HKS Shorenstein Center

During every stage of the 2020 presidential campaign, Donald Trump was the center of attention on the nightly newscasts of CBS and Fox News. The pattern had started much earlier. Our study of the 2016 presidential campaign found that Trump was the most heavily covered candidate in the national press during every month – and nearly every week - of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The media’s obsession with Trump is no mystery. No politician of recent times has so steadily supplied the controversy and novelty that journalists seek in their news stories and that audiences relish. Trump quipped that, within seconds of touching the send button on his Twitter feed, news outlets

The last quarter of 2020 produced decisions in Brussels, London, and Washington that constitute a turning point in the relationship between the major digital platform companies and democratic societies. Recognizing all the good these companies produce, the different actions share a similar conclusion: that the social costs imposed by the digital companies have become too high.

While there may be shared concerns about the unsustainable social and economic costs imposed by the dominant digital companies, the actions by the European Union and United Kingdom have reinforced how the European approaches to the problems of digital platforms are more direct and focused than have been those of the United States. This is a function of two factors. The E.U. and U.K. regulatory culture has been less in thrall to the non-interventionist orthodoxy that has dominated U.S. policy; thus, while the U.S. has effectively turned a blind eye, the Europeans have for several years been searching for effective solutions.

Our world, and those of us who live in it, are getting older.

With a worldwide demographic transformation toward “an aging society” before us, new issues and thus new stories evolve that warrant widespread media coverage. But is the print media — arguably the eyes and ears of our society — taking due notice? Newspapers try to reach out to people as readers, as consumers and as citizens.

In many regards, our lives flow through the press, since it is in the midst of our communities. But the press also contributes in its own choices of action to the creation of perceptions and awareness. People — of various age and experience — are creating newspapers, but are the newspapers created catering to the news and needs of all people, or only the needs of those in “desirable” demographic categories?

An aging society, and the issues that such a changing society brings, should affect the press in many arenas. It presents news as well as the potential to change news values. It affects the use of different media forms through the day. It will have an enormous impact on the economy. It changes living patterns and the most basic family interactions in ways that strongly affect patterns of media consumption. It is perhaps the most important transition to cover during the course of this century. Editorial leadership can make a difference. There are newspapers of higher and lower standards in the real world, and there must be room for improvement, especially when a new type of journalism clearly would be met with vivid interest from its readers.

This study tries to cover an aging society in relation to all these aspects of the press: its internal realities, its commercial relations and its public responsibilities.

Over the last three years, the United States government has spent 215 million dollars on a sweeping effort to try to create a vibrant free press in Iraq and Afghanistan. The drive is part of President George W. Bush’s policy of spreading democracy across the globe to counter terrorism. In a May 2005 speech, the president said that all successful democracies are built on five common foundations, one of which is a “vibrant free press“ that “informs the public, ensures transparency and prevents authoritarian backsliding.”

This paper will examine American efforts to create a vibrant free press in Iraq and Afghanistan. A 200 million dollar project in Iraq was the largest attempt ever by the United States, or any country, to help create independent media in another nation. Run by the Pentagon, it was a near total failure in its first year, with Iraqi journalists, American trainers and U.S. government officials assailing it as wasteful, amateurish and counter‐productive. A far smaller, 15 dollars million State Department effort in Afghanistan, by comparison, appears to have been more effective.

