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"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty...We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason." - Edward R. Murrow
If you think 2016 has been a wild and rough ride, just wait 'til you get a load of 2017.

Given everything we know about Donald Trump from his divisive, demagogic presidential campaign, the next four years will be a stress test for the American system.

The Trump Years promise to be full of Oval Office insults, Twitter attacks and disregard for facts. But rather than viewing the prospect of covering a Trump administration with exhaustion, we should feel invigorated. Because when this time is done, we will look back on it as the best and most important time to be a journalist - not because it was easy, but because it was hard and our sense of mission was clear: to respect the office of the President while holding the person in power accountable against a standard of enduring American values.

For journalists, Edward R. Murrow offers durable inspiration. The man who brought the Battle of Britain home to Americans via radio and pioneered TV News at CBS, is probably best known today from "Good Night and Good Luck," directed by George Clooney. Murrow famously risked his career to confront a popular and powerful conservative populist demagogue, Senator Joe McCarthy. He secured his legacy through a commitment to independence and integrity.

McCarthy used lies and innuendo to intimidate critics, famously parading a fake list of communists in the State Department, accusing a Democratic administration of participating in a vast conspiracy to subvert our sovereignty and falsely declaring that the ACLU a communist front group. In an ironic bit of symmetry, among his aides was a young true believer named Roy Cohn, who would later become attorney for both mob bosses and Donald Trump. It was from Cohn that Trump learned to never apologize, always attack.

Pushing back against the dark tides of his times, Murrow preached fearlessness rooted in fairness. In my office at Beast HQ, I have a Murrow quote on a brass plaque: "To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful."

Trump's political success was based on declining trust in all civic institutions - especially the media. Not coincidentally, this decades-long decline directly parallels the rise of partisan media, which has allowed people to self-segregate into separate political realities. As conservative radio host Charlie Sykes recently reflected, "We've basically eliminated any of the referees...we have spent 20 years demonizing the liberal mainstream media...But, at a certain point you wake up and you realize you have destroyed the credibility of any credible outlet out there."

This election's sinister innovation of " fake news " came when this diet of confirmation bias collided with click bait, polluting our political waters with propaganda.

Journalists determined to hold Trump accountable must understand that offering nothing but reflexive criticism will reduce their credibility. We'll need to give credit for the policies the administration gets right so that our criticisms carry weight. We'll need to offer a roster of reporters and columnists with credibility on both sides of the aisle instead of predictable partisanship.

But it does not mean surrendering our principles or indulging in the idiotic "on-the-one-hand, on the other" drift toward moral relativism that blurs the line between fact and fiction. Separating truth from lies is journalism's core responsibility. When a McCarthy defender accused Murrow of "bias and hypocrisy," Murrow coolly replied, "If the weight of public testimony has tended to show that so far, Senator McCarthy's charges are unproven, that is not my responsibility."

Of course, aiming for the truth doesn't make you immune from criticism. Some conservatives will call anyone who isn't conservative a leftist and unleash howling Twitter mobs on them. Liberals have their own identity politics litmus tests that the more militant among them trot out to condemn any one who dares disagree with them.

Here, too, the example of Ed Murrow offers some perspective. Before taking on McCarthy, he was considered a fairly conventional anti-communist, backing the execution of the Rosenbergs for spying on behalf of Russia. He'd also been called a warmonger by isolationists for his belief that American should stand up to Hitler. Contrary to his critics' caricatures, Murrow was not a Democrat or a Republican but a registered independent. As his colleague Charles Collingwood said, "His politics were based on old-fashioned notions of morality and honor, not ideology." His influence stemmed from his independence.

But after taking on McCarthy, Murrow was called a communist "fellow traveler" and worse. The Wisconsin Senator denounced him as "the cleverest of the jackal pack, which is always found at the throat of anyone who dares to expose individual communists and traitors."

Conservative columnists constantly attacked Murrow and his crew, driving the broadcaster Dan Hollenbeck to commit suicide. J. Edgar Hoover ordered an expansion of his FBI file. Murrow's eight-year old son was subjected to slurs and their home was inundated with letters and postcards of hate, the doxxing of his day. When asked how they were holding up, his wife Janet calmly explained "we were under worse in London."

That is the sound of perspective. Journalists who've stood up to Trump, particularly those on the center-right, were trolled and doxxed throughout the campaign. The Daily Beast's reporters were threatened by Trump's senior staff, our site was denounced by the candidate and we were among the first news organizations to be placed on his campaign's blacklist. Reporters from the Washington Post to the Arizona Republic received death threats for daring to criticize - or not endorse-The Donald. Trump allies have doubled down on the campaign's blacklist by floating the notion of an "enemies list," echoing Trump's favorite ex-president, Richard Nixon. Trump and his geo-political paramour Vladimir Putin have a common aim to intimidate critics while creating the false sense of security that comes from rallying around a strong man draped in the flag.

But Murrow would not back down, famously confronting McCarthy on his show "See It Now" in the spring of 1954, subjecting his opponent's statements to the cool scrutiny of facts combined with unusual eloquence for a television anchorman.

His words echo with new urgency today. "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes which were for the moment unpopular."

Murrow's stand drew accolades - he was praised by the New York Times for "crusading journalism of high responsibility and courage, " reflecting "enlightened citizenship" while offering an "indictment of those who wish the problems posed by the senator's tactics and theatrics would just go away and leave them alone."

But he did not turn the tide in one night. His cause was, at the time, unpopular. In fact, days after the broadcast, the president of CBS showed Murrow a poll that showed "more people trusted McCarthy than Murrow, and that one-third of the respondents considered Murrow to be 'Communist or Communist sympathizer.'"

Truth often loses battles on the way to winning the larger war of history's judgment. Murrow's advertisers came under fire and his show was disgracefully moved to the comparative Siberia of a Sunday afternoon time slot, when corrupt quiz shows were deemed less problematic and more profitable. Murrow mocked the idea that "we must at all costs shield the sensitive citizens from anything that is unpleasant...[or] eliminate something that might offend some section of the community."

Even now, we are seeing success among news organizations that have maintained the courage of their convictions rather than simply playing to the lowest common denominator. The New York Times is seeing a surge in subscriptions since Trump's unexpected win while the Washington Post has achieved profitability. At The Daily Beast, we have seen another record year in terms of traffic and revenue, reaching more than 1 million readers a day with high loyalty and engagement - more than doubling our traffic from four years before. The lesson is clear: quality journalism attracts a quality audience.

In time, Murrow's example inspired courage in other citizens that ultimately reached the halls of Congress. When the lawyer Joseph Welch confronted McCarthy by asking "have you no sense of decency," that courage became contagious, inspiring Republican colleagues like Margaret Chase Smith to stand up to the demagogue, spurring a Senate investigation into McCarthy and his tactics. Republicans who denounced candidate Trump as dangerously irresponsible, ignorant and unqualified are now lining up to get on board - some motivated by a sense of service, others by rank opportunism. Reform Republicans will be a critical principled balance of power in our era as well.

Trump is, of course, not McCarthy. For one thing, he is far friendlier to Russia. But the point of studying history isn't the search for perfect parallels but finding the courage to confront our own challenges, armed with a sense of perspective. Mark Twain reportedly said, "history doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes." Maybe Donald Trump will be the first person in human history to campaign as a demagogue and not govern as one. We'll hope for the best but prepare for the worst on that front. But we already know that how we handle the next four years as a nation will echo across this century.

Trump's rise coincides with a broader ethno-nationalist pushback against liberal democratic values occurring across the western world. Already, studies are showing that only 30% of millennials feel it's essential to live in a democracy, compared to 75% of their grandparents' generation, who actually had to fight for freedom against fascism and communism. Situational ethics is rampant, with Republican approval of Russia's Vladimir Putin skyrocketing after it was revealed that his government tried to influence the election on Trump's behalf. Willful ignorance is on the rise as well, with nearly 50% of Trump voters believing the unhinged fake news story that Hillary Clinton was involved in a sinister, non-existent, pedophile ring. These trends represent a crisis of our capacity for self-government.

This is our generation's responsibility to fix. We sometimes simplify the risk when we look back at moral battles in history. But the actors then were surrounded by doubt. They didn't know how it would all turn out. The best we can do is imagine how the choices we make today will look in twenty years time and act accordingly. That also means resisting cynical arguments for inaction that often provide a fashionable mask for fear.

The character of our country didn't change on Election Day. Trump's mandate may be thin - after all, he lost the popular vote by an unprecedented 2.9 million and won the Electoral College by a margin of roughly 100,000 in three states - but he will be our next president. We should all want his administration to succeed so that our country succeeds. And so we must find a way to unite as a nation without falling into the trap of normalization, shrugging off Oval Office Twitter attacks on dissenting citizens or private businesses, reframing lies as simply exaggerations and undermining the integrity of facts by labeling all news "fake news." We cannot turn our backs on our best, most inclusive traditions.

