard on the city of Chicago Friday in the findings of a yearlong investigation of police misuse of force,” [accessible via search engine] the Chicago Tribune editorialized after the findings’ release.

“The U.S. Justice Department’s report blows the lid off nothing, of course. It has long been tragically obvious that Chicago does a poor job of holding police officers accountable for violence against citizens. The case of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager shot 16 times by a white cop in October 2014, is but one of many examples.

“But now there is a 164-page document, released with the force of federal law, that lays out in resounding detail CPD’s reckless approach to oversight. And it points the way to a dramatic, necessary fix: the completion of a court-approved settlement that would bind the city to its commitment to reform the Police Department and restore public trust in a battered institution.

“Here is what the Justice Department found in Chicago: The Police Department inadequately trains officers to fight crime in a violent city and then fails to properly monitor their use of force or punish wrongdoing. The result is ‘a culture in which officers expect to use force and not be questioned about the need for or propriety of that use.’ Boiled down to the essence, Chicago cops abuse citizens because nobody tells them they can’t. . . .”

The Tribune also wrote, “Early signs suggest that Donald Trump and his pick for attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, do not have a strong interest in involving the federal government in oversight of local police departments. (Trump has even suggested that Chicago’s epidemic of violent crime could be brought under control quickly through tougher police tactics.)

“That’s a problem, because [Attorney General Loretta] Lynch’s department didn’t get to the finish line with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. . . .”

Bonita E. DeBose, left, and her husband, Arthur E. DeBose Jr., prepare to leave the review board that looked into the fatal police shooting of their son, armed robbery suspect Artavious DeBose in June 2008. (Credit: Will Dickey/Florida Times-Union)

Fla. Paper Documents Failure to Punish Police

“In the last six years, Jacksonville police officers have shot 54 people — 40 of them black — killing 29,” Ben Conarck reported Monday for the Florida Times-Union in the first installment of an investigative series, “No Further Action.”

“Only one officer has been fired as a result, but he got his job back through arbitration,” Conarck continued. “Every other officer who has gone through the sheriff’s closed-door police shooting review boards has been cleared of policy violations, with little public explanation.

“Amid a string of controversial police shootings of black men in the spring of 2015, Sheriff Mike Williams, who was still a candidate, distinguished himself by highlighting the need to restore trust on the issue. He promised to sue to reopen the office’s review boards, which were closed by a police union lawsuit in late 2010 after decades of public access.

“It was a short-lived commitment. . .”

Conarck also wrote, “In the absence of official statistics on the city’s police shootings, it has been left to the news media to compile the data. The numbers reveal stark racial contrasts. . . .

“To illuminate the scope of Jacksonville’s police shootings, the Times-Union has compiled a complete database of the 124 people shot since 2007. . . .”

Is It That Americans Find Diversity Too Hard?

“Many pundits remarked that, during the 2016 election season, very few Americans were regularly exposed to people whose political ideology conflicted with their own,” Danah Boyd, founder and president of Data & Society, a New York-based research institute, wrote Jan. 5 for datasociety.net.

Danah Boyd

“This is true. But it cannot be fixed by Facebook or news media. Exposing people to content that challenges their perspective doesn’t actually make them more empathetic to those values and perspectives. To the contrary, it polarizes them.

“What makes people willing to hear difference is knowing and trusting people whose worldview differs from their own. Exposure to content cannot make up for self-segregation.

“If we want to develop a healthy democracy, we need a diverse and highly connected social fabric. This requires creating contexts in which the American public voluntarily struggles with the challenges of diversity to build bonds that will last a lifetime. We have been systematically undoing this, and the public has used new technological advances to make their lives easier by self-segregating.

“This has increased polarization, and we’re going to pay a heavy price for this going forward. Rather than focusing on what media enterprises can and should do, we need to focus instead on building new infrastructures for connection where people have a purpose for coming together across divisions. We need that social infrastructure just as much as we need bridges and roads. . . .”

Doris Truong a Subject of Social Media Smear

“There’s a joke among Asian Americans that people think we all look the same,” Doris Truong, a former president of the Asian American Journalists Association, wrote Thursday for the Washington Post.

“That joke became my own personal Pizzagate late Wednesday: I got caught in a terrible case of mistaken identity that was exacerbated by the speed at which false information spreads on social media.

“I work as a homepage editor at The Washington Post. Because Wednesday was my day off, I hadn’t been online much. But before I went to bed, I noticed a message request on Facebook. Someone I didn’t know asked: ‘Any comment on you taking photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes?’ When I checked Twitter, I had to scroll for several minutes to figure out what was going on. It seemed to start with this post: ‘Who is this woman and why is she secretly snapping photos of Rex Tillerson’s notes?’

