Donald Trump

E.J. Dionne Jr.: “When confronted with untruths, all journalists have one and only one choice: to call them what they are. They cannot, without misleading the public, pretend that there are two sides to a purely factual question. Further, they need to avoid vague language about facts being “in dispute” when there is absolutely no question about what the facts are. Partisans might well emphasize some facts over others. But facts themselves aren’t partisan.”

Several websites reported that the president told Fox News that he would ban “Empire” as part of a two-year effort “to remove all shows that have too much gay activity.” A spokesperson for Fox News confirms that Trump never made such remarks on their air.

The president dispatches two aides to the broadcasting agency that came under fire last weekend for its Trump coverage. The concern among some staffers is especially acute because Trump’s administration is getting control over the broadcasting agency just weeks after Congress moved to eliminate the board of directors that had served as an integrity check on the organization, instead consolidating power with a CEO position appointed by the president.

President Trump’s repeated baseless assertion about widespread voter fraud has challenged the news media to find the precise words to describe it.

The six journalists charged with felony rioting at the Trump inauguration were among 230 people detained in the anti-Trump demonstrations.

NEW YORK (AP) — After incorrect or unprovable statements made by Republican President Donald Trump and some White House aides, one truth is undeniable: Sales of George Orwell’s “1984” are […]

Emails sent to EPA staff since President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Friday and reviewed by The Associated Press detailed specific prohibitions banning press releases, blog updates or posts to the agency’s social media accounts. The Trump administration has also ordered what it called a temporary suspension of all new business activities at the department.

Donald J. Trump embellished his Apprentice ratings and the number of floors in Trump Tower. As president, he has continued using suspect math.

But Republicans say the focus on crowd size probably wasn’t the best use of his first days in office.

And in the unlikely event that anyone was paying attention to size over the weekend, that’s short of the 37.8 million who watched President Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. Steven Perlberg puts the Nielsen numbers in historical perspective. 

Executives, producers and writers discussed how the election of Donald J. Trump might affect the characters, stories and situations in scripted shows.

Journalists were in a state of shock a day after Sean Spicer, the press secretary, employed a combative tone and false statements in his first appearance on the White House podium.

Privatizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is surfacing as a prospective Trump administration move to reduce government spending. The prospect comes from a proposal by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that also proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Cable news networks had reason to feel bittersweet about the end of 2016 as Donald Trump’s historic campaign for the White House drove their ratings to record levels. But in the days leading up to his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, Trump’s continuing love-hate relationship with them is providing a compelling sequel.

The media’s fragmentation, competitiveness, and increasing partisanship have sapped it of much of the collective political power it held during Watergate. Add in a hyperpolarized environment in Washington, on the internet, and across the country, and the Trump Administration may usher in one of the most challenging environments for the Washington press corps over the past century.

Expectations are FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai will be named interim chairman of the agency later this week when Tom Wheeler steps down on Inauguration Day. The clearest signal that’s likely to happen came when incoming White House spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed on a call with reporters that Pai met with the president-elect in Trump Tower on Monday.

A coalition of 61 journalism organizations would like a meeting or conference call to discuss access issues with President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence.

President-elect Donald Trump said Wednesday that NBC News is not giving him the credit he deserves for job-creation announcements from major U.S. and foreign companies. “No wonder the Today Show on biased @NBC is doing so badly compared to its glorious past. Little credibility!” Trump wrote on Twitter, ending his attack against the network.

Throughout the first week of TCA, questions about Trump and national politics dominated — sometimes to the consternation of producers and executives fielding those questions, but sometimes not.

The Trump administration rolls into power on Friday and is expected to undertake a complete shake-up of the FCC. For starters, President-elect Donald Trump is expected to take away from the FCC its oversight of competition and consumer interests, shifting them to the Federal Trade Commission.

Summer Zervos, who last year accused Trump of grabbing her breast without her consent and unwanted aggressive kissing, filed suit against the president-elect on Tuesday. He has denied her allegations. The defamation suit alleges that Trump falsely branded Zervos a liar after she made her accusations public, calling her story “totally made up nonsense.”

TV news will go wall to wall to cover Trump’s ascension to the presidency, a feat that many pundits and prognosticators believed was nearly impossible a year ago at this time. Now, news outlets ranging from ABC to MSNBC will devote hours and hours to the start of his term in office.

Jack Shafer wants to thank President-Elect Trump for simplifying journalists’ mission and setting them free. “He has been explicit in his disdain for the press and his dislike for press conferences, prickly to the nth degree about being challenged and known for his vindictive way with those who cross him. So, forget about the White House press room. It’s time to circle behind enemy lines,” he writes.

The president-elect will surely be a “gaslighter-in-chief,” Margaret Sullivan argues, regularly distorting reality. He’ll also punish journalists from doing their job and will “relentlessly manipulate,” as he did by stacking his first press conference with jeering-at-the-media staffers in the audience.

In the face of plagiarism accusations, Monica Crowley announced Monday that she will not be taking a senior position in Donald Trump’s upcoming administration. Crowley was Trump’s pick for senior director of strategic communications for the White House’s National Security Council.

The White House press corps was stunned by reports of a proposal by the Trump administration to eject reporters from their home in the West Wing.

He did so via a breathtakingly potent “reality-distortion field,” writes James Wolcott in this floridly-penned piece. Political journalists deserve combat pay for their recent work, he argues, but others, especially CNN, comported themselves disgracefully by “slumming on the job.”

Jason Miller backed out of the communications director job only two days after it was announced he was taking it. He says it’s to spend more time with his family (his wife is expecting their second child). Miller was a senior member of the president-elect’s campaign staff.

Over four days in early August, Donald Trump gave interviews to four TV stations in Ohio, Florida and Maine, and to the Washington bureau of a national TV chain. The most striking thing about the interviews, however, may be that one company was behind all of them: Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair, which has drawn criticism for favoring conservative candidates before, says it had no special arrangement with Trump’s campaign and that it didn’t favor him at the expense of Hillary Clinton. However, a review of Sinclair’s reporting and internal documents shows a strong tilt toward Trump. 

Donald Trump has selected Republican National Committee communications director Sean Spicer to be his press secretary, his administration announced on today.

Donald Trump’s transition team said this morning that Conway, the president-elect’s pollster and strategist, would be the highest-ranking woman in his White House. The appointment comes after Conway turned down the role of press secretary.

Reporters hung out with Donald Trump last weekend at Mar-a-Lago, though American news consumers won’t be reading too much about the event. That’s because it was all off-the-record, meaning that Trump could say anything he wanted, and the journalists who heard it all couldn’t pass along a single word.

Andrew M. Seaman, chair of the Society of Professional Journalists‘ ethics committee, posted a commentary on Saturday based on a Politico story that Sinclair Broadcast Group struck a deal with Donald Trump to air interviews with the candidate without added context in exchange for access. Today Seaman blogged: “After hearing from Sinclair’s representatives and viewing emails between the company and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton‘s campaign, I don’t believe the interview arrangements fell outside what would be considered ethical journalism.”

Margaret Sullivan predicts an impending period of unprecedented conflict between the press and the administration, weakening journalism in the heartland as papers’ revenue slides continue and reporters are cut loose and, perhaps worst of all, an audience where, as Carl Bernstein puts it, “Fewer and fewer people are open to the best obtainable version of the truth.”