"We can deny our heritage and our history," Ed Murrow warned, "but we cannot escape responsibility for the result." This is on us, not just journalists but all citizens who are committed to putting patriotism ahead of partisanship. This is our Murrow moment.

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"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty...We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason." - Edward R. Murrow If you think 2016 has been a wild and rough ride, just wait 'til you get a load of 2017.

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As Edward R. Murrow wrapped up his now-famous special report condemning Joseph McCarthy in 1954, he looked into the camera and said words that could apply today. "He didn't create this situation of fear-he merely exploited it, and rather successfully," Murrow said of McCarthy. Most of Murrow's argument relied on McCarthy's own words, but in the end Murrow shed his journalistic detachment to offer a prescription: "This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent-or for those who approve," he said. "We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

After months of holding back, modern-day journalists are acting a lot like Murrow, pushing explicitly against Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. To be sure, these modern-day Murrow moments carry less impact: Long gone are the days in which a vast majority of eyeballs were tuned to the big-three television news programs. But we nonetheless are witnessing a change from existing practice of steadfast detachment, and the context in which journalists are reacting is not unlike that of Murrow: The candidate's comments fall outside acceptable societal norms, and critical journalists are not alone in speaking up.

It's difficult to find a single launch moment for the change in coverage, but perhaps it started with a question from Fox News's Megyn Kelly during the August 2015 GOP presidential debate. Kelly simply listed some of the awful things Trump has said about women; the power of her question was her use of the candidate's own words. As effective as Kelly's question was-provoking Trump's ire and countless tweets-journalists began to become more adversarial. The new tone began to ramp up in March when CNN's Anderson Cooper took Trump to task. Trump, in defending himself after a squabble with fellow candidate Ted Cruz involving photos of each of their wives, explained to Cooper that Cruz had started it. "With all due respect, sir, that is the argument of a 5-year-old," Cooper replied.

Others followed suit. In June, CNN fact-checked Trump in real-time with the caption "TRUMP: I NEVER SAID JAPAN SHOULD HAVE NUKES (HE DID)." And it was extraordinary to see CNN's Jake Tapper asking Trump about his objections to US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was born in the United States to Mexican parents. Trump contended Curiel's background prevents him from making a fair judgment in a case involving Trump. "Is that not the definition of racism?" Tapper asked the candidate.

Last month, Trump sent a self-aggrandizing tweet about Orlando ("Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.") and intimated in an interview with Fox News that Obama may have had a role in the attack. ("We're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind.") In response, Stephen Colbert took to his chalkboard on The Late Show to diagram Trump's logic. The diagram was a swastika, a joke on a major network show that would have been inconceivable even a few months ago. After Orlando, the Los Angeles Times called Trump "a loose cannon" who was stooping to "a new low-even for him."

The American journalistic goals of detachment and objectivity are long held. Until the mid-19th century, most newspapers were directly funded by political parties. As that started to change and the commercial model began to emerge, newspapers started to shed their partisan baggage. For much of the last 150 years the trade-off was a good one: Journalists would avoid taking sides, and they would be given access to newsmakers-and news consumers-from both parties.

Playing it straight can still be effective. Trump mocked a disabled New York Times reporter, revoked the credentials of The Washington Post, and insulted Megyn Kelly-responding, in each case, to straight reporting of facts. But facts alone may be a poor weapon against a campaign that rarely admits errors, choosing instead to double down on dubious claims.

So why the change in coverage? To understand this moment, and what it says about journalism's place in our democracy, we need to explore two things that trigger journalists to call speech dangerous. The first is that journalists rarely shed their detachment in a vacuum. Murrow, the most respected television journalist of his day, wasn't the first to criticize McCarthy. The Milwaukee Journal and other newspapers led the charge, and The Washington Post 's Herblock made McCarthy the subject of many of his cartoons. And while President Dwight D. Eisenhower resisted criticizing McCarthy forcefully, other politicians began to, particularly when McCarthy's targets included Protestants and the military, as the Army-McCarthy hearing would reveal.

Throughout American history, journalists have been more likely to become advocates when they see others, like politicians and protesters, speaking loudly in dissent. When Walter Cronkite went on television in 1968 after the Tet Offensive to conclude that "we are mired in stalemate," he did so after much of America had come to the same conclusion.

That the vast majority of Democrats and quite a few Republicans (some of whom will boycott their convention) speak out publicly against Trump gives cover to journalists who choose to depart from the usual practice of studied balance. When you have the Bush family boycotting the GOP convention and George Will, the leading conservative journalist of the past four decades, leaving the party over Trump, it is easy to see that the political world has been overturned.

The second condition for mainstream journalists to abandon their detachment is when a politician's words go way beyond the pale. More than his vocal critics, the words and ideas of Trump himself are causing journalists to change their role. To understand this, it is useful to look briefly at a theoretical construction of objectivity by a leading journalism historian, Daniel Hallin, who sees the world of political discourse as falling into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance.

The sphere of consensus is the inner circle, the place in which most people tend to agree. Most American journalists and news consumers would agree on the legitimacy of the government as embodied in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Amendments.

The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the questions within the standard political debates: How much should the rich pay in taxes? Should the US expand offshore drilling? Is universal health care a desired outcome?

Then we have deviance, the place in the diagram which falls outside the bounds of journalistic conversation. This includes issues such as: Should the US be violently overthrown? Should we ignore the Constitution? Often, as in the above example, the first and last spheres operate as opposites: Everyone agreeing with the sphere of consensus would uphold the Constitution; the deviants might overturn it. These spheres also shift from time to time, as politicians and journalists and the public shift their views. The support of two issues-the full citizenship of African Americans and a woman's right to vote-moved over time from deviance to legitimate controversy to its present position: deeply embedded in the sphere of consensus. In the span of about 20 years, same-sex marriage evolved from legitimate controversy and is well on its way to consensus.

Where does Trump's speech fall? Some predicted that his opening announcement, with its salvo about Mexicans, represented a descent into deviance that would be unpalatable to the voters. Some observers assumed that labeling Senator John McCain and other POWs "losers" would finish him. "I like people who weren't captured," he said in July 2015. But the stakes weren't high yet, and Trump brought in skyscraper-sized ratings. "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS," said Les Moonves, that network's CEO.

The declining audience for traditional news is well documented and creates twin pressures. First, the desperation for audience share-an estimated 80 million viewers tuned into the networks' coverage of McCarthy's hearings about the Army following Murrow's show. These are ratings numbers that the networks cannot replicate now. Second, networks cannot replicate the influence that Murrow, Cronkite, and others had-on Election Day (November 8), we will be eager for signs to see if today's journalists pushing back against Trump actually stop him. Specifically, we'll want to look at whether journalists are still able to set the tone, despite the diminished audience. And what role do Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms play in multiplying the national conversations that once raged around actual water coolers?

We've reached a turning point, and the two criteria for journalists to abandon their objectivity have come to pass: Trump is widely criticized, even by his own party, giving journalists a lot of company in their criticism of him. When Trump suggested that Judge Curiel was incapable of trying a case because of his parents' birthplace, even House Speaker Paul Ryan, a fellow Republican, called the comments "racist."

And Trump's views appear increasingly deviant. No respected journalist would seek a balancing quote from someone who held such a view about a judge or who suggested, as Trump did last month after the Orlando shootings, that a sitting president was in cahoots with a mass murderer.

Murrow felt compelled to end his broadcast by warning his audience about the dangers of staying neutral, as journalists too often do, when the stakes are high: "Cassius was right," said Murrow. "'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.'" If a politician's rhetoric is dangerous, Murrow implied, all of us, including journalists, are complicit if we don't stand up and oppose it.

David Mindich is a professor of media studies, journalism, and digital arts at Saint Michael's College in Vermont. A former assignment editor for CNN, Mindich is the author of Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism.

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For journalists covering Trump, a Murrow moment

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As Edward R. Murrow wrapped up his now-famous special report condemning Joseph McCarthy in 1954, he looked into the camera and said words that could apply today. "He didn't create this situation of fear-he merely exploited it, and rather successfully," Murrow said of McCarthy. Most of Murrow's argument relied on McCarthy's own words, but in [...]

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Republican front-runner Donald Trump Donald John Trump Trump to sign executive order promoting artificial intelligence Trump's new Syria timetable raises concern among key anti-ISIS allies Trump officials considering Mar-a-Lago for next meeting with China's Xi: report MORE is not the first demagogue in American history to corrupt political discourse through falsehoods and innuendo that exploit public fear. In the early 1950s, Joseph R. McCarthy, a first-term Republican senator from Wisconsin, ruthlessly manipulated Americans' fear of communism. He was brought down because a courageous journalist named Edward R. Murrow understood that a vile bully like McCarthy could not be dealt with by traditional reporting. The problem is that they don't make them like Murrow anymore.

