U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin blasted the Trump administration for using federal government websites and emails to display partisan messages to the American people, at times appearing to be from federal government civil service employees, and reportedly without their knowledge or consent.
Numerous federal websites, including the homepages of the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, all show partisan messages specifically blaming Democrats for the shutdown of the federal government.
Outgoing out-of-office auto-reply email messages at the Education Department and other government agencies also blamed Democrats for the shutdown. At the DOE, messages were inserted into emails and appeared as if the sender had written them, causing frustration among several civil service workers concerned about possibly appearing to violate the Hatch Act.
“I have been contacted by numerous constituents outraged by the fact that the Trump Administration is now sending out blatantly partisan messages, both on official Websites and through emails from federal agencies,” Congressman Raskin, the Ranking Member of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement on Thursday, calling the messages “Orwellian miscommunication” and an “intolerable abuse of power.”
“These official agency messages blame ‘Senate Democrats’ and the ‘Radical Left’ for the government shutdown.” He alleged that several taxpayer-funded agencies “are now being turned into MAGA propaganda organs.”
“Taxpayers cannot be forced to be a captive audience for propaganda against the Administration’s opponents every time they inquire about their benefits and rights,” Raskin continued. “Nor may an Administration grant itself a campaign contribution of free nationwide political ads by hijacking agency service messages.”
Federal employees at the Department of the Interior are reportedly raising alarms over a weekly video series titled “Inside Interior,” which they describe as "propaganda" — a slick, over‑the‑top portrayal of President Donald Trump and agency leadership, complete with staged scenes and breathless narration.
The Daily Beast reported Wednesday that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, once tagged “Diva Doug” for requesting political appointees to bake chocolate chip cookies and summoning a U.S. Park Police helicopter for his own personal use, now finds himself at the center of growing backlash within his own department.
Staffers deride the Environment and Natural Resources Agency as “The Department of Propaganda,” a moniker born from their mounting frustration with weekly “Inside Interior” videos, widely criticized for their slick, "Dear Leader"-style presentation and unabashed praise of Trump and Burgum to a lesser extent.
The latest installment, according to the report, touts that “Interior made major moves to strengthen America’s energy future, protect taxpayer interests, and keep our nation’s capital city safe.”
But the true inflection point came with a July 4 special that left many shaken. The clip opens with Trump dancing to the Village People’s YMCA, then cuts to him exiting Air Force One, greeted by cheering construction workers, before returning to more footage of Trump, much to the chagrin of those compelled to watch.
The report further noted that the narration heralds the day with a patriotic fervor likened to authoritarian regimes: “Happy Birthday America!” “Today we celebrate 249 years of American liberty, freedom and strength and we’re doing it under the fearless leadership of President Donald J. Trump, who reminds us every day what true patriotism looks like as he works tirelessly to make America great again.”
Critics among the staff have dubbed the presentation “North Korea‑worthy," according to the report.
Meanwhile, many already felt demoralized by deep cuts tied to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative and a policy shift prioritizing fossil fuel development over conservation.
A National Park Service employee told The Beast: “I have never seen a more blatant and deplorable display of propaganda on behalf of the Trump administration.”
Adding insult to injury, they note, “They even called for the USA to celebrate the 4th ‘the MAGA way!’”
Click here to read the Daily Beast's report in full (subscription required).
The two-decades old online dumping ground known as 4Chan got hacked out of existence last week by a rival message board, but WIRED reporter Ryan Broderick examined how the former home of harmless cat memes became the toxic network that influenced X and YouTube and eventually saw its darkest elements infect the U.S. government.
Founded by 15-year-old Christopher "Moot" Poole as a spin-off site for a Japanese message board 2chan, or “Futaba Channel,” 4Chan evolved into the internet's "Wild West" devoid of organization or moderators. Without solid rules, Collins said he watched over the next two decades as a site featuring owls saying “ORLY” devolved into a fan club for mass shooters and the launchpad for the infamous Gamergate.
Broderick says it also became “the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world. A virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for.”
