C. Ryan Barber and Jimmy Vielkind, Wall Street Journal; Trump Suggests Using National Guard Against ‘Enemy from Within’ on Election Day
"Donald Trump suggested deploying the National Guard or military to respond to what he termed the “enemy from within” on Election Day, saying in an interview that aired Sunday that he was concerned about the chaos wrought by "radical left lunatics".
NPR/Fresh Air ; Journalist Maria Ressa explains 'How to Stand Up to a Dictator'
"DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I am Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross. Our guest today, Maria Ressa, is an international journalist who's widely celebrated around the world. She was Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2018 and last year won the Nobel Peace Prize along with Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov. But in her home country, the Philippines, Ressa faces multiple criminal charges and regulatory actions, which could shut down Rappler, the online news organization she heads, and land her in jail for decades. Rappler drew the anger of President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his violent campaign against alleged drug users, because the news site did stories about corruption and cronyism and exposed a web of online disinformation networks with ties to Duterte.
Before co-founding Rappler in 2011, Ressa spent many years covering Southeast Asia for CNN, breaking important stories about Islamic terrorist networks. Ressa's story isn't just that of a crusading journalist exposing corruption, though it is that; she's also focused on the role of social media networks, who, she says, are weakening democracy by enabling the rise of online disinformation and hate mobs in the service of authoritarian rulers around the world. Her new memoir is "How To Stand Up To A Dictator: The Fight For Our Future."...
DAVIES: To kind of summarize here, it sounds like what you're proposing is that news organizations need to overcome some of their competitive instincts and work together when there is important fact-checking to be done, connect them to other organizations in a way that puts energy and emotion into it and get that out there.
RESSA: Think about it like this. Like, if you don't have integrity of facts, you cannot have integrity of elections. And ultimately, what that means is that these elections will be swayed by information warfare. I mean, you know, it's funny. Americans actually look at the midterms. And they say, well, it wasn't as bad as it could be. Death by a thousand cuts - it's still bad. And if we follow, you know, what - the trend that we're seeing, if nothing significant changes in our information ecosystem, in the way we deliver the news, we will elect more illiberal leaders democratically in 2023, in 2024.
And what they do is they crumble institutions of democracy in their own countries, like you've seen in mine. But they do more than that. They ally together globally. And what they do is, at a certain point, the geopolitical power shift globally will change. Democracy will die. That point is 2024. We must figure out what civic engagement, what we do as citizens today, to reclaim, to make sure democracy survives."
Dorothy Wickham, The Guardian; In 35 years’ reporting from Solomon Islands, I have never seen such secrecy as the last few months
"As we deal with the attention our country is getting since the signing of the security agreement with China, it is now more important than ever to have a free press and a government that wants to communicate their actions to their people."
“Our biggest enemy is the news media. How can we rein in the news media?”The man then looked at the Ravalli Republic reporter sitting next to him and raised his hands as if he would like to wring his neck.Gianforte smiled and pointed at the reporter.“We have someone right here,” the candidate said. “It seems like there is more of us than there is of him.”
"China’s internet, always censored and firewalled, is now even more strictly separated from the rest of the world’s than ever before, and becoming more so. China’s own internet companies (Baidu as a search engine rather than Google, WeChat for Twitter) are more heavily censored. Virtual private networks and other work-arounds, tolerated a decade ago—the academic who invented China’s “Great Firewall” system of censorship even bragged about the six VPNs he used to keep up on foreign developments—are now under governmental assault. When you find a network that works, you dare not mention its name on social media or on a website that could alert the government to its existence. “It’s an endless cat-and-mouse,” the founder of a California-based VPN company, which I’m deliberately not identifying, recently told me. “We figure out a new route or patch, and then they notice that people are using us and they figure out how to block it. Eventually they wear most users down.” On a multiweek visit to China early last year, I switched among three VPNs and was able to reach most international sites using my hotel-room Wi-Fi. On a several-day visit last December, the hassle of making connections was not worth it, and I just did without Western news sources. China’s print and broadcast media have always been state-controlled and pro-government. But a decade ago I heard from academics and party officials that “reasonable” criticism from the press actually had an important safety-valve function, as did online commentary, in alerting the government to emerging problem spots. Those days are gone. Every week or two the Chinese press carries warnings, more and more explicit, by President Xi Jinping and his colleagues that dissent is not permissible and the party’s interests come first."
"The Guardian reported late on Monday night that Melania Trump’s lawyers have sent threatening letters and are considering filing lawsuits against a variety of media organizations – including the Daily Mail, Politico and the Week – for reporting on rumors of Melania Trump’s past, including her alleged immigration status when she came to the United States. This is the quintessential example of the disturbing precedent Peter Thiel has just set by creating a blueprint for billionaires to destroy news organizations they do not like. He has shown that all they need is a little persistence. And in a media landscape that is increasingly dominated by the rich and powerful, that should give even Gawker’s most ardent critics pause... In the end, even if you think Gawker deserved punishment, media organizations should not face the financial death penalty for a mistake, even a deplorable and egregious one. After all, there is probably one billionaire or another who hates pretty much every news organization in the world worth their salt. If they all decide to go down the path Thiel took, how many publications will be left when they’re done?"
"The Sun can still call an election correctly, can still elicit outrage and comment. The Mirror, The Sun and The Mail hope to turn their vast online audiences into a profitable business model. And there is a gradual resurgence of a willingness to pay for quality. The Times and The Sunday Times, paywalled and protected, have become profitable perhaps for the first time in history. Paywalls — once seen as an embodiment of Luddism in the giddy world of the free internet — now seem essential to the survival of professional writing. Yet there has never been a more hostile environment to journalism than exists today, and not only in economic terms. The democratizing effect of social media, a potentially healthful development, has also given rise to a cynicism directed toward the mainstream media. This is all part of a new angriness in politics."
"The news and gossip site Gawker.com is shuttering after a lengthy court battle with former professional wrestling star Hulk Hogan, who was secretly backed by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel. The Post's Margaret Sullivan and Paul Farhi look at Gawker's legacy and how this could be a dangerous precedent for news critics."
