Donald Trump

Donald Trump’s campaign struck a deal with Sinclair Broadcast Group during the campaign to try and secure better media coverage, his son-in-law Jared Kushner told business executives Friday in Manhattan. Kushner said the agreement with Sinclair, which owns television stations across the country in many swing states and often packages news for their affiliates to run, gave them more access to Trump and the campaign, according to six people who heard his remarks.

Whoever Donald Trump appoints to head the FCC, broadcasters figure they should be in much better shape than they have been with the outgoing Tom Wheeler, who provided no relief on the out-of-date ownership restrictions. With Wheeler’s departure, the Republicans will suddenly have a 2-1 majority, a three-person quorum necessary to do business and the power to set the agenda that comes with the chairmanship.

Conservative television commentator Larry Kudlow is a leading candidate to become chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, which is usually run by one of the nation’s most prestigious economists.

Sean Spicer, the Republican National Committee communications director, is a leading candidate to serve as White House press secretary under Donald Trump, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter. Several people are also in contention for the White House communications director role.

Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe on MSNBC with co-host Mika Brzezinski is a longtime obsession of cable-news fan Donald Trump, who has said that he derives much of his policy wisdom “from the shows.” It’s an odd position for Scarborough. The president-elect not only watches him — he calls him later.

A provision tucked into the defense bill guts the Voice of America board, stoking fears that Trump could wield a powerful propaganda arm. That change, combined with a 2013 legislative revision that allows the network to legally reach a U.S. audience, which was once banned, could pave the way for Trump-approved content created by the U.S. diplomacy arm, if he chooses to exploit the opportunity.

President-elect Donald Trump has proven to be as unconventional — and at times outright hostile — in his interactions with the press during his transition as he was in his campaign. That posture has journalists bracing themselves for what looks like four years of freeze outs and silence from the incoming administration.

The failed reconfirmation of Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel means that Republicans will hold a majority if and when chairman Tom Wheeler steps down. Their first order of business will likely be to reverse the network neutrality rules that were finalized in 2015.

Kellyanne Conway said she “politely declined” an offer to be White House press secretary for Donald Trump, telling conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that communications, particularly with a “hostile” press will be paramount in Trump’s White House.

For the next four years, we are living in a TV show that President-elect Donald J. Trump is simultaneously starring in, consuming and live-tweeting.

President-elect Trump has an executive producer credit on NBC’s The New Celebrity Apprentice. His continued stake in the TV series is yet another unusual aspect of the election of a businessman and reality star to the presidency.

Adonis Hoffman, chairman of Business in the Public Interest: “Elections have consequences. And nowhere are the consequences more monumental than in the telecom, media and technology sector, where the erstwhile status quo stands to be upended soon. Predictably, every big decision of the last decade affecting broadcasting, cable, internet, telecom and wireless companies will be reviewed and revised by the new administration.”

McMahon and her husband, Vince, founded and built World Wrestling Entertainment, now a publicly traded sports entertainment company. She stepped down as the company’s chief executive in 2009 and earlier this year launched a joint venture, Women’s Leadership Live, which promotes opportunities for women in business and public service.

Laura Ingraham, seen by many as Donald Trump’s top candidate for press secretary, is a true believer and strong supporter of far-right wing media. “ABC, NBC, The Washington Post are worse than irrelevant. We now must make fun of them,” she has said, and Peter Sterne reports how that view isn’t likely to make the press’ job any easier.

The fight to ditch the cable box appears to be over, thanks to Donald Trump.

Walt Disney Co. CEO Robert Iger has been named to a new policy forum created by President-elect Donald Trump. The President’s Strategic and Policy Forum includes several business heavyweights. The nonpartisan, 16-person forum will be chaired by Stephen Schwarzman, the chief executive of private equity firm Blackstone. The group will frequently meet with Trump to directly offer its knowledge and perspective to the president, according to Trump’s transition team.

Republicans who generally oppose regulation seem likely to take charge at the FCC, the government’s primary telecom regulator. That alone could mean the end of rules designed to protect privacy and individual choice on the internet. Those rules were enacted over the past several years under the Obama administration.

President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team on Tuesday named a third economist to the transition team overseeing the FCC. Roslyn Layton, who was born in Pittsburgh, is currently a. fellow at Denmark’s Aalborg University, according to her website. She joins two other economists on the FCC transition team: Jeffrey Eisenach and Mark A. Jamison. All three are affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy.