“I had a front row seat to the way … timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet,” writes Broderick. “The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak.”
The writer traced 4Chan’s impact on global democracy throughout the 2010s, following it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil, "as 4chan's users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyber-bullying."
4Chan's poison it carried worked its way into government, particularly in the United States.
"[4Chan's] user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," said The Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins. "Twitter became 4Chan, then the 4Chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official."
Both Collins and Broderick followed 4Xhan's rise in the 2010s “from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration.” Once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, Collins said there was “really no point to 4Chan anymore.”
“Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name, and even pays you for it?” Collins said.
Read the full WIRED story at this link (subscription required)
The Trump administration’s long-promised “largest mass deportation operation” in U.S. history, which was announced to begin “on day one,” has so far resulted in what some experts and immigration advocates suggest are an average number to mild increase in arrests and deportations. Activists, experts, and journalists are working to provide context to the White House’s claims of its own effectiveness.
“The White House said immigration agents have arrested 538 undocumented immigrantswith criminal records and deported ‘hundreds’ more,” The Washington Post reported Friday. “Those numbers, if accurate, would be relatively modest for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement surge operations — a possible indication that the Trump administration’s show of force has so far outpaced the government’s capacity to deliver on the president’s lofty goals.”
Ahead of his inauguration on Monday, the media was awash with reports that President Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants would start Tuesday, the day after he was sworn into office, and one day after it was originally supposed to. Chicago was identified in reports as the first city to be targeted by Trump’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities.
“ICE will start arresting public safety threats and national security threats on day one,” Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan said, according to the BBC. “We’ll be arresting people across the country, uninhibited by any prior administration guidelines.”
But Homan, who served as acting director of ICE during Trump’s first administration, then served up a curious claim: “Why Chicago was mentioned specifically, I don’t know.” He went on to suggest that the “leaked” Chicago details could be putting the safety of federal agents at risk.
“What was leaked in Chicago was more specific, what was happening, and that raises officer safety concern,” Homan said, according to The Hill.
The mass arrests and deportations, despite appearing to be average, were heralded by the media.
Wednesday night, Fox News host Jesse Watters posted video to his Facebook page, declaring, “FOX NEWS ALERT: The largest mass deportation operation in American history is underway, and Primetime has exclusive photos of ICE’s first arrests.”
Numerous media outlets blared that the Trump administration on Thursday arrested 538 undocumented immigrants.
And yet, according to a former Capitol Hill staffer, President Joe Biden’s average was often higher.
The White House on Friday posted an image to social media, declaring, “Deportation Flights Have Begun.”
Immigration experts, activists, and journalists pushed back hard.
“Deportation flights were taking place under Biden too. What’s new is the military aircraft,” noted The Bulwark’s Sam Stein. CNN’s Brian Stelter added, “Also new: The PR strategy.”
PR appears to be a major focus.
The Washington Examiner’s DHS reporter, Anna Giaritelli, quickly corrected the record on the White House’s above social media post: “DHS official authorized to speak with media said this is not a deportation flight — these are roughly 80 Guatemalans who were arrested AT the southern border recently and are being REPATRIATED. That is legally not a deportation.”
Immigration activist Thomas Cartwright, who, according to The Washington Post “tracks ICE deportations for the immigrant advocacy group Witness at the Border,” pointed to this data, and also challenged the White House’s narrative.
“Theater of the absurd,” he charged. “The only thing new about this is subjecting people to transport on a cargo plane rather than charter and the LOWER number of people on the plane – 75-80 compared to the average for ICE deportation flights to Guatemala of 125. In 2024 there were 508 deportation flights to Guatemala and in 2020 – 2023: 247, 184, 369, and 470, respectively. The 508 in 2024 represents just under an average of 10 deportation flights per week to Guatemala. Counting this flight there have been only 5 this week through Thursday.”
Immigration attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, also responded to the White House’s post: “This is utter propaganda and you have to make sure not to fall for it. There were dozens of deportation flights every single week over the last year and before that. Deportation flights never stopped. If they try to claim otherwise, they are lying to the American people.”