In both countries, many local journalists have performed well, particularly when given proper resources and training. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as around the world, murder and violence is now the single largest threat to the creation of an independent news media. Government officials, criminals and terrorists are increasingly using assault and murder to silence the media. Supporting, respecting and, most of all, securing local journalists may be the most critical way the United States can foster the creation of a vibrant free press in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Shorenstein Center’s Conference on Race and the Press offered a timely and searching exploration of issues currently receiving scrutiny by scholars, journalists and increasingly, the citizenry at large. Featuring discussion among several distinguished editors, reporters, and scholars and a keynote address by former President William Jefferson Clinton, the conference revolved around such key issues as these: • Are the news media doing an adequate job covering the news of a progressively more diverse society in which members of the long-dominant white, Euro-American ethnic groups are heading toward minority status? • If the media exhibit deficiencies in covering multicultural America, exactly what should be done, and how much can be done given the economic pressures that constrain all media organizations? • Should news personnel consciously take race and ethnicity into account when choosing and reporting the news, or are ethnic identities best left out of journalists’ calculations? Perhaps for the first time since the landmark Kerner Report of 1968, the impacts of the media on race relations have become matters of public controversy. Several forces have converged to place media and race on the agenda. First, President Clinton’s Initiative on Race (1997–98), although foreshortened by the controversies that engulfed the administration in its latter years, stimulated frank public discussion of race across the country. More recently, several scholarly books written with a broader audience in mind have investigated the nexus of race and media. The 2000 Election, with its disputes over disparate treatment of African American and Hispanic versus Anglo voters in the decisive state of Florida (and elsewhere), also drew attention to power differentials among groups and the media’s role in sustaining them. In addition, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has placed improving media images of blacks near the top of its agenda, and other ethnic organizations have followed suit. Finally, data from the 2000 U.S. Census point to an even greater than expected acceleration in the ethnic diversity of the country. This point reinforces a central theme of President Clinton’s speech, which emphasized globalization and interdependence as forces spurring the need for inter-ethnic harmony within and outside the United States—and for media that recognize these imperatives.

The following discussion paper is an ideal example of this approach. This paper was written by Santiago Sanchez Gonzalez, Professor of Law at the University of Madrid and former Dean of the Faculty of Law at that university, while he was in residence as a Fellow of the Shorenstein Barone Center. He focuses here on freedom of the press in a decidedly and admirably philosophical style, questioning the applicability to the modern economic, political, and technological climate of the American Constitution's preoccupation with negative liberties and the importance of keeping the government at bay. To Professor Sanchez Gonzalez, however, freedom of the press is as much about freedom to as about freedom from, and as much about fostering the conditions for democratic deliberation as about the libertarian goal of keeping the government away from the private press. These goals often clash, however, and his arguments for preferring the former goal to the latter in cases of conflict is decidedly at odds with the traditional American approach. By considering Sanchez Gonzalez's perspective, Americans may see parts of their Constitution that have heretofore escaped them, and others may see that a sensitive reading of the American constitutional experience shows that there are some aspects to be questioned just as there are so many to be admired.

When the Bush administration came into office, it was generally considered that domestic spying was off limits for the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), the ultra-secret agency tasked with electronic eavesdropping. Both had been in trouble before for keeping tabs on American citizens, but the rules had been tightened.

In the wake of 9/11, however, how could we be sure that our own citizens had not been drawn into the jihadist cause? Wouldn’t the new, unprecedented threat justify eavesdropping on Americans? “Basically all the rules were thrown out the window,” according to Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA employee, “and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.”

Thus was Stellar Wind born, an operation which resulted in an unprecedented encounter in the Oval Office between President George W. Bush and New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. over whether a news story should ever see the light of day.

According to William Binney, a former NSA cryptologist, Stellar Wind information was gathered through a network of windowless wiretapping rooms around the country, known as “switches,” which could gain access to international and domestic communications. AT&T and Verizon were drawn into an eavesdropping network of vast scale.

The Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) had established courts to quickly provide warrants to intelligence agencies in the 70’s. But Stellar Wind bypassed that process. This was to be a warrantless wiretap, for reasons that have never adequately been explained. Perhaps, despite how easy warrants were to obtain, NSA decided that the process would be too restricting and complicated. Perhaps NSA just couldn’t be bothered. The disgruntled Binney would tell author James Bamford that “they violated the Constitution” setting up Stellar Wind “but they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way.” Bamford alleged that the “NSA illegally…allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and emails.”