On Feb. 9, 1950, McCarthy, brandishing a piece of paper, gave a speech in Wheeling, W.Va.:

I have here in my hand a list of 205 [State Department employees] - a list of names that were made known to the secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who, nonetheless, are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.

McCarthy's timing was perfect. The previous year, the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb and China had fallen to Mao Zedong's Communist forces. It didn't much matter to a frightened public that McCarthy could not even keep his accusations straight. The day after the Wheeling speech, McCarthy declared instead that there were "57 card carrying communists" in the State Department; 10 days later, however, he changed that to "81 loyalty risks" in the department. Thus began years of debasement of American politics and a national climate of fear.

Then the widely admired Murrow of CBS took him on. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, millions of Americans had listened on their radios to Murrow report from rooftops in London while German bombs exploded around him. In February 1954, Murrow devoted an episode of his popular weekly program, "See It Now," to McCarthy. The show's premise was that since McCarthy had used newspapers and television to spread false accusations, he was not entitled to the benefit of disinterested, polite journalism. As David Halberstam wrote in "The Powers That Be," traditional reporting on McCarthy hadn't revealed "the invisible part, the inflection, the distortions of scene, the lack of follow through, the lack of seriousness, the cumulative record or lack of record which was missing in all accounts."

Murrow's show largely consisted of carefully juxtaposing McCarthy's speeches and accusations in Senate hearings. McCarthy came across as a bullying, shifty-eyed and leering zealot, contradicting himself, casually inventing facts and ruining innocent lives. Murrow closed the program with an all-out assault on McCarthy as a threat to America's national security, saying that the senator "had caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad, and given considerable comfort to our enemies." The program provoked a backlash against McCarthy that ended with his censure by the U.S. Senate.

Trump uses the same techniques as McCarthy. In a poisonous attack on Muslim Americans, for example, he claimed that on 9/11, he "watched in Jersey City, New Jersey [which has a large Muslim-American population], where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down." When safety officials in New Jersey said that no such thing had happened, Trump claimed that it has "been confirmed by hundreds of people" without identifying any reliable eyewitnesses. Trump then suggested that the exact number really wasn't the issue. "The only purpose in saying that was [to show] that there's something wrong. ... But throughout the world, I mean, amazingly, they were celebrating, which tells you there's something definitely going on here that's wrong. There's some bad stuff happening. And that's the point of the whole thing."

Trump has gotten away with this even though there are many more journalists and forms of journalism than existed in the 1950s. But there is no one like Murrow, who was highly trusted by the public, tough as nails, willing to risk his career to stop McCarthy and not afraid to drop journalistic norms when dealing with a subject who had dropped any pretense of telling the truth. Compare Murrow's approach in "See It Now" to the traditional, but ineffectual, way George Stephanopoulos questioned Trump about his 9/11 claims on ABC's "This Week."

Stephanopoulos: You know, the police say that didn't happen and all those rumors have been on the Internet for some time. So did you misspeak yesterday?

Trump: It was on television. I saw it.

For its part, CBS seems to have forgotten that Edward R. Murrow ever worked there. Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS, told a recent investor conference that while the Trump-dominated campaign "may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS. ... The money's rolling in ... [B]ring it on, Donald. Keep going."
Wallance is a writer and lawyer in New York City. His most recent book is "America's Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR's State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy."

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Donald Trump is American journalism's great failure

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Republican front-runner Donald Trump Donald John Trump Trump to sign executive order promoting artificial intelligence Trump's new Syria timetable raises concern among key anti-ISIS allies Trump officials considering Mar-a-Lago for next meeting with China's Xi: report MORE is not the first demagogue in American history to corrupt political discourse through falsehoods and innuendo that exploit public fear.

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Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Credit Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

This has not been your typical presidential election - not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.
JIM RUTENBERG Well, James, here we are - finally at the end. Or are we? Let's cross our fingers and assume we are. Phew! Historians are going to be examining the cadaver of Election 2016 for quite some time. But the news media doesn't have time for history. Tomorrow is another day, and a new test. And I'm wondering, along with a lot of other people: Does the media emerge from this campaign year having learned important lessons that made it better - quicker to call a falsehood false (or, if you prefer, a lie a lie) and treat all comers seriously? Or does it limp into the new phase of coverage unrepentant, ready to make similar mistakes all over again?

JAMES PONIEWOZIK One thing this election has reminded us is how broad "the media" is. It's cable news. It's Gawker (or was). It's Twitter, Donald J. Trump's weapon of choice, and every morning show that let him phone in interviews. It's NBCUniversal, which brought you "Morning Joe" and Billy Bush and the "Access Hollywood" bus and "The Apprentice." It's traditional news operations like ours. It's Breitbart (and may be Trump TV). It's fake news on Facebook and everyone rifling through a WikiLeaks dump.

So will the media be better in 2020? Worse? Yes. And yes. And there will be more of it.

I'll start with one topic you raised: reporters' willingness to truth-squad. I hope that Mr. Trump's asymmetric, weirdly brazen dishonesty has broken reporters of the bad habits of false equivalency, euphemism and forced balance. The job of journalism, always, is to describe reality as we honestly find it, regardless of appearances. I hope that's a permanent change. I fear that the profession will decide Mr. Trump was a one-off, an asteroid, a special circumstance requiring Special Trump Rules.

RUTENBERG We talked about those Trump rules yesterday, and as I said then, it turns out the Trump rules were really just plain old journalism rules: Collate what's true from what's false; analyze, contextualize, dig, dig, dig - for scoops and hidden details (and hopefully not your own grave!).

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Mr. Trump during a forum hosted by Matt Lauer, right. Credit Eric Thayer for The New York Times

PONIEWOZIK And do it without regard for how it makes you look to one camp or another.

RUTENBERG The new twist was that we had an asymmetry no working journalist had ever seen. Donald J. Trump lied more than his opponent did. It meant that the press was seen calling him out for falsehoods more than it was seen calling out Hillary Clinton, who fibbed less ( but did aplenty). That created the impression of imbalance. But so much of it was reflecting what the reporting found, objectively. For instance, last week, when Mr. Trump described a scene in which President Obama verbally attacked a pro-Trump protester at a rally when Mr. Obama had clearly, in fact, argued the protester deserved respect and a hearing, well, that called for a robust fact-check. I mean, reporters have eyes.

That doesn't mean Hillary Clinton got a pass. When she referred to half of Mr. Trump's supporters as hailing from a "basket of deplorables," it was widely aired. The Times broke the story that she was keeping a private email server at her home in Westchester, New York. The media covered the WikiLeaks emails from her adviser John Podesta in ways that produced a fair share of rough headlines for Mrs. Clinton; scrutinized pay-to-play optics at the Clinton family's foundation, and examined her record on Libya and Syria with an eye on what she'd do as president.

PONIEWOZIK The press covered Hillary Clinton like the next president of the United States. The press covered Donald Trump like a future trivia question (and a ratings cash cow).

From the get-go, too much coverage of the race has been informed by a belief, overt or unconscious, that Mr. Trump couldn't win. Last fall, the political press, like their sources, dismissed the polls and stuck to the belief that people would never actually pull the lever for that man. The mind-set stuck well into the primaries - even data-minded Nate Silver succumbed to the siren call of punditry.

RUTENBERG Yes, If you think about it, she received coverage befitting a traditional politician running for president; he received coverage of a billionaire reality-television star who turned politics into performance art and sparked a powerful movement in the process.

PONIEWOZIK And in the general election, it affected expectations. NBC's September "commander-in-chief forum" with Matt Lauer [of "Today"] was a low point. Mrs. Clinton got an appropriately tough vetting. Mr. Lauer told Mr. Trump "nobody would expect you" to have studied up on foreign policy before running. (Nobody? Do they cover that at orientation?)

Boris Epshteyn and Campbell Burr during an internet show from Trump Tower. Credit Hilary Swift for The New York Times

It's not as simple as, "the press went easy on him." In some ways this made for devastating or dismissive coverage. But only one candidate was treated like she might be elected, set policy and make appointments.

RUTENBERG One thing lost in that whole controversy - Mr. Lauer and Mr. Trump were once related by corporate synergy. (Which makes them, what, corporate media cousins?) "Today" used to regularly run segments on the previous night's edition of "The Apprentice." So here was Mr. Lauer having to switch from asking Mr. Trump about Omarosa's antics to those of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. And I bet this threw him. Still, your point stands.

PONIEWOZIK Yes. My biggest piece of advice for covering a candidate like Donald Trump: Just pretend he's the Republican nominee for president. Within the bubble of conventional wisdom, this didn't happen enough.

RUTENBERG I was struck by how many times I saw prominent journalists say, "Gee, I don't know anybody who would vote for Mr. Trump, I'm going to have to work on that," or some such. Take it from me - having friends who supported Mr. Trump from early on didn't mean you were going to expect him to win the Republican nomination. But there was without question a big disconnect between mainstream reporters and Trump supporters (and a segment of Bernie Sanders supporters, too, for that matter).