Reichlin-Melnick also blasted White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in response to another of her posts on immigration. “Are these people seriously trying to suggest the deportation flights have not already been going on? They’re lying to you. The Biden administration had already ramped up deportations from the border to a higher level than it was under the Trump admin.”
And pointing to Cartwright’s data, he noted, “In 2024, ICE carried out an average of 4.27 deportation flights per day (which includes weekends and holidays) The normal weekday total was above 6 deportation flights a day, per @thcartwright. Deportation flights never stopped. This is propaganda.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times’ Hamed Aleaziz on Friday afternoon told MSNBC that the Trump administration is really going “on the offensive when it comes to putting out pictures of ICE deportations from the White House Twitter account, from Tom Holman being on several new spots, talking about deportations, it is front and center. And I think it’s an effort to show that President Trump is fulfilling this promise of mass deportations.”
He says their goal is they “want people to be uncomfortable. They want there to be a climate of fear. And ultimately, maybe people will decide that they want to leave this country voluntarily?”
“The howl of the cave man.” This is how a 1918 Los Angeles Times article described the music of Brahms and Bach. A year earlier the U.S. had declared war against Germany and waded into the tragedy of the First World War. The propaganda machine was in full swing. Germans were brutes—close cousins of the barbaric Huns—and detesting all things German became a badge of patriotic pride. The time was also ripe for the contributions of German-Americans to be scrubbed from the history books. Figures like Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Blümner, and Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen, whose contributions to the U.S. are vast, were eclipsed by caricatures of the brutish German lusting for American blood. German-Americans learned to keep a low profile and the collective demonization induced a historical amnesia from which we have yet to awaken.
Today, German-Americans are the largest ancestry group in the U.S., with some 50 million citizens, but their history and their identity has been largely disappeared. This may seem irrelevant, but the history of how it happened tells us a great deal about our present and how ethnic groups can come in and out of favor depending on the geopolitics of the day. As Art Silverman and Robert Siegel noted in an “All Things Considered” segment titled, “During World War I, U.S. Government Propaganda Erased German Culture”: “today … what happened a century ago has special relevance … World War I inspired an outbreak of nativism and xenophobia that targeted German immigrants, Americans of German descent, and even the German language.”
I grew up in Germany and was educated in the post-World War II model, which, for obvious reasons, stressed a respect for pluralism and cultivated a global view of politics and culture. As a result I’ve always been sensitive to the ways in which propaganda shapes our opinions of different communities. The daily scandals of how Latin American immigrants, many of them fleeing horrors that the U.S. had a hand in producing, are brutalized at our borders; and the harassment and attacks on Muslims come out of and occur alongside a propaganda campaign to dehumanize these groups as criminal, devious, and irrational. The ethnicities change, but the message stays the same.
Unfortunately, this model has proven reliable in the effort to tar an entire population, and I’ve spent a good deal of time studying how it was applied to Germans and German-Americans. It begins with a well-crafted propaganda campaign initiated only days after the U.S. declared war on Germany. On April 17, 1917, President Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information (CPI), which recruited 150,000 academics, business people, and talent from the media and arts to promote the war to voters. Up to 20,000 newspaper pieces per week were printed based on “voluntary censorship” and CPI handouts. That was probably the birth of “embedded.” One of the CPI’s primary goals was to shape public opinion of the new enemies—Germans. Professor Vernon Kellogg, a member of the intelligentsia, who served this effort, eloquently expressed himself in a CPI publication, writing, “Will it be any wonder, if, after the war, the people of the world, when they recognize any human being as German, will shrink aside so that they may not touch him as he passes, or stoop for stones to drive him from his path?”
Hollywood did its part by producing films like “The Kaiser: The Beast of Berlin” and “Wolves of Kultur,” which cemented the idea of Germans as a public menace in the minds of movie-goers. Super-patriotic volunteer groups joined in, whipping up a tidal wave of war hysteria, hunting for imaginary spies or saboteurs who did not exist, trampling civil rights along the way. Books were burned, citizens were tarred and feathered, German names of places, streets, foods, and objects were erased. Bach went from being a seminal composer to a villain whose work exemplified the monstrous German aesthetic. Teaching the German language was outlawed in more than a dozen states.