As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Donald Trump’s Twitter account — a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one — has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate.

Journalists may thrive on news — by definition, the unexpected or novel — but they’re terrible at getting out of their own comfortable ruts. Donald Trump has been a candidate and will be a president who requires vastly different coverage. If the ’70s brought, via Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and Norman Mailer, what was called “the New Journalism,” I suggest we now need a New New Journalism. Here are some ways journalism must be reinvented.

On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump chose former Goldman Sachs executive Steven Mnuchin as secretary of the Treasury, Georgia Rep. Tom Price to oversee the nation’s health care system, and another veteran Republican, Elaine Chao, a former labor secretary and the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, to head the Department of Transportation.

In changing of the guards at the White House, the local TV industry sees an opportunity in their ongoing quest to toss out the FCC’s rules on media crossownership that bar media companies from owning newspapers and TV stations in the same market.

Donald Trump lashed out on Twitter Monday night over a CNN report by CNN senior Washington correspondent Jeff Zeleny refuting his unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud on Election Day.

It hasn’t quite been a month since Donald Trump’s extraordinary victory over Hillary Clinton, and newsrooms have already had to repeatedly confront the unique coverage challenges posed by the president-elect. One of the biggest dilemmas created by Trump came into focus once again on Sunday, when he took to Twitter to falsely claim that he won the popular vote over Clinton “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

This week the anchors and executives of the major networks walked into an ambush that affirmed the media as Trump’s whipping boy and left him victorious in his woodshed fury, Margaret Sullivan writes. But while the TV folks agreed to go off-the-record, the Times staffers “successfully called Trump’s bluff” and refused to. The lesson, she writes, is “journalists, and their corporate bosses, shouldn’t allow themselves to be used as props in Trump’s never-ending theater.”

Joining Jeffery Eisenach on Trump’s FCC transition team is Mark Jamison, an economist at the University of Florida. Like Eisenach, Jamison is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, an expert in telecommunications policy and a critic of the FCC’s net-neutrality regs.

There’s plenty of compelling evidence already as Dylan Byers tallies the offers (or considerations thereof). They include Laura Ingraham (press secretary), Richard Grenell (UN ambassador), Scott Brown (Veterans Affairs), Ret. Army Gen. Jack Keane (Defense secretary) and the list goes on and on….

President-elect Donald J. Trump, now the nation’s press critic in chief, inviting the leading anchors and executives of television news to join him on Monday for a private meeting of minds. On-air stars like Lester Holt, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos and Wolf Blitzer headed to Trump Tower for the off-the-record gathering, typically the kind of event where journalists and politicians clear the air after a hard-fought campaign. Instead, the president-elect delivered a defiant message: You got it all wrong.

Kellyanne Conway, the campaign manager of Donald Trump’s winning presidential run, says that the off-the-record meeting today between the president-elect and top brass from ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, CNN and Fox News was “excellent” as well as “very candid and honest.”

The off-the-record meeting is scheduled for 1 p.m. ET today and will include top executives and anchors from the nation’s five biggest television networks — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and Fox News. Kellyanne Conway, the president-elect’s campaign manager and senior adviser, set up the meeting, and there’s plenty to talk about.

Alec Baldwin returned to Saturday Night Live this weekend in his first post-election appearance, portraying President-elect Donald Trump as he grapples with his transition from candidate into head of state. The episode drew instant criticism from real-life Trump on Twitter who ended his tweet with: “Equal time for us?” Baldwin responded on Twitter, writing, “Equal time? Election is over. There is no more equal time.”

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president with a wave of support from middle American voters, advertisers are reflecting on whether they are out of touch with the same people who propelled the businessman into the White House.

Well, it’s official — the new word of 2016, according to Oxford Dictionaries, is “post-truth.” The question behind the word is this: In covering President-elect Trump and his presidency, should the traditional news media treat this like any other transition, and like any other run-of-the-mill administration? Here are three suggestions as to how the traditional press should go forward now.

It has been a rough week for those trying to cover the president-elect, as Hadas Gold and Peter Sterne portray in their profile of journalists encamped in the lobby of Trump Tower, shouting questions at passersby while they’re held in the periphery.

The FCC is likely to change course and prioritize lifting newspaper and TV station ownership restrictions when it comes under Republican control in 2017, agency watchers say. Industry analysts who track the FCC expect Republicans to relax rules once they assume control of the agency in President-elect Donald Trump’s administration.