In the wake of the program’s exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendment Act in 2008 which largely made the practices legal. But that does not address whether Stellar Wind was illegal when it was first set up after 9/11. To some, the 2008 FISA Act was akin to declaring a burglary legal after the burglars had been caught.

Was Stellar Wind illegal? The New York Times came to think so. But General Michael Hayden, who was head of NSA at the time, holds a different opinion. I asked him if he had any doubts. “I still say no,” he said. “The wiretaps were perfectly lawful and provided useful intelligence.”

I borrowed a wonderful quote from Ross Ramsey, managing editor of the Texas Tribune, for the title of this Discussion Paper. His is one of the more interesting Internet start‐ups focusing on news coverage of state government. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the journalists [covering state government] now, it’s that we need more ants at the picnic,” he told me. Ross Ramsey’s observation captures the essence of what I found in my research: there’s a feast of news and information to be had about what’s happening in the 50 state capitols — news and information that matters much more directly to the average news consumer than what’s happening in Washington, DC — but the traditional media, for a variety of reasons, is not covering it the way they used to. All is not lost, however — an army of Internet start‐ups, some practicing traditional journalism in a new medium, others delivering political propaganda dressed up as journalism — are crawling all over the picnic. My paper includes an overview of news coverage of state government (pp 2–7), findings of a survey that shows how some state officials view the situation (pp 7–15), a look at a couple of interesting new state news initiatives (pp 15–19) and what I call “Journalism with an asterisk” (pp 19–27), and some conclusions about what might be done to reinvigorate this critical journalistic endeavor. (pp 27‐33).

Has the most important election in living memory left the transatlantic alliance stronger or shattered? As the votes were cast a European spectator could only hope that the outright winner would be America. The victor will need all his courage and resolution to defend the free world against the political and economic ruin threatened by international terrorism.

The spreading Muslim phobia to America has fuelled the evil of Osama bin Laden and presented the President with an international in-tray dominated by the tragedy of Iraq, the growing nuclear menace in Iran and North Korea, the Middle East, and the emergence of China as a looming economic superpower.

Army manpower is a key factor in the military’s ability to fight the War on Terror, which includes sustaining the combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet manpower is a subject that is often misunderstood and misreported. How does the status of Army manpower affect the nation’s War on Terror? What if the manpower demands of concurrent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped the country’s ability to deploy to the next hotspot on the globe? What if recruiting shortfalls leave combat units only half filled? What if frequent deployments for long periods cause professional soldiers to leave the service? And what if the demands of mobilization on the Reserve and Guard mean that those forces are used up and unavailable for a new contingency not yet on the radar? Debating the pros and cons of intervening in Syria, Darfur, and Iran, or even a prolonged presence in Iraq is nothing more than an academic exercise if no troops are available for the operation. This paper provides background material on Army manpower that is meant to inform journalists who might cover the issue.

Recent waves of technological change and economic contraction have left traditional news organizations floundering. Most are cutting back — often drastically. Some will fold. One particularly chilling result is that the number of reporters covering city halls, statehouses and Baghdad is dropping. Our ability to be informed on public affairs seems at risk. “There is a diminishing supply of quality journalism,” warns Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times.

The question now echoing through journalism schools, opinion pages and, most urgently, newsrooms, is how that apparent decline might be slowed or even reversed. With a desperation characteristic of people whose livelihoods are at stake, journalists have been forced to rethink how “quality journalism” might be distributed and how it might be funded. Most have not, however, been rethinking what in these changing times “quality journalism” might be.

In an online dialogue with readers, Keller supplies a definition with which the bulk of his fellow journalists might agree: “By quality journalism I mean the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double‐checking.” This, Keller tells his readers, is journalism that provides “the information you need to be an engaged citizen.” But is “quality journalism,” so defined, really the journalism citizens today require?

In February 2018, a rocket launched by Elon Musk’s company, SpaceX, placed a Spanish radar satellite named Paz into orbit. While the launch itself was uneventful, there were two significant stowaways on board: a pair of small prototype communications satellites, Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b.1 SpaceX plans to use information from these prototypes to build Starlink, a network of communications satellites intended to provide broadband services across the planet.