In that same year an anti-German mob demanded that the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee (once called the “German Athens”) cancel a scheduled performance of “William Tell” by Friedrich Schiller. They underscored their demand by placing a machine gun in front of the theater. When the theater offered to show a comedy instead, the crowd threatened to “break up the Hun show.” The mob got its way and nothing showed on the night “William Tell” was due to run (Ostergren and Vale, 1997). It is interesting to note that Schiller drew his inspiration from the American and French Revolution. “William Tell” was the same play W.E.B. Du Bois read in German at Fisk University before he studied in Berlin where his “first awakening to social reform began” (Hutchins Center, 2013).
On April 5, 1918, almost exactly a year after Wilson inaugurated the CPI, Robert Prager, a German miner living in Illinois, was lynched. Not only had he committed the sin of being a German immigrant, but he was suspected of being a socialist. Ironically, one of the reasons Prager’s application for membership in the United Mine Workers Union was declined was precisely because he was German. Eleven men were arrested, tried, and ultimately acquitted of the crime. On April 11, 1918, the Washington Post editorialized, “The more one ponders Senator Overman’s estimate of 400,000 German spies the harder it is to grow righteously indignant over the Illinois lynching.” Lee Slater Overman was a senator from North Carolina who chaired a committee zealously dedicated to routing out real or perceived spying and other treasonous activities on the part of Germans and others.
If the propaganda served the war effort, it also served the economic interests of the elite. Not unlike today, discontent among workers was profound. It ran so deep that the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, an arm of Congress, admitted: “The workers of the nation, through compulsory and oppressive methods, legal and illegal, are denied the full product of their toil … Citizens numbering millions smart under a sense of injustice and oppression. The extent and depth of industrial unrest can hardly be exaggerated” (Karp, 1979, p. 217).
When miners in Bisbee, Arizona, went on strike in June 1917, Walter Dodge, president of Phelps Dodge Corporation, a mining company impacted by the strike, declared, “I believe the government will be able to show that there is German influence behind this movement” (Bisbee Daily Review, 1917, July 11).
In a stroke of propagandistic genius, cartoonist H.T. Webster managed to conflate the Kaiser, the top German aristocrat, with the International Workers of the World. His cartoon, which ran in the New York Globe in 1917, shows the acronym IWW printed over the Kaiser’s face.
By the time the war was over, ordinary German-Americans had learned to lay low, speak English exclusively, and release any attachment to their cultural heritage. Perhaps the best measure of the success of the propaganda effort against Germans is how quickly and effectively they learned to de-identify as German. We may be tempted to mistake this for assimilation, but history shows the hand of coercion was placed firmly around the German-American community.
So, why care about this? After all, it’s not as if any American is being attacked or oppressed today based on their German heritage. For me, as a German-American and a student of history, the anti-German propaganda effort is no mere historical footnote or anomalous descent into xenophobia. It is a template—hardly the first, but a vivid one no less—for what we are seeing today. When I look at the faces of Latin American children forcibly separated from their families or hear the racism directed at Muslims, I know that the demonization of communities does not happen accidentally and that an intellectual as well as legal and political infrastructure is required for them to become victims in the larger game of geopolitics. The material loss for those affected is incalculable and the loss of culture heritage for them and everyone else is often a quiet casualty of the war waged against them. History gives us the vantage point to see how and why enemies are created. It also gives us an unmistakable warning that we would be wise to heed.
CNN reporter Jim Acosta fiercely criticized Sean Hannity on Wednesday after the Fox News host had said Acosta deserved the verbal abuse he endured while reporting at President Donald Trump's campaign rally the previous night.