And this will be key in the days, months and years ahead. The press needs to explore the frustration of those many Americans who think free trade's gone too far; that immigration threatens the national fabric; and that insiders from Washington, Wall Street and the media have rigged the system against them.

PONIEWOZIK This election has exposed a lot of bubbles. Chuck Todd this morning writes that if coastal journalists were more in touch with economically hard-hit areas, they'd have seen the Trump phenomenon coming. As a southeast Michigan native, I'll give him that. But I would add that a more diverse press corps would have been less likely to deflect so much of the overt racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism on the campaign trail as "economic anxiety." And it wouldn't be so quick to equate "working class" with "white."

Mrs. Clinton being interview by Mr. Lauer. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times

RUTENBERG I think that's right, in that the press corps' lack of diversity - not only in terms of race but also class perspective - left it blind to the power of the movement that carried Mr. Trump to the nomination. That said, I think that to the extent that the Trump campaign surfaced pockets of racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny, the news media did a good job calling that out for what it was, which doesn't come naturally.

Either way, this will be a real wasted opportunity if there isn't a lot of probing, fearless reporting about how much racism, misogyny and anti-Semitism exist in the culture. It has surfaced. Let's not let the rug roll back over it all when this is done.

That brings me to this question: When this thing wraps, do you think the mainstream media will revert to where it was before this campaign started, treat this as one nightmare it would just as soon forget? Or does it emerge forever changed?

Because whatever you say about this year's election coverage, it killed at the box office.

PONIEWOZIK The drive for ratings and clicks will not change, whatever anyone says. Jeff Zucker recently said maybe the network should not have aired so many of Mr. Trump's rallies unedited.

I take these morning-after regrets the same way I do a political party's postelection autopsy. Wake me up if they ever implement it.

Another looming question about the postelection media is if Mr. Trump will be a player in it. Especially if he loses, I'm dubious of Trump TV as a full-fledged cable channel. That's expensive - an online subscription service might be an easier way to cash in. That, and that brand depends on his image as a winner. In defeat, even claiming a rigged election, he may be a tougher sell.

But who says Trump TV would only be a thing if Mr. Trump loses? A President Trump would make aggressive use of the media. Why not his own de facto state TV? What would stop him: his deep respect for the norms of political propriety?

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Can the Media Recover From This Election?

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This has not been your typical presidential election - not for the voters, the candidates or the news media. James Poniewozik, chief television critic for The New York Times, and Jim Rutenberg, media columnist for The Times, discuss how the election season went, good and bad, for members of the press.

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The 2020 presidential race is on, with the first major candidate out the gates, and, on the sidelines, a new subgenre of media criticism inspired by the failures of the last campaign.

We now know the contours of what went wrong in 2016: reporters focused too much on personality and polling when they should have paid more attention to issues that mattered to voters; they let Donald Trump dominate coverage , to the detriment of other, more serious candidates, both Democrat and Republican; and, when it was all over, they blamed and (and ) for skewing the campaign, neglecting to acknowledge their own failure to analyze the issues that merited attention.

And so, two years later, it begins again, with a new race for the White House underway and no indication that the political press corps has learned anything from 2016. Early-round coverage of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's New Year's Eve campaign announcement was a greatest hits tour of what's wrong with political journalism; journalists focused on her stagecraft (not even mentioning the word !) rather than on what she had to say; they let the response to her candidacy, and the controversies already surround it , overshadow the candidate; they were too distracted, or too bored, by the policy issues to consider the senator's serious, and detailed, ideas about running the country.
ICYMI: Magazine's star reporter caught making up sources
Media commentators such as Margaret Sullivan, Jay Rosen, and others have already begun working diligently to call out the face plant of the early coverage, and they're right to do it. "The mission of pre-election coverage should not be to determine who's going to win, but to respond intelligently to what voters want and need to know," Sullivan wrote this week . "It's so simple it seems absurd the reality is so far from it."

But you can't help but wonder whether anybody's listening; surely the editors, writers, anchors, and producers leading, and participating in, the coverage so far have seen and digested the critiques of the last two years-they certainly hang out on Twitter enough. And yet, so far at least, they seem to be ignoring them, whether for clicks or because of laziness and failure of imagination.

So, we're going to dispense with the usual coverage advice for now; CJR did, I think, an excellent job of looking back on how the media failed in 2016, in this piece and and, from me, . Read them all and don't make the same mistakes again.
Get out of your own head
Instead, let's think more broadly about how the coverage could be better, which have as much to do with the mindsets and worldviews of political journalists as with specific prescriptions for what to write or say.
ICYMI: The tweet that derailed a news cycle Dive into the details
It is the quintessence of insider-baseball reporting to think that the timing of a candidate's announcement, or its location, or the color of his or her outfit or hair means anything to most Americans. Voters won't notice and won't care. If you're starting your campaign story by focusing on atmospherics, you're writing more for your friends and colleagues than for your audience. Hit the delete button and start over.
Trash the crystal ball
Public policy can be dull. Your job is to make it interesting and relevant; it's why you became a reporter-to explain byzantine systems, complicated bills, and congressional voting histories in a way that grabs attention. Your first job in covering a new candidate is to spend every second you have understanding every aspect of what they believe and what they have done. Drown yourself in the mundane and the bureaucratic. Then, work like hell to translate it into plain language that will make sense to everybody. It's hard and it's time-consuming, but it's the best service you can provide to voters.
Don't interview anybody whose kid goes to your kids' school
No one knows who will win the 2020 race. No one knows who's going to get the Democratic nomination. No one knows who will be left campaigning a year from now. Anybody who says they do shouldn't be trusted as an expert on politics. Reporters who make predictions shouldn't be awarded with bylines. Reporters and their news organizations were massively wrong in assuming the results of 2016, and the people they respected, and quoted, helped get them there. Do away with this kind of reporting entirely, and follow the rules of basic journalism: write what you .
Stop with the pretending around Trump
Reporting in 2016 was proven to be an incestuous game, which rigged the coverage. Journalists depended on a small circle of sources and experts, most of whom were just like them. The result was journalistic groupthink on an industrial scale. This time, be bold in your outsiderness. Develop sources you've never met or heard of. Go places you've never been and talk to people who don't look or think like you. The fact that the conventional experts in Washington failed in 2016 is liberating, leaving the entire rest of the country as the place to look for sources.
Enough with the group hug
Deal with, and report on, the Donald Trump as he has shown himself over the last two years: the racist, the xenophobe, the sexist, the liar. In the lead-up to the last election, news organizations surrendered their common sense about who Donald Trump was, even though most had known him for years as a dodgy real estate mogul and manipulator of the press. They worked instead to convince themselves that he was someone else: a populist savant, a gifted strategist, an amusing truth-teller, a flash in the pan. He was none of those things, and everyone involved in the coverage on some level knew it. The race for the presidency isn't a game of fantasy politics, where we can pretend people are who want them to be or need then to be. Trump is a man with a track record and a public record that should be addressed as they are.
Newsrooms are not shrines
The last two years have been tough for journalism. Good people have been threatened and other good people have died. Tyrants like Trump have used language that will inevitably prompt more attacks, here and around the world. But circling the wagon and focusing inward, on our own tribe, isn't helping our cause or our coverage. Instead, it makes us insular and overly introspective. We can't see our own failings if we're wary of outsiders, if we close ourselves off to people who may have better ideas. We need to be more open than ever to criticism, to help, to outside opinion. Ours is not a voice from on high. It is instead, a groundswell that should come from the bottom up: from our readers, our employees, and our neighbors.
Finally, it's not as bad as it looks
It's amazing that in 2019, with the business of the press on the ropes and trust in the media in the toilet, the people who run the biggest newsrooms continue to treat themselves as the truth's high priests. And yet newsrooms remain anachronisms of our age-staffed with too many white men, managed in an old-school, tight-fisted style, hostile to readers and subscribers who pay the bills. (For much more on this, read CJR's most recent print issue on race and media .) This affects coverage, closing the mind to innovation and new approaches. We learned in 2016 that, unless we open our eyes and our minds and hit the pavement, we don't know shit. Let's turn that humility into an asset.
ICYMI: How a problematic NYT article shows how newsrooms are out of touch with the communities they cover
This is one hell of a story. American elections are glorious things-as cheerlead-y as it sounds and as flawed as they are. We get the opportunity, as a nation, to reinvent ourselves, every four years. The same holds true for our profession. Last time, we screwed up. Now, we have the chance to make it right. Embrace the opportunity. This is an epic story, one of the most important in our lifetimes. We're lucky to be able to tell it.

Kyle Pope is the Editor in Chief and Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.