There are currently about 800 functioning communications satellites in orbit, providing services across the globe.2 SpaceX has permission from the FCC to launch 11,943 Starlink satellites in the next few years, and the constellation is scheduled to be completed by 2025.3.

The evidence presented in this paper will show that the mythology of the new economy reached unusual heights, even by modern standards. The media correctly and often insightfully reported on a variety of important changes in the economy along the way, but the tendency to exaggerate their impact grew intense. By 2000, new economy rhetoric became a frenzy of half-truths, bad history, and wishful thinking. For the most part, economists did not subscribe to the idea. This in itself does not suggest the idea was wrong. Economic analysis is typically slow to warm to major change, and arguably these days, academic economists are more cautious than ever before. But there was, in truth, little empirical support—at least as yet—for a new economy that was unprecedented in any meaningful way.

In “The Business of Getting ‘The Get’,” TV news veteran Connie Chung has given us a dramatic— and powerfully informative—insider’s account of a driving, indeed sometimes defining, force in modern television news: the celebrity interview.

The celebrity may be well established or an overnight sensation; the distinction barely matters in the relentless hunger of a Nielsen-driven industry that many charge has too often in recent years crossed over the line between “news” and “entertainment.”

Chung focuses her study on how, in early 1997, retired Army Sergeant Major Brenda Hoster came to accuse the Army’s top enlisted man, Sergeant Major Gene McKinney—and the media firestorm her accusations (later joined by those of others) created. She delves behind-the-scenes into the role of Hoster’s lawyer, how a reporter was “selected” for the initial breaking story, and then the maelstrom of media requests for “exclusive” interviews that followed.

She lets us see, in that maelstrom, how journalists compete for the interview, the techniques and strategies they use, the role luck and circumstance sometimes play, and why—among the literally hundreds of press supplicants willing to tell Sgt. Hoster’s story—the vast majority failed.

Drawing on her own experience as well as that of fellow broadcasters such as Barbara Walters, Walter Cronkite, and Mike Wallace, she lets us see how the quest for the celebrity interview— the “get” in her title—has evolved over the past two decades. She also lets us see how the “get” phenomenon isn’t confined to broadcasters— a fact print reporters sometimes like to forget—but is common to newspapers and newsmagazines as well. Indeed, in a detailed description of the competition for exclusive first excerpts from Gen. Colin Powell’s book, Chung shows us how the cross-media competition served to intensify the level of journalistic competition overall.

In a final section, Chung reflects on the “get”’s impact on TV news. Going beyond CBS producer Don Hewitt’s frank (and likely widely-shared) conclusion that “gets” are “the most disgusting” thing on television, Chung tries to give us fresh insights into the “get”’s effect on TV news, and how networks could act in order to recover a sense of lost balance and integrity that appears to trouble as many news professionals as it does, and, to judge by polls, the American news audience.

One may agree or disagree with all or part of her conclusion; what is not disputable is that Chung has provided us in this paper with a nuanced and provocatively insightful view into the world of journalism at the end of the 20th century, and one of the main pressures which drive it as a commercial medium, whether print or broadcast. One may lament the world it reveals; one may appreciate the frankness with which it is portrayed; one may embrace or reject the conclusions and recommendations Chung has given us. What we owe Chung, for “The Business of Getting ‘The Get’,” is our thanks for giving us a carefully-crafted window of understanding into one of the most influential forces of our times.

Adwatch attempts both to refute any false claims made by a candidate and to deconstruct an advertisement’s peripheral cues. This is an attempt to encourage voters to evaluate the substance of a persuasive message and reduce the influence of peripheral cues. By evaluating the veracity of a candidate’s message, Adwatch focuses on the quality of the candidate’s argument. By deconstructing the dramatic and visual content of a message, Adwatch encourages voters to think about peripheral cues rather than allowing these cues to influence them unaware.