"Hannity is a propagandist for profit, peddling lies every night," Acosta said in a tweet. "He says he’s just a talk show host, not a journalist. But he’s injecting poison into the nation’s political bloodstream warping public attitudes about the press. I’m confident in the long run the truth will prevail."
During an appearance on HLN with S.E. Cupp earlier in the day, Acosta had said of the rally: “Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore."
He added: “I don’t know how to put it any more plainly than that. Americans should not be treating their fellow Americans in this way.”
After the incident at the rally, some of which Acosta recorded, Hannity said Tuesday night that CNN deserved the ire and ridicule.
"I’m actually going to give your network some advice, if you have an open mind and an open heart," Hannity said. "The people of this country are screaming at you for a reason. They don’t like your unfair, abusively biased treatment of the president of the United States."
Ironically, after press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant in June because of her association with the administration, many on Fox News and other media outlets had pleaded for "civility." In this context, Hannity said some of Trump's opponents were "utterly psychotic and unhinged."
While much of the world's attention is currently centered on efforts by Russian operatives to sow discord among the American electorate with fake social media posts and "troll farms" during the 2016 presidential election, an Oxford Internet Institute study published Friday found that use of social media by governments looking to "spread junk information and propaganda to voters" has become a global phenomenon.
"Social media manipulation is big business," the researchers found. "We estimate that tens of millions of dollars are being spent on social media manipulation campaigns, involving tens of thousands of professional staff."
While there is nothing new about political parties and governments using disinformation to manipulate elections at home and abroad, the Oxford researchers note that the massive, easily accessible, and lightly regulated platforms offered by Facebook and Twitter have become enormously powerful tools in the hands of political actors, who have used social media to kick their propaganda campaigns into overdrive and cast doubt on science and public institutions.
"Although closely related to some of the dirty tricks and negative campaigning we might expect in close races (and which have always played a part in political campaigning ), what makes this phenomenon unique is the deliberate use of computational propaganda to manipulate voters and shape the outcome of elections," the study notes.
In 30 of the 48 countries examined, Oxford researchers discovered "evidence of political parties using computational propaganda during elections or referenda. In emerging and Western democracies, sophisticated data analytics and political bots are being used to poison the information environment, promote skepticism and distrust, polarize voting constituencies, and undermine the integrity of democratic processes."
Despite recent efforts by Facebook, Twitter, and governments to rein in the proliferation of fake stories on social media, Oxford researchers found that the use of bots to quickly spread disinformation is growing exponentially.
"We actually found 38 countries used bots last year, compared with 17 in the year before," Philip Howard, director of the Oxford Internet Institute and co-author of the new study, toldMcClatchy.
"Social media have gone from being the natural infrastructure for sharing collective grievances and coordinating civic engagement, to being a computational tool for social control, manipulated by canny political consultants, and available to politicians in democracies and dictatorships alike," the study concludes. "We cannot wait for national courts to sort out the technicalities of infractions after running an election or referendum. Protecting our democracies now means setting the rules of fair play before voting day, not after."
Nonetheless, in the wake of major events, a judicious reading of their content can sometimes offer insights into the reclusive state’s priorities and resolve. As a political scientist and longtime observer of North Korean media, I followed this past week’s coverage of the inter-Korean summit with great interest.
The most striking aspect was how complete and unreserved it seemed compared with coverage of the previous summits in 2000 and 2007. Unusually prompt, detailed and thorough, it showed the two leaders interacting on an equal footing – which may signal that the country is serious about cooperation.
Less scripted, more open
This most recent summit represents the third time that the two Koreas’ top leaders have met.
The previous two summits were held on the North Korean side, and the coverage seemed meticulously scripted. It was likely written well in advance.
In the years after the first inter-Korean summit in 2000, the joint declaration that emerged from that meeting – known as the June 15 Declaration – came to have almost talismanic power in North Korean media. It expressed a broad commitment to continued dialogue, economic cooperation and family reunions. Whenever the South levied sanctions or criticism in response to provocations, North Korea would counter that the South was failing to uphold the declaration.