“Right-wing bloggers and Twitter posters had noticed a woman who they thought was taking pictures of the notes that Tillerson, a former ExxonMobil chief executive who is Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state, had taken during his Senate confirmation hearing. Instantly, they started to ‘investigate’ whatever was going on.

“Before I could do anything about it, someone had decided the woman was me. No one ever bothered to contact me, but it was this post that Twitter seized upon overnight. By the time I woke up, trolls had commented on social media channels besides Twitter. My Facebook feed had dozens of angry messages from people I didn’t know, as did comments on my Instagram account. Even my rarely used YouTube channel attracted attention. My emails and my voicemail included messages calling me ‘pathetic’ and a ‘sneaky thief.’ . . .”

Jeffrey Ballou is sworn in Saturday as 110th president of the National Press Club. (Credit: Charles Robinson)

Ballou Sworn In as National Press Club President

Jeffrey Ballou, a news editor at Al Jazeera English, was installed Saturday as the first African American man and the first from a non-U.S. news outlet to serve as president of the National Press Club.

The club, housed in the National Press Building in Washington, calls itself “the world’s leading professional organization for journalists, and one of the most popular venues to host business, news or social events in downtown Washington.” It hosts newsmaker events and is a networking venue for Washington journalists whose home bases are out of town.

“The first play before we take the field is to make sure that our fiscal house remains in order,” Ballou said in his inaugural speech. “In a great forward pass play, we identified and auctioned a key club asset that will secure our future. Now invested with an African-American owned firm, Brown Capital, we can build on our fiscal stability and take our revenue and rainy day savings to new levels.”

Ballou also said he would rename committees as “teams,” stand up for press freedom and continue “some renovations on security to protect our members and guests.” Sheila Cherry, a journalist at the Washington Times who served in 2004, was the first African American to lead the club.


President Obama, in his last week in office, participates in a service project for Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Monday. (Credit: White House)

Examining Youth Who Grew Up Under Obama

“He sat in the front pew, listening as the pastor of Prince of Peace Missionary Baptist Church preached about the blessings bestowed on those with a humble spirit and audacious dreams,” Akilah Johnson wrote Sunday from Ferguson, Mo., with Jan Ransom, for the Boston Globe.

“ ‘Obama had only been a senator for 768 days when God had put greatness in his spirit to aspire to the greatest office in the world,’ said the Rev. Willie E. Kilpatrick, wiping the sweat from his brow as 17-year-old Waiel Turner and the congregation shouted in agreement. ‘He had a dream. . . . ‘

“Turner has big dreams too: Graduate high school, go to the Air Force, retire as a colonel or general, and, in 2042, follow in Obama’s footsteps, becoming president of the United States. The teenager’s mama had always told him that if a black man raised by his grandparents could become president, then a black boy from Missouri could grow up and do the same.

“But there is something else that he and his peers believe to be true: Black lives are not valued the same as others. That, he said, was evident more than two years ago when Michael Brown’s body lay bloodied and uncovered in the street some 7 miles from where Turner now worshiped and dreamed on a chilly Sunday afternoon.

“As the nation’s first black president prepares to leave office, a generation of black teens stands on the cusp of adulthood, eyes wide open, trying to make sense of a world that many of the adults in their lives say they are struggling to understand. From the kitchen tables in Ferguson, to the high school hallways and street corners of Baltimore, to the historic neighborhoods of Boston, dozens of black teens, in interviews, questioned their place in America.

“They live in a country that can elect — then reelect Obama — while enduring the savage run of police-involved shootings, causing inspiration and desperation to collide. It is this generation that will inherit the world that will be shaped by Donald Trump’s presidency, and they must find a way to live through it — and thrive.

“For some, it’s a struggle. For others, the answer is clear cut. But on this much they agree: President Obama proved the impossible possible. Now, they will come to know another president, a man who many of them said ran a campaign with racist and xenophobic overtones. . . .”

Short Takes

Daliyah Arana, a 4-year-old who’s read more than 1,000 books, was the subject of Monday’s “NBC Nightly News” “Inspiring America” segment. Rehema Ellis reported that Daliyah was invited to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday at a school outside of Atlanta, where she read King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Kimberly Brooks

“Lots of people talk about the need for media diversity, but all roads lead back to the same things: organizations and networks to help journalists of color support each other, and someone to shed light on those efforts. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel every two years, the best thing we can do is support the work of Richard Prince, AAJA, and other groups that have been here doing the work for years.”

— Gautham Nagesh, founder of @StiffJab, alumnus of the Wall Street Journal, Roll Call and the Hill; former treasurer, Asian American Journalists Association.

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