We wanted to know whether Adwatch had the intended effect on voters. If successful, Adwatch should increase the elaboration of political thought. This increased elaboration should in turn increase the stability of voters’ political preferences and reduce their vulnerability to attitude change. In order to assess the effects of Adwatch, we employed a dual strategy, interviewing a number of political reporters who covered political advertisements during the 1992 campaign, and conducting an experimental test of the effects of Adwatch.

The 2012 campaign cycle was “the greatest windfall” for political operatives in American history, Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf has said—a 6 billion dollar spending frenzy unmatched in U.S. politics. [i]

So who pocketed all that cash? Most of it went for ads on TV, radio and the Internet, of course; media buys are the biggest expense in any election. But Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks broadcast spending, puts the 2012 total for all media at roughly $5 billion, which left another one billion at the disposal of the “campaign industrial complex”—that standing army of consultants, pollsters, mailers, data gurus and field organizers. [ii]

Did this torrent of money—raised and spent under the new rules of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision—make anyone rich? Did it create new financial incentives that changed the way the game is played or altered the political discourse? Has it, as some argue, bankrolled the polarization of America?

These legitimate questions are difficult to answer under current disclosure laws. And the U.S. press has been oddly complacent about that fact, continuing a tradition that puts the financial gains of political operatives—who are great sources and valued customers of the big media companies—off limits. The presumption seems to be that these men and women are motivated by ideology and personal loyalty, their payoff, if any, just a happy coincidence and a private matter.

But this attitude is woefully out of date now that what Bloomberg Businessweek called “a Cayman Islands–style web of nonprofit front groups and shell companies” is being used not only to shield donors but also to obscure the self-enrichment of the political class. [iii] When a consultant can earn millions of dollars in a single election cycle by moving nimbly between the campaigns, the independent spending groups and the vendors that get their business, it’s time to revive the Watergate-era mantra, “follow the money.”

The new era of campaign finance is a “real crisis for American journalism,” Washington Post associate editor Robert Kaiser told an audience at Harvard Law School in September, 2013, “and we have not risen to the occasion.”

Our democratic institutions have never been more important or more vulnerable, and the United States Census is no exception. Every decade since 1790, the 228-year-old institution has conducted a count of our nation’s population to determine both congressional apportionment and the annual distribution of federal funding—now over $800 billion every year.

The census provides our nation’s foundational dataset, the basis upon which so much other data is based. It is used in research, algorithms, journalism, business and infrastructure planning among other things. In many ways it creates the reality upon which our institutions, our lives, and our futures are built. It is the people’s data, a shared public asset that is becoming increasingly important in a data-driven world.

Is nonprofit, tax-exempt status the answer to newspaper industry woes? Marion Fremont-Smith’s paper takes a fresh look at legal precedent and IRS rulings to argue that it is possible under current conditions for daily newspapers to qualify for tax exemption, and examines how existing law could be interpreted to allow newspapers nonprofit status.

The Black community online is awash in medical misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic.

Even as Black people are disproportionately dying from the virus due to systemic racism, harmful inaccuracies about how to keep from contracting COVID-19, how to treat it, and where it comes from are metastasizing in Black online spaces, putting people at even greater risk.

In February 2012, the nonprofit news organization Mother Jones published a seemingly ordinary story that would prove to change its fate. The story profiled a Republican donor, Frank VanderSloot, and among other things, his treatment of a gay journalist. Shortly thereafter, VanderSloot and his company, Melaleuca Inc., filed a defamation lawsuit against Mother Jones, beginning a nearly three-year saga that ended in 2015 with a judge in Idaho ruling in the magazine’s favor. “All of the statements at issue are non-actionable truth or substantial truth,” the judge found, protected as fair comment under the First Amendment.

Throughout the ordeal, the leaders at Mother Jones made two choices that illustrated strategic decisions. They were decisions that would make a striking difference for Mother Jones’ future as not only one of the oldest nonprofit news outlets but also one of the most successful.