The subsequent October 4 Declaration of the second inter-Korean summit in 2007 has been similarly brandished. That declaration added a commitment to “terminate military hostilities, ease tension and ensure peace.�
After the collapse of the so-called “Sunshine� Policy – the pro-engagement policy South Korea pursued from 1998 to 2008 – the North frequently cited both declarations as symbols of South Korean perfidy.
This latest summit – the first to be hosted by the South Korean side – represented the first opportunity to observe North Korean media reacting in near-real time to a ceremonial event that they had not choreographed themselves. Indeed, this is the first time we have seen North Korean cameramen scrambling and maneuvering for shots alongside their southern counterparts.
We can expect that the newest declaration – the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity and Unification of the Korean Peninsula – will carry similar weight in the country’s political discourse.
The main party mouthpiece, Rodong Shinmun, published the full text of the Panmunjom Declaration. There were no edits or omissions except for some minor stylistic differences (e.g. “North and South Korea� where the South Korean version read “South and North Korea�). In addition, North Korea’s most famous news anchor, the long-serving Ri Chun-hee, read out the entire text during the Saturday afternoon newscast.
The inclusion of “complete denuclearization� as a goal raised a lot of eyebrows, and several observers have interpreted it as a signal of North Korea’s commitment to serious negotiations. Previously, North Korean domestic media had only used this term in the context of declaring the matter non-negotiable.
But as other analysts have noted, denuclearization for the North Korean side implies the withdrawal of the U.S. military presence from the South.
Highlighting a common ‘Koreanness’
Aside from reporting on the political developments, the news coverage focused on the pomp and circumstance of the summit, paying close attention to South Korea’s accouterments of traditional culture.
“The leaders of North and South proceeded toward the ceremonial dais escorted by a traditional honor guard,� the Rodong Shinmun reported. At the forefront, a band “enlivened the mood with lively traditional music.� The coverage also mentioned the “shared bonds of blood� between the two sides.
The glowing praise for the South Korean cultural displays somewhat contrasts with the North’s habitual depictions of South Korea as culturally defunct and excessively Westernized. As renowned North Korea analyst Andrei Lankov has observed, “With all its wealth, South Korea is represented [in the North] as basically a very unhappy place. The reason for this unhappiness is that South Koreans’ national identity, their precious ‘Koreanness,’ has been spoilt and compromised by the domination of American imperialists who propagate their degrading and corrosive ‘culture.’�
Articles also detailed the banquet dinner, which featured “various dishes with special meaning from the South� and “Okrugwan cold noodles from our side.� An evocative moment came when the two leaders sliced into a cake bearing the words “Springtime of the Nation.� Seasonal metaphors have long-standing significance in Korean culture on both sides, and North Korean media have repeatedly turned to theme of “springtime� when depicting their young leader’s ascent to power.
Altogether, it’s a heartening sign that North Korea may be willing to recognize that its southern neighbor has not completely abandoned its roots.
Looking ahead
While coverage of previous inter-Korean summits mainly featured posed photos and handshakes, this time North Koreans were exposed to colorful action photos and footage of the two leaders.
The day after the summit, Chosun Central TV aired complete footage of the event, from the moment Kim’s limousine rolled into Panmunjom, through the handshakes, procession, conference, ceremonial tree planting and banquet.
The anchor’s narration opened on a euphoric note: “At this historic moment in Panmunjom, a symbol of the long years of strife, suffering, conflict and enmity, all the bitter pain of past confrontations has wafted away on the April breeze.�
Later, over footage of the first ladies conversing, he added that “the banquet proceeded amid an atmosphere overflowing with familial affection.�
Television coverage of the summit assumed a spirited tone.
In the coming weeks and months, it will bear watching how positively President Moon will be depicted in North Korean media. As the first pro-engagement leader in 10 years, he will likely escape the vitriol that the previous two conservative presidents were subjected to. But the true test will be whether North Korea goes beyond the usual muted depiction it has used for past liberal presidents.
