Facebook Shouldn’t Fact-Check; New York Times, 11/29/16

Jessica Lessin, New York Times; Facebook Shouldn’t Fact-Check:

"If you don’t believe that Facebook’s policies could sway the news industry, you haven’t been paying attention over the past five years. Publications have been suckered into tweaking their content and their business models to try to live off the traffic Facebook sends them. They’ve favored Facebook clicks over their core readers, and are no closer to addressing plummeting print revenues. What would happen if the distribution of their articles on Facebook was tied to submitting data about their sources or conforming to some site-endorsed standards about what constitutes a trustworthy news source?

My fellow reporters and editors will argue that I am letting Facebook off too easy. While my husband did work there for a brief period, my position isn’t a defense of the company, which I have covered critically for years. I simply don’t trust Facebook, or any one company, with the responsibility for determining what is true."

Top American Historians Find a Modern Way to Rip Donald Trump; Daily Beast, 7/13/16

Eleanor Clift, Daily Beast; Top American Historians Find a Modern Way to Rip Donald Trump:

"“I just finished a children’s book on Grover Cleveland. I know all of them [the former presidents], and they are deeply flawed—but none of them have the glaring flaws of Donald Trump. Those of us who spend our lives studying American history are upset about the rise of Trump. There’s been nobody like him. I wish there were a Murrow [Edward R.] or a Cronkite [Walter] to expose him,” Burns said, voicing nostalgia for the giants of the journalistic past who took on Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunts, and brought the truth about the Vietnam War into American living rooms.

Today’s media, for whatever reason, has failed, said Burns."

My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump; New York Times, 3/26/16

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times; My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump:

"All politicians spin, of course. But all in all, I’ve never met a national politician in the U.S. who is so ill informed, evasive, puerile and deceptive as Trump.

When the fact-check website PolitiFact was ready to choose its “lie of the year” for 2015, it found that the only real contenders were falsehoods by Trump. So it lumped them together and awarded the title to “the many campaign misstatements of Donald Trump.”

That pattern of prevarication is what we in the media, especially television, didn’t adequately highlight, leaving many voters with the perception that Trump is actually a straight shooter."