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Do this, not that: 8 tips for covering the 2020 presidential race

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The 2020 presidential race is on, with the first major candidate out the gates, and, on the sidelines, a new subgenre of media criticism inspired by the failures of the last campaign. We now know the contours of what went wrong in 2016: reporters focused too much on personality and polling when they should have [...]

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Citizens are taking to the streets in cities across the world to demand greater accountability from their leaders in a surge not seen since the end of World War I. The issues differ from country to country -- against graft, violations of the rights of women, exploitation of the environment or the abuse of privilege -- but they all demonstrate a hunger for good governance and the power of the new media. These citizen uprisings represent a new force on the world stage that serves as a counterweight to the excesses of our current political order, whether democratic or authoritarian. The grass-roots are stirring and politicians everywhere must pay attention.

As these pages themselves testify, the news media have traditionally played an essential role as our watchdog over government, a "fourth estate" that guards against abuse of power. From Watergate to today's exposures of the NSA's surveillance activities, the news media shed light on the workings of government and provide a public forum for the debate of our laws and policies. But with the decline of traditional news outlets, particularly on the local level, there are concerns that the power of the press has been compromised and that our freedoms have been curtailed.

Not so. Citizens are the new Fourth Estate. As the new media disrupt the industrial model of information, citizens have become empowered to oversee the doings of their elected representatives. A more direct form of democracy is emerging. The availability of information and, more importantly, the ability to communicate and self-organize has created a diverse "citizens movement" that serves as a check and balance on the prerogatives of government. It is a worldwide phenomenon. Millions of citizens have taken to the streets of Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, Manila, Madrid and Bangkok demanding good governance and an end to corruption. Demonstrators have swept away autocratic governments in scores of countries. Citizens in India demand protection from rape. In China tens of millions of bloggers have become a virtual citizens lobby pushing for environmental change, blocking huge new dams and petrochemical plants. In Italy and other European countries new citizen parties have emerged to challenge established political powers.

The new media enhance rather than compete with traditional journalism in defending the public trust. Citizen journalists have expanded the reach and the scope of established news organizations. Whistleblowers or traitors, depending on your political orientation, are piercing the veils of government secrecy. Social media activists have ignited revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran and Syria. Although attention has focused on these so-called Facebook and Twitter revolts, it should not be forgotten that traditional mass media outlets like Al Jazeera and CNN vastly magnified their power. When Mohammed Bouazizzi self-immolated in Tunisia sparking the Arab Spring, videos on YouTube spread word of spontaneous protests. But it wasn't until Al Jazeera's Arab-language Mubasher network broadcast these cellphone images on satellite television that a veritable conflagration engulfed the Arab world. The symbiotic relationship of old and new media plus investigative journalism from independent non-profit organizations like ProPublica have brought a greater degree of transparency to governments than has ever existed before.

Now that almost everyone on the planet has access to a mobile phone, news reports, pictures and opinions can come from everywhere and anyone. Traditional journalism continues to sort, contextualize and analyze the vast data that is available and has the training, the skills and the credibility to tell the story. But a new citizens movement is now emerging that has the people power to demand accountability from our governments, whether in America or in China. There are certainly risks that these newly empowered citizens could become pawns for populist demagogues, but this is far more likely to happen when the media are controlled by a few than when there are multiple and independent sources of information.

Politicians everywhere fear the crowd. They try to control the powerful new tools of communication, they censor the content they don't like and they tighten their secrecy regimes against leakers and whistleblowers. This will only harden the resolve of the emerging citizens movement. Instead of manipulating and monitoring its speech and activities, political leaders should embrace this surge in democracy. Sclerotic eighteenth century systems of representative government need to evolve into new forms of direct democracy. Let the peoples' voices be heard. Open up government data. End the surveillance state. The people demand full transparency. The citizens movement is not going away. It will increasingly assume its role as the watchdog of government.
David Hoffman is the author of Citizens Rising: Independent Journalism and the Spread of Democracy (CUNY Journalism Press)

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Citizens are taking to the streets in cities across the world to demand greater accountability from their leaders in a surge not seen since the end of World War I.

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This month marks the two-year anniversary of one of the most important articles ever written on journalism. On Aug. 7, 2016, after Donald Trump formally secured the Republican nomination and the general election campaign was under way, New York Times media columnist James Rutenberg began with a question:

"If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation's worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?"

Under the Times' traditional standards, the right answer is that you wouldn't be allowed to cover any candidate you were so biased against. But that's not the answer Rutenberg gave.

Instead, quoting an editor who called Hillary Clinton "normal" and Trump "abnormal," Rutenberg suggested "normal standards" didn't apply. He admitted that "balance has been on vacation" since Trump began to campaign and ended by declaring that it is "journalism's job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history's judgment."

I wrote then that the article was a failed attempt to justify the lopsided anti-Trump coverage in the Times and other news organizations. It was indeed that - and more, for it also served as a dog whistle for anti-Trump journalists, telling them it was acceptable to reveal their biases. After all, history would judge them.

Weeks later, Dean Baquet, the Times' executive editor, told an interviewer the Rutenberg article "nailed" his thinking and convinced him that the struggle for fairness was over.

"I think that Trump has ended that struggle," Baquet boasted. "I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it's false."

Because the Times is the liberal media's bell cow, the floodgates were flung open to routinely call Trump a liar, a racist and a traitor. Standards of fairness were trashed as nearly every prominent news organization demonized Trump and effectively endorsed Clinton. This open partisanship was a disgraceful chapter in the history of American journalism.

Yet the shocking failure of that effort produced no change in behavior. After the briefest of mea culpas for failing to see even the possibility of a Trump victory, the warped coverage continued and became the media wing of the resistance movement.

Which is how we arrived at the latest low moment in journalism. This one involved the more than 300 newspapers (including The Post) that followed the Boston Globe and, especially his accusation that they are "the enemy of the people."

The high-minded among the media mob insisted they were joining together to protect the First Amendment and freedom of the press. In fact, the effort looked, smelled and felt like self-interest and rank partisanship masquerading as principle.

True to their habit, most of the papers expressed contempt for the president and some extended that contempt to his supporters.

Nancy Ancrum, the editorial page editor of the Miami Herald, told Fox News her paper joined the effort without any hope of changing the minds of Trump supporters because "they are just too far gone."

Imagine that - 63 million Americans are written off because they disagree with the media elite's politics. Echoes of Clinton's "deplorables" comment ring loud and clear.

I agree that Trump is wrong to call the media the "enemy of the people" and wish he would stick to less inflammatory words. His favorite charge of "fake news" makes his point well enough without any hint that he favors retribution on individual journalists.

But I am also concerned that media leaders refuse to see their destructive role in the war with the president. Few show any remorse over how the relentlessly hostile coverage of Trump is damaging the nation and changing journalism for the worse.

One obvious consequence is increased political polarization, with many media outlets making it their mission to denounce Trump from first page to last, day in and day out. Studies show 90 percent of TV news coverage is negative and the Times, Washington Post and CNN, among others, appear addicted to Trump hatred as if it is a narcotic.

This lack of balance permits little or no coverage of any of his achievements. How many people, for example, know about the employment records shattered by the jobs boom unleashed by Trump's policies?

Black unemployment stands at 5.9 percent, the lowest rate on record. For Latinos, it is 4.5 percent, also the lowest on record. For women, it's the lowest rate in 65 years and for young people, it's the lowest since 1966.

Those statistics mean millions of people are getting their shot at the American dream. How can that not be newsworthy?

Rest assured that if Barack Obama had achieved those milestones, they and he would have been celebrated to the high heavens.

Yet when it comes to Trump, nothing is ever good. Having decided he is unfit to be president, most news groups act as propagandists, ignoring or distorting facts that contradict their view of him.

While media manipulation hurts Trump's popularity, there is a second, ironic impact: The skewed coverage is doing even more damage to public trust in the media itself.

A Gallup/Knight Foundation survey of 1,440 panelists earlier this year found adults estimating that "62 percent of the news they read in newspapers, see on television or hear on the radio is biased" and that 44 percent of "news" is inaccurate.

Separately, Axios and SurveyMonkey polled nearly 4,000 adults in June and found that 70 percent believe mainline news organizations report as news things "they know to be fake, false or purposely misleading."

Among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, an astonishing 92 percent harbor that distrust, as do 53 percent of Democrats.

And get this: Two-thirds of those who believe there is rampant false news say it usually happens because journalists "have an agenda." Clearly, the distrust is not limited to Trump supporters.

These numbers reflect an urgent crisis of confidence in the press. And it's getting worse.

A Gallup survey three years ago found that 40 percent trusted the media; two years ago, the trust meter declined by 8 points, to 32 percent. Now even that low bar looks like the good old days.

Yet instead of soberly examining their conduct, most in the media ratchet up the vitriol, apparently believing that screaming louder and longer will lead the public to hate Trump as much as they do.

But as the surveys show, their bias is a boomerang. With media behavior undermining public trust more than anything Trump says or does, a return to traditional standards of fairness and a separation of news from opinion are essential.

And urgent - for the good of a free press and America.

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The media's hatred of Trump is only hurting itself

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This month marks the two-year anniversary of one of the most important articles ever written on journalism. On Aug. 7, 2016, after Donald Trump formally secured the Republican nomination and the general election campaign was under way, New York Times media columnist James Rutenberg began with a question: "If you're a working journalist and you believe that Donald J.

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Probably the smartest thing anyone said about Donald Trump before his election was the explanation by Salena Zito in The Atlantic of why he could get away with making wildly exaggerated or flatly false statements: "When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

And yet Zito's insight has turned out to be insufficient. In the mad days that have followed his inauguration, it has become clear that Trump takes himself both literally and seriously.

He mistakes his own impulses for facts. He does not know the difference between self-aggrandising symbolic gestures and lived human realities, and this tiny-minded literalism has very serious consequences for millions of people.

The most important thing to understand about the executive order keeping immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim countries out of the US is that it has no relationship whatsoever to its stated purpose. That purpose is, supposedly, to keep America safe from terrorism. The order is actually called "Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States".

Memory of 9/11

As the chaos, anguish and shame erupted last weekend, Trump's surrogates and supporters repeatedly evoked the memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

But Trump's order would do absolutely nothing to prevent a repeat of those attacks. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia continues to be the primary sponsor of the extremist versions of Islam that feed into militant jihadism. Yet Saudi Arabia is not one of the seven countries whose citizens are affected by Trump's order.

On the contrary, the Saudi government this week reiterated its delight at Trump's accession to the presidency and declined to utter the smallest criticism of the order.

By contrast, not one American has been killed since 9/11 by any immigrant or refugee from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen - the countries targeted by Trump. Every jihadist who carried out a lethal attack inside the United States since 9/11 was a citizen or legal permanent resident of the US itself.

The most recent major attacks - the Orlando nightclub massacre last June and the killing spree in San Bernardino in December 2015 - were carried out principally by people born in the US. (The San Bernardino shooter was helped by his wife, who was born in Pakistan, which is not on Trump's list.)

And, in fact, the biggest terrorist threats to US citizens come from disturbed people, many of them high on white supremacist fantasies, who are allowed by US laws to have access to extremely lethal weapons. Trump's own rhetoric and his close association with elements of the white nationalist right have, at least in their own eyes, further legitimized many of these extremists.

Further, Trump's absolute commitment to insuring that extremely lethal weapons remain easily available to anyone planning a terrorist attack makes a nonsense of his claims to be "protecting the nation".

Campaign rhetoric

The problem the executive order is really meant to address is not terrorism, but Trump's own campaign rhetoric. The order relates, not to actual, living, breathing events or conditions, but only to language.

It is pure postmodern politics: The order is a text that refers only to another text, which is Trump's stump speech on the campaign trail and its dark promise of a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." (If the lifting of the ban really has to wait for Trump to figure out what is going on, it will last indefinitely.)

Many people within the US media and political worlds, including some Republicans who support the intention of the order, wondered why Trump did not consult more widely before signing it. But this is to entirely miss the point. Once you start to consult, you recognise that you are intending to do something that will have consequences for real people in the real world - and that you have to modify your intentions to take account of those consequences.

What the world is struggling to come to terms with is that this is not what Trump is about at all. He is not engaged in rational politics. He is a character in a story of his own invention. And the only rules he understands are the rules of the narrative.

The president does not read books (though he watches a lot of TV), yet he instinctively understands the rule laid down by one of the greatest of storytellers, Anton Chekhov: "Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

Trump gets this, and the anti-Muslim executive order shows him applying it. First, remove everything that has no relevance to the story, which in this case is all the real people with real lives that are being thrown into further turmoil, whether it is an Iranian mathematician studying at an Ivy League university or a desperate orphan fleeing Islamic State in Syria.

There is a paradox at work here: precisely because these people are in fact entirely irrelevant to what Trump claims to be doing - keeping America safe from terrorism - they are all the more easily erased. You just tell everybody to shut up and talk about the real story: 9/11, jihadists, Islamic State.

Big guns

Next, Chekhov's rule requires that Trump has to fire in his second chapter all the shotguns he put up on the wall in his first. That first chapter - his long rampage through the Republic primaries and the general election - was all about loading the big guns with vicious ammunition: fear-mongering, xenophobia, ethnic nationalism, anti-Mexican and anti-Muslim vitriol, white revenge for a perceived loss of power and privilege.

He knows that the shaping of the story requires that these weapons, once loaded, must be fired at somebody.

There has been much talk of liberals being in a bubble when it comes to Trump. But his first days in office have shown that the biggest bubble of all was the one occupied by the sneaking regarders and the old-school political cynics.

These are the people who - some with a slightly desperate smile, some with a superior smirk - have informed everyone that President Trump would not be the same as candidate Trump. In the wishful thinking of old-style conservatives and the buyer's remorse of people who voted for him in the belief that he could not possibly be as boorish as he seemed, there was an assumption that old patterns still held.

The old pattern is, as the New York politician Mario Cuomo put it, that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Campaigns are primarily rhetorical; being in office is primarily practical.

But this is a political dictum - and Trump is not a politician. He is a reality TV star, a semifictional invention. If your character is a big, blowsy burlesque of a mogul, like Trump's in The Apprentice, he doesn't suddenly become a quietly competent chief executive. You stick with your shtick.

Forget poetry, forget prose - they are for people who read books. This is spectacle. This is entertainment. The vulgar, reckless narcissist, the pathological liar, the panderer to prejudice, is a vastly popular character. It gets the ratings with which Trump is so dementedly obsessed. Why on earth would he change it?

And besides, the political skill of being two people - one for the campaign trail, one for the office - requires some subtlety of mind. It may not be especially admirable, but those who are good at it are able to keep contradictory notions in their heads at the same time. They can juggle different realities: what they would like to do and what they can do.

But Trump has neither the brain nor the personality for such complexities. He is the one-dimensional man. And that dimension is all Trump. The narcissist has eyes only for his own reflection: when President Trump looks in the mirror, he sees only candidate Trump. He hears only his own voice from the platform.

To his credit, this is one thing Trump didn't lie about: he said on the campaign trail that he was his own chief adviser. The president listens to the braggart, the bully, the blowhard that roars in his ear. And what it tells him is what the last Russian Tzar, Nicholas II, constantly told himself: "I wish it, therefore it must be."

His first traitor

Donald Trump's frantic signing of grandiose orders has about it the air of a despot's last days, not his first. Deluded tyrants, their grip on reality faltering, simply issue more directives, ordering nonexistent tank divisions to take up their positions, or firing traitors. It is remarkable that Trump got to fire his first traitor, the acting attorney general, who he explicitly accused of betrayal, just 10 days into office. She will not be the last.

There is no place for argument or consultation or a weighing of consequences: I wish it, therefore it must be. Trump, in other words, takes himself, and his own desires literally. And this is both his greatest strength and his biggest weakness.

It should be borne in mind that literalism has a strong grip on American culture. The born-again evangelicals who were so crucial to Trump's victory take the Bible literally as the word of God. (They are, of course, highly selective in their application of this principle, but that does not stop them from being literal-minded.)

And the right-wing "originalist" legal tradition that Trump honoured this week when he nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court is also proudly literal: it purports to be able to discern what the framers of the US constitution really meant in the 18th century and be able to apply this meaning quite literally in the 21st.

Trump's style resonates with these habits of mind, even in its narcissistic weirdness: he is a fundamentalist believer in the literal truth of the Book of Trump; an originalist interpreter of the constitution of Trumperica. This places him, for his fans, somewhere between God and the founding fathers.

American carnage

However, taking himself literally is also Trump's weakness - because what he is being literal about is a dystopian fiction.

The "American carnage" he evoked in his inaugural address, the graveyard landscape and ruined republic, the communities stalked by immigrant rapists and jihadi terrorists, does have some distant correlatives in an actual America. But it is so wildly distorted that it has no practical use as a map of the country Trump is supposed to rule. And Trump doesn't know the difference between his crazy map, with "here be monsters" scrawled all over it, and the real territory it is supposed to chart.

What has been clarified this week is that Trump will not - and most likely cannot - do what a successful ruler needs to do: separate the fictional place in his head from the country he has to govern.

The president will go on as he has started, with empty gestures that have no purpose other than allowing him to claim that Trump has obeyed the sacred word of Trump. The misery wrought in people's lives and the damage to the global standing of the US will never matter beside that great imperative.

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Probably the smartest thing anyone said about Donald Trump before his election was the explanation by Salena Zito in The Atlantic of why he could get away with making wildly exaggerated or flatly false statements: "When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

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Five years ago, I came across an article in The New York Times about a spate of robberies in the Bronx. It was the kind of story that has been a staple in the metro sections of newspapers since there have been metro sections in newspapers, focusing on the reaction of people living in the neighborhood where robberies took place. But there was a notable wrinkle: Confronted by armed antagonists, the article sighed, many people refused to surrender their belongings, even when they had only a few dollars on them. The article tsk-tsked at community members for tempting fate. A criminologist offered a suggestion that it was "nuts for the victim to refuse." A few dollars, readers were told, are not worth one's life.

The article stuck with me in part because I'd once lived nearby that area and understood the realities of crime there. But I also was struck by the ways in which the efforts of a journalist, an editor, an expert, and even neighborhood residents seemed only to further a narrative of liberal condescension, missing crucial facts about life in this place.

Here's what I knew: People who live in a rough neighborhood and are confronted with a demand for money are forced to make calculations that people in safer, more affluent areas rarely think about. The few dollars in their pockets may represent their only way to get to work; surrendering cash is not only an immediate loss but also one that jeopardizes a future paycheck. More crucially, people who are known to be easily victimized likely will become frequent targets, a reality that may make their neighborhood virtually unlivable. What to the journalist seemed inscrutable was, to many residents, reasonable.
ICYMI: The tweet that derailed a news cycle
It was not lost on me that the journalist who wrote the story was white and that the neighborhood was largely black and Latinx. The article represented not simply a case of a journalist missing a story. The story, to me, spoke to the problem of what happens when the demographics of the Times -and American newspapers in general-look nothing like the demographics of the communities they cover. The people who are most likely to appear in these kinds of stories are the least likely to have a say in how those stories are told.

Conversations around diversity in media have tended to focus on cozy niceties. "Diversity" is often partnered with the word "inclusion" in our racial vocabulary. Since the conflicts of the 1960s, it has been increasingly apparent that our political, educational, and media institutions should not appear to be monochromatically white. But appearance is not the real problem. A democratic media is.

A half-century ago, members of the Kerner Commission-an advisory board formed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to a series of race riots-spelled out the role of a mostly white media in failing to cover the cause of unrest. It called on news outlets across the country to diversify. In the decades since, including "diverse" perspectives in media and elsewhere has become broadly acceptable-eight out of 10 Americans view ethnic diversity as "at least somewhat important" in the workplace.

Yet 50 years after Kerner, we still see chronic underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in print and broadcast media. In 2017, only 16.6 percent of journalists at daily newspapers were people of color; in the US population, more than 37 percent of people are nonwhite. According to a 2015 poll, more than three-quarters of the guests on Sunday morning shows were white. There is currently only one person of color, CNN's Don Lemon, hosting a weeknight primetime show on the three biggest cable news networks. This underrepresentation of minorities is a more polite way of saying that there is an overrepresentation of white people in media-79 percent of people working in the publishing industry are white. Two years ago, the dearth of people of color at the Oscars generated the satirical #OscarsSoWhite hashtag. A #NewsroomSoWhite hashtag would now be equally fitting.

There is something awkward about this kind of racial census taking-journalism is difficult and our media outlets, we like to think, are staffed by people who have the skills to get the job done. This is often the case. But it leaves a question unasked: How many people who have the skills to do this work never even get the opportunity to try?

I came to journalism through alternative newspapers in the Washington, DC, area. I contributed to The Hilltop, Howard University's student paper, and wrote for a small black-owned weekly, where I learned the fundamentals of writing on deadline. My first job at a majority-white publication was at the Washington City Paper, in 1996. David Carr, who would go on to become a crucial voice in media criticism at the Times before his death, in 2015, arrived at the City Paper from its sister publication, The Twin Cities Reader. The City Paper traditionally had chilly relations with much of the city's majority black population. In addition to the lack of minority representation on staff, the paper's critical coverage of the mayoralty of Marion Barry was often read as thinly veiled racial condescension.

Carr, with characteristic insouciance, set out to diversify the staff. He started a paid internship program and put out feelers for writers who might be interested in working at the paper. His first class of interns included me; Holly Bass, now a writer and playwright; Neil Drumming, currently a producer with This American Life; and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who would go on to win a National Book Award. Carr did not pat himself on the back for his recruitment style. (To my knowledge, he never even spoke of it outside of an article he wrote explaining the importance of newspaper and magazine internship programs at a point when many outlets were eliminating them.) But equally important was the fact that he did not hire any of us in pursuit of a vague, frankly condescending ideal of "inclusion." He explained in straightforward terms that he worried that there were specific stories missing from his newspaper. He wanted a better publication and believed our work would help him build one. And we did.

What happens when the demographics of the Times- and American newspapers in general-look nothing like the demographics of the communities they serve?

Years later, in 2013, I attended the annual conference of the City and Regional Magazine Association and participated in a panel on media diversity. My session was scheduled to immediately follow a panel, always well-attended, on best-selling magazine issues. The theory was that the huge lead-in would generate a spillover crowd for the diversity panel. Instead, people streamed out of the room, leaving just a handful of outlets lefttodiscussthedisappointingnumber ofpeopleofcolorintheindustry. Afterward, I talked to people from magazines in Detroit, Birmingham, Philadelphia, Washington, and Los Angeles-places with large black populations-and learned that none of them had any black writers on staff; the only black journalist at Atlanta's regional magazine had left a year or so earlier. Not only were outlets overwhelmingly white, it seemed, based on the lousy showing at the conference, that few people were concerned about inequality.

The implications of the media's representation problem could not be more clear. As race emerged as a central theme of the 2016 elections, crucial decisions about coverage were being made in institutions employing few of the people Donald Trump maligned. Euphemisms appeared when unblinking assessments of racism and religious bigotry were warranted. A persistent theme of "economic anxiety" was cited to explain away an animosity that was clearly connected to much darker objections. As a corollary to this, the work of journalists like Adam Serwer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Jamelle Bouie-which pointed to the centrality of racism as a motivating factor for Trump voters-came under attack. (Subsequent studies have validated their contentions.) Debates over the role of race in political coverage remain deeply predictable and dispiriting-as in the story of crime in the Bronx, where white journalists dominate, the most familiar and comfortable narratives hold sway.

There's another reason why diversity matters. The media exists in a climate of unprecedented hostility. The relationship between the White House and the press, frequently rocky, has devolved into a circumstance in which the president of the United States has referred to us as the "enemy of the people." Trump's attacks are facilitated by the fact that, in the past two decades, trust in the media has plummeted. This is a crisis of democracy, since the press's role as a guardian of democracy is founded upon the trust of the public. But at least some portion of that distrust is a product of people who rarely see themselves or their stories depicted in the media they consume. A great deal must be done to rebuild public trust. But it can begin by including the voices of all Americans. The press, tasked with protecting American democracy, is best secured by reflecting the American people.
ICYMI: The aggressive campaign that has extinguished 90 percent of Breitbart's advertisers
Jelani Cobb is the director of Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

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Five years ago, I came across an article in The New York Times about a spate of robberies in the Bronx. It was the kind of story that has been a staple in the metro sections of newspapers since there have been metro sections in newspapers, focusing on the reaction of people living in the [...]

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Trump has repeatedly attempted to undermine the press, including such well-respected publications as The New York Times. He has disseminated a wealth of unsubstantiated attacks on the media, though this baseless tweet from April pretty much sums it all up, "How bad is the New York Times -- the most inaccurate coverage constantly. Always trying to belittle. Paper has lost its way!"

As a candidate, Trump's gaslighting was manipulative. As president-elect, it is a deliberate attempt to destabilize journalism as a check on the power of government.

To be clear, the "us" here is everyone living under Trump. It's radical progressives, hard-line Republicans, and Jill Stein's weird cousin. The president of the United States cannot be lying to the American electorate with zero accountability. The threat of deception is not a partisan issue. Trump took advantage of the things that divide this country, pitting us against one another while lying his way to the Oval Office. Yes, everything is painfully clear in hindsight, but let's make sure Trump's win was the Lasik eye surgery we all so desperately needed.

The good news about this boiling-frog scenario is that we're not boiling yet. Trump is not going to stop playing with the burner until America realizes that the temperature is too high. It's on every single one of us to stop pretending it's always been so hot in here.

There are things you can and should be doing to turn your unrest into action, but first let's empower ourselves with information. Insist on fact-checking every Trump statement you read, every headline you share or even relay to a friend over coffee. If you find factual inaccuracies in an article, send an email to the editor and explain how things should have been clearer. Inform yourself about which outlets are trustworthy and which aren't. If you need extra help, seek out a browser extension that flags misleading sites or print out a list of fake outlets, such as the one by communications professor Melissa Zimdars, and tape it to your laptop. Do a thorough search before believing the agenda Trump distributes on Twitter. Refuse to accept information simply because it is fed to you, and don't be afraid to ask questions. That is now the base level of what is required of all Americans. If facts become a point of debate, the very definition of freedom will be called into question.

It will be far easier to take on Trump's words when there is no question of what he's said or whether he means it. Regardless of your beliefs, we all must insist on that level of transparency. Trump is no longer some reality-TV clown who used to fire people on The Apprentice. He is the president of the United States.

The road ahead is a treacherous one. There are unprecedented amounts of ugliness to untangle, from deciding whether our president can be an admitted sexual predator to figuring out how to stop him from threatening an entire religion. It's incredible that any of those things could seem like a distraction from a greater peril, or be only the cherry-picked issues in a seemingly unending list of gaffes, but the gaslights are flickering. When defending each of the identities in danger of being further marginalized, we must remember the thing that binds this pig-headed hydra together. As we spin our newfound rage into action, it is imperative to remember, across identities and across the aisle, as a country and as individuals, we have nothing without the truth.

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Trump has repeatedly attempted to undermine the press, including such well-respected publications as The New York Times. He has disseminated a wealth of unsubstantiated attacks on the media, though this baseless tweet from April pretty much sums it all up, "How bad is the New York Times -- the most inaccurate coverage constantly.

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Liveleak.com - Embarrassingly Stupid Americans, the Video!

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by Jason Mattera from HumanEvents.com 07/06/2010 I could've also..

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Mikva Challenge 2010 Campaign Kick-Off Video

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Mikva Challenge's Elections in Action team created a video to kick-off the 2010 campaign season in Illinois. The video highlights the candidates competing in the Gubernatorial and Senatorial races. The General Elections in Illinois will be on Tuesday, November 2nd.

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Frankenstorm Sandy has passed over the New York City area on her slow, destructive path north, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and mayhem from North Carolina up to at least Connecticut. The biggest mess, though, is in New York City: The streets and subway tunnels are filled with water, power lines and power stations have erupted in flames, fires have taken out whole blocks in outer Queens - and New Yorkers with cameras, both professional and cellphone varieties, captured much of the damage. But among those stunning photos, telling the story of Sandy to people anxiously scanning their Twitter feeds, Instagram, and web browsers, a number of fakes also went viral. Some helpful journalists have laid out ways to sniff out the fakes from the real thing, and others have turned to debunking the frauds themselves. Here, a lightly curated gallery of some Sandy fakes:

1. Some of the photos making the rounds on Twitter are real, but have nothing to do with Sandy. This amazing view of a storm brewing over lower Manhattan, for example, is from an April 2011 tornado, captured on film by The Wall Street Journal:

2. Also in the not-fake-but-not-Sandy category is this picture purporting to be from a hurricane-ravaged McDonald's in Virginia. It's not. In a case of life imitating art, the photo is from a 2009 installation/film called, appropriately enough, Flooded McDonald's:

3. The bulk of the faux photos involve varying degree of skill with image-editing software like Photoshop. In this imaginative mash-up, a scuba diver explores the 14th Street-Union Square subway stop in Manhattan:

4. Sharks were well represented in the doctored flood photos from New York and New Jersey. This photo, from Kevin McCarty, of actually flooded Brigantine, N.J., fooled a lot of people on Twitter but mostly earned eye-rolls from his friends on Facebook:

5. This frequently-retweeted photos is also from Brigantine. A Twitter user named Tom Phillips found the shark used in this Photoshop job in a Google image search:

6. The final shark photo, also purportedly from a street in New Jersey, not only isn't real, it isn't new. It first made the rounds after 2011's Hurricane Irene, when it (slightly more plausibly) pretended to be in the streets of Puerto Rico:

7. This impressive-looking storm gathering behind the Statue of Liberty is actually from 2004, in Nebraska, captured on film by storm chaser and photographer Mike Hollingshead:

8. In this photo, Lady Liberty looks like she's under attack from Sandy's massive storm surge, but really is being washed away by the Hollywood special effects team behind 2004's The Day After Tomorrow. In a minor bit of post-screengrab doctoring, the image "has had a New York TV logo superimposed on it to fool people," says The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal.

9. Given how eager Twitter users have been to sic Sandy on her, Lady Liberty could be excused for trying to lay low, as in this not-even-trying-to-fool-you Photoshop job:

10. Like No. 9, this one didn't take any sophisticated sleuthing to debunk. The Atlantic's Madrigal scores it " fake (but awesome)":

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Frankenstorm Sandy has passed over the New York City area on her slow, destructive path north, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and mayhem from North Carolina up to at least Connecticut.

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WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama reportedly said The U.S. Constitution is out-of-date, so he is ripping it up and writing a new one.

President Barack Obama reportedly told reporters last night that the U.S. Constitution has become a hindrance to progress in America. "The document is so out-dated, that it is now becoming a hindrance to governing the country."

Obama has signed an Executive Order voiding the U.S. Constitution. "We need to move forward. We need change."

Obama reportedly said he has already drafted a new constitution and that Americans "will love what I came up with." Insiders say Obama is keeping a lot of old elements from the original constitution "he's just making it better, bringing it into the 21st century," said White House Spokesman, Jay Carney.

Many Democrats said that President Obama was a constitutional scholar and probably the only President - since the Founding Fathers - who is qualified to change the Constitution.

"President Obama knows more about the Constitution than any man who has ever lived," said Minority Leader, Nancy Pelosi. "It's about time we change that document and we are lucky to have President Obama to do it."

Republicans, of course, were outraged that Obama would even consider changing the constitution, and they vowed to fight. "We will fight this to the bitter end," said Speaker of the House, John Boehner, "there's no way we are going to let the Constitution of the United States be altered even a little bit. If there are changes to be made to the Constitution it should be done the appropriate way - through amendments and we think Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor are the ones to make any changes."

Insiders say the new Constitution will look a lot like the constitutions of Kenya, France and Soviet Russia.

There are many, many changes in the New U.S. Constitution, but here are a few of the highlights.

1) SUPREME COURT - Will now have 11 members, which reflects the growing U.S. population. President Obama will appoint two new members immediately. The President can name a new justice without the approval of Congress.

2) EXECUTIVE FINANCIAL POWER - The President will have the power to unilaterally enact any financial policy he chooses, without approval of Congress. He must inform them, but they can not "stop" the President from promoting his (or her) agenda.

3) LOBBYISTS - They will now be outlawed. There will be no more lobbyists in Washington. However, there are some exemptions outlined in the New Constitution" : Trial Lawyers, National Education Association and unions. They will all be able to lobby.

4) REPRESENTATION - California, New York and Illinois will double the number of representatives in Congress - permanently. "The President feels that the smartest people in the country live in these states, so they should be over-represented," said a White House spokesperson.

5) GUNS & RELIGION - Both will be banned in the United States.

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WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama reportedly said The U.S. Constitution is out-of-date, so he is ripping it up and writing a new one. President Barack Obama reportedly told reporters last night that the U.S. Constitution has become a hindrance to progress in America.

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As a presidential candidate, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York was not a glad-hander, not a flesh-presser. He was stiff and tended toward pomposity. "The only man who could strut sitting down" was the crack that made the rounds. But on Nov. 2, Election Day, an overwhelming sense of inevitability hung about the Republican nominee. The polls and the pundits left no room for doubt: Dewey was going to defeat President Harry S. Truman. And the Tribune would be the first to report it.

Arguably the most famous headline in the newspaper's 150-year history, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN is every publisher's nightmare on every election night. Like most newspapers, the Tribune, which had dismissed him on its editorial page as a "nincompoop," was lulled into a false sense of security by polls that repeatedly predicted a Dewey victory. Critically important, though, was a printers' strike, which forced the paper to go to press hours before it normally would.As the first-edition deadline approached, managing editor J. Loy "Pat" Maloney had to make the headline call, although many East Coast tallies were not yet in. Maloney banked on the track record of Arthur Sears Henning, the paper's longtime Washington correspondent. Henning said Dewey. Henning was rarely wrong. Besides, Life magazine had just carried a big photo of Dewey with the caption "The next President of the United States."

The ink was hardly dry on 150,000 copies of the paper when radio bulletins reported that the race was surprisingly close. The headline was changed to DEMOCRATS MAKE SWEEP OF STATE OFFICES for the second edition. Truman went on to take Illinois and much of the Midwest in this whopping election surprise. Radio comedian Fred Allen noted Truman was the "first president to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk." The Tribune blamed the pollsters for its mistake.

The headline might well have been quickly forgotten but for a chance encounter two days later in St. Louis.

Truman, traveling by rail to Washington, stepped to the rear platform of the train and was handed a copy of the Tribune early edition. He had as low an opinion of the Tribune as it did of him. Truman held the paper up, and photographers preserved the moment for history.

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As a presidential candidate, Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York was not a glad-hander, not a flesh-presser. He was stiff and tended toward pomposity. "The only man who could strut sitting down" was the crack that made the rounds. But on Nov. 2, Election Day , an overwhelming sense of inevitability hung about the Republican nominee.