Although North Korean state media have never overtly praised a sitting South Korean president, previous presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun were treated with careful neutrality following their Pyongyang summits in 2000 and 2007, respectively. In subsequent years, portrayals of these two presidents have grown significantly fonder, especially since they passed away and their pro-engagement policies were dismantled by the succeeding conservative administrations. And literary fiction propagandists warmly depicted the character of Kim Dae-jung’s widow, Lee Hui-ho, in a 2013 short story titled “Him in December� as a resolute patriot struggling against the hawkish instincts of the post-Sunshine era.
North Korean media have yet to make any mention of Kim’s future summit with U.S. President Donald Trump, probably because the date and location haven’t been agreed upon. They have been similarly mum on last month’s meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. North Korean media outlets are generally cautious about announcing and discussing events that haven’t been finalized. Notably, Rodong Shinmun did refer to Trump as the “American ruler� (“chibgw�nja�) in a March 13 article on steel tariffs – a noticeable departure from its earlierepithets.
All eyes will now be on the anticipated Trump-Kim summit. It remains to be seen how North Korean media will tackle the historically unprecedented sight of their leader hobnobbing with a sitting U.S. president. But the exceptionally glowing coverage of last week’s summit could be a precursor.
I was a Sinclair news director. For a few months, at least.
In 2013, I was a young news director at a struggling small station in the Midwest, having worked my way up the ranks as a producer in larger markets. I’d uprooted my family the year before and moved from the West Coast to “earn my stripes” running a newsroom. I had a small team with a handful of veterans and eager new reporters I enjoyed mentoring.
That fall, Sinclair Broadcast Group bought the station. Sinclair was not a household name at the time, but it did have a reputation in the business for being heavy-handed in station operations and for having a conservative editorial lean. The company first made national headlines when it forced all its stations to run an anti-John Kerry documentary just before the Democratic nominee lost the 2004 presidential election.
Still, I went in with an open mind. As Sinclair prepared to purchase my station, I emailed a colleague to say, “From everything I’ve seen so far, it’s not the evil empire some people think.”
It took just a few months to realize how wrong I was.
It began with the “must run” stories arriving in my inbox every morning. “Must-run” stories were exactly what the name suggests: They were a combination of pre-produced packages that would come down from corporate, along with scripts for local anchors to read. We had to air them whether we wanted to or not.
On the way to a meeting of company news directors, someone whose station had been acquired a few months earlier explained that the arrangement wasn’t that bad — you just had to bury the “must-run” corporate stories and commentary in early-morning newscasts where few viewers would see them. Shortly after that, an executive made it clear to us that the “must-run” stories were not optional and that corporate would be watching to make sure they weren’t getting buried at 5am.
Sinclair knows its strongest asset is the credibility of its local anchors. They’re trusted voices in their communities, and they have often been on the air for decades before Sinclair purchased their stations.
The must-run stories, however, barely passed as journalism. More than one script came down that, had it come from one of my fresh-out-of-college reporters, I would have sent back for a complete rewrite. But Sinclair executives made it clear that the must-run scripts were not to be touched by producers or anchors.
I didn’t last long after that. I soon realized I would have trouble looking myself in the mirror if I put stories and commentary like that on the air. I couldn’t in good conscience ask young reporters and anchors to sign multi-year contracts knowing what they’d be forced to say on the air and face severe financial penalties if they left early.
So I quit, and once again uprooted my family in search of a company with ethical and news standards I could be proud of. I was fortunate enough to find a new position with another station group that, unlike Sinclair, had a true commitment to local journalism.
Over the course of my 14-year career in broadcasting, I worked for multiple corporate owners, large and small. I have good friends who are anchors, reporters and executives at other station groups across the country. Only Sinclair forces those trusted local journalists to lend their credibility to shoddy reporting and commentary that, if it ran in other countries, we would rightly dismiss as state propaganda.
In the four years since I left, Sinclair has doubled down on its “must-run” strategy. Segments like the Islamophobic “Terrorism Alert Desk” and commentary from Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn have started running in markets from Seattle to Washington, D.C. If the Federal Communications Commission approves Sinclair’s purchase of Tribune Broadcasting, it will get a foothold in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Denver and other major markets. I know several journalists who preemptively left Tribune stations after the sale was announced. They’re the lucky and principled ones.
When Deadspin’s genius supercut of Sinclair’s latest promo went viral last weekend, my heart broke for the anchors who were used to make the equivalent of a proof-of-life hostage video. They know what they’re being conscripted to do, but most of them have no choice in the matter. They’re trapped by contracts, by family obligations and by an industry that is struggling to stay relevant in an era of changing media habits.
The anchors who were forced to decry “fake news” put their own credibility on the line, accusing “some members of the media” of pushing “their own personal bias and agenda,” when nothing could be further from the truth. The only ones pushing a personal bias in local broadcasting today are the corporate executives at Sinclair, who leverage the trust that those anchors have developed in their communities over years and often decades of hard work.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with journalism that wears its bias on its sleeve. At some point, local news may transform into something more like the cable news landscape, with hosts who are paid to share their perspective and commentary. But that requires honesty on the part of station owners, and it requires embracing a diversity of viewpoints on the air. That’s the exact opposite of what Sinclair is doing to local broadcasting today.
During my time with Sinclair, while on a conference call with other news directors, someone asked if we could ever run local commentary during newscasts. The answer was a firm “no.” The only opinions Sinclair allows on air are the opinions that come out of headquarters, because the company will not risk giving local audiences a dissenting view.
That “no” was telling. Being afraid of a variety of viewpoints is, in the words of Sinclair’s now-infamous “must-run,” extremely dangerous to a democracy.
The chat log was first leaked to the technology website Silicon Alley Insider and depicted instant messages from Zuckerberg in which he brags to an unnamed friend about having unfettered access to the data of any Harvard student he wanted. When the friend asks Zuckerberg how he gained such access, the social network creator mocked people’s supposed naivete.
"Yeah, so if you ever need [information] about anyone at Harvard, just ask," Zuckerberg said to his friend. He added, "I have 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, [and] SNS." The friend sounds surprised, and asks, "What? How'd you manage that one?" Zuckerberg replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They trust me. Dumb f***s."
Zuckerberg's insensitive remarks could cause him even more legal and social trouble as recent reports point to accusations of data harvesting and manipulation by Cambridge Analytica. For about a year, the United Kingdom-based data analytics consulting firm has gained notoriety as some allege it played a role in both Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the United Kingdom’s Brexit campaign.
Now, both companies are under more global fury after former Cambridge Analytica employee Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on the company and accused Facebook of allowing Cambridge Analytica to harvest around 50 million users' personal data through personality quizzes. Both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook deny any misconduct.
Fake news remains a serious problem, and we have only ourselves to blame.
That's the finding of a new study published in Science by researchers at MIT. The researchers examined the spread of 126,000 news stories on Twitter between 2006 and 2013, and they verified the stories by consulting trusted fact-checking websites.
The results were not good. They found that false stories are 70 percent more likely than true ones to be retweeted. False stories also spread six times faster.
“We found that falsehood defuses significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth, in all categories of information, and in many cases by an order of magnitude,” said Sinan Aral, an MIT professor and co-author of the study.
Unfortunately, we can't blame the robots.
“When we removed all of the bots in our dataset, [the] differences between the spread of false and true news stood,” said Soroush Vosoughi, a post-doctoral researcher and Aral's co-author.
Finding that false information has a propensity to spread quickly is bad enough, but it gets worse. Fake news about politics—the stuff that divides people and concerns vital issues of public policy and social trust—was the most likely to be shared.
Why are we more likely to spread nonsense than truth? The researchers have some speculations.
“False news is more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information,” said Aral. "People who share novel information are seen as being in the know.”
All eyes will now be on the anticipated Trump-Kim summit. It remains to be seen how North Korean media will tackle the historically unprecedented sight of their leader hobnobbing with a sitting U.S. president. But the exceptionally glowing coverage of last week’s summit could